Bristling Words

Issuing forth from ranch houses, county courthouses and statehouses across the nation, hoards of Democratic Party workers filled the crisp fall air with bristling words about their party, the opposition and the Democratic candidates. Confident that they were winning hands down, they knew when to ride entirely on local savvy and prestige, when to call in one of their headliners to rally up the homefolks. Among last week's headliners:

Missouri's Harry S. Truman, back in 1948 form ("I just tell the truth, and they think it's hell"), showed off his widest swings for an intimate, friendly audience of 2,300 in Wilmington, Del. "Eisenhower went to Korea and surrendered to the Communists," he said. The Administration has lost most U.S. friends abroad "by doublecrossing them at every turn in the road." He also paid his tribute to Vice President Nixon for campaigning with "verbal garbage."

Texas' Lyndon Johnson, Senate majority leader, to a Democratic dinner in Nashville, Tenn.: "I will admit that it is sometimes difficult to discover exactly what [Administration] foreign policy is. When the President says one thing, the Vice President says another and the Secretary of State takes a third course, there is little we can do but wait for Jim Hagerty to correct the record."

Texas' Sam Rayburn, House Speaker, at a Joplin, Mo. rally where he explained away his own 1948 and 1952 efforts to make Eisenhower a Democratic President : "I said Eisenhower was a good man, but I've felt since his hassle with the 83rd Republican Congress [1953-54], he has gone sour."

Tennessee's Albert Gore, now safe for another six years in the U.S. Senate, speaking for a Michigan congressional candidate: "If the Republican Party were ever reincarnated into a homing pigeon, no matter where it was released in the universe, whether from a jet plane or in outer space, it would go directly home to Wall Street without a flutter of the wing."

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