Love That Warmth

Confident Democrats having a high old time together, all 900 luncheon eaters ($28 a plate) at Washington's Mayflower Hotel, applauded joyously one day last week when Party Faithful Tallulah Bankhead, wrapping her "dahlings" in her bourbon drawl, breathed spite upon the opposition. "Dirt is too clean a word for him," she said of Vice President Richard Nixon. Fumbling for an exit bit, Tallu focused upon the seated form of Harry S. Truman, listed sharply in a maneuver designed to land in his lap but, defeated by his red-faced agility,* succeeded only in a bear hug. Bawled she: "The warmth that comes out of that man just kills me."

All the same, Harry Truman had a chilly warning to give, based on his 1948 lesson to the Republican Party that straw polls and cocksureness can upset any campaign. "I find only one thing wrong with Democrats today," he said. "They are suffering from Deweyitis, which is the worst disease in the world. You mustn't decide the election is won because the Democratic curve is going up. We've got to keep fighting until the polls are closed."

Other chief Democrats stumping and rallying right down to polling day:

Senator John Kennedy, Massachusetts urbanite who voted against rigid price props in 1956, preceded Eisenhower at Cedar Rapids' corn-picking contest with a stemwinding attack upon the author of flexible props, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson: "His objective may be to get the government out of the farming business, but the farmers' objective apparently is to get Mr. Benson out of the governing business."

Adlai Stevenson, at a labor-organized bean-and-wiener feed ($1 a plate) in Milwaukee Auditorium, said: "The tragedy of the Eisenhower Administration is that its only weapons seem to be platitudes or paratroops. And this seems to be true whether the situation is Little Rock or Lebanon, South America or Quemoy."

Lyndon Johnson, Senate Majority Leader, in a blast in the coal-mining center of Welch (pop. 6,850), called on West Virginia to elect two new Democratic Senators to replace its Republicans. He charged that the G.O.P. is running against Old Socialist Eugene Victor Debs, because they know they "can beat poor old Gene Debs, because he is dead and buried. But," cried Johnson, "they can't beat unemployment, they can't beat sickness and disease, and they can't beat Khrushchev by resurrecting a dead man--and a dead issue--and kicking him around."

Paul M. Butler, National Chairman in a Chicago debate with his G.O.P. opposite number, Meade Alcorn, who forced Northern Democrat Butler to talk about Southern Democrat Orval Faubus of Arkansas, said: "We will not tolerate that kind of an un-American attitude in a party that represents the American people."

Eleanor Roosevelt, 74, talked and talked in New York for Averell Harriman, dashed out to Topeka, where she made her comparisons between her husband and the White House's present resident: "We have never lacked greatness but at the moment we lack leadership. Education has been lacking for the chief educator, the President of the United States. It has been nil."

* Still agile later that same day, Truman kidnaped two historical figures to add to the 13 Democratic Presidents whose pictures he hung at a new party clubroom: John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), over the protest of Adams' great-great-grandson that his forebear was a Republican precursor, and Andrew Johnson (1808-75), who was a War Democrat when he became Abraham Lincoln's Vice President. Discoursing further on his reading of history, Harry scaled down every U.S. schoolboy's image of the man who said, "Give me liberty or give me death!": "There was an old man here in Virginia who was a great orator, Patrick Henry, who did his best to defeat the Constitution, and when they wanted me to dedicate a monument to him I wouldn't do it."

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