The Men Who

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HAPPy days are HERE again! THUH skies aBOVE are CLEAR again! Let us SING a SONG of CHEER again! HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN!

Convention Hall roars to the Democratic war song. Red-eyed delegates sing, shout, weep, laugh, wring hands, whale backs and jostle one another in the aisles. Spotlights swing dizzily around the vast room; the convention floor is a riotous sea of waving signs. BANG! BANG! BANG! Permanent Chairman Sam Rayburn thumps endlessly for order: "The sergeant at arms will clear the aisles." Finally, a hush falls. Rayburn smiles for the first time in precisely four years. "Members of the convention!" cries he. "It is my great pleasure to give you the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!"

The Man Who--the man who will march forward to the battery of microphones, blink smilingly into the aurora of flashbulbs, raise his hands in delightful helplessness to quiet the throng--that man had probably not dared to let his thoughts wander so extravagantly last week. But chances were good that he had already felt a tremor of premonition.

The Man Who surveyed the U.S. political landscape through a Democratic lens and liked what he saw. In the White House was a lame-duck Republican President, unbeatable in the past but barred by the Constitution from running again in 1960. Going up to Capitol Hill in January is a Congress dominated by Democrats as it has not been since 1937. There seemed a good chance that the strong Democratic winds of 1958 might blow at gale force in 1960, carrying The Man Who all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Fight & Frolic. With such heady hopes, the 1960 Democratic nomination is something far more than a token to fob off on anyone who will take it. Rather, it seems, in the glowing days of 1958 Democratic victory, the richest prize in U.S. politics--a prize worth fighting for. And Democrats being Democrats, loving a fight as much as a frolic, the battle for the 1960 nomination shaped up as one of the grandest, free-swinging rough-and-tumbles in years.

Of the leading contenders, some might wear themselves out doing dressing-room nip-ups before 1960, others might trip over the ropes while entering the ring, others might be kayoed with one presidential primary punch. There will always be more to take their places, but as of this week, six Democrats had emerged from the 1958 elections looking fittest. The six: Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington, Massachusetts' Senator John Kennedy, Texas' Senator Lyndon Johnson, California's Governor-elect Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, and New Jersey's Governor Robert Meyner.

Wheel & Deal. Last week each of the big Democratic six was somehow behaving in keeping with his presidential po tential. Hubert Humphrey was aboard the S.S. Liberte, bounding about on the promenade deck, shaking hands and making friends, on his way to Paris for UNESCO meetings that will help him in his role as a leading Democratic foreign policy spokesman. Bob Meyner was in his Trenton statehouse wondering how to get overseas next year in an effort to overcome admitted shortcomings in the foreign policy field ("I can't afford to go on my own hook, and if I let somebody pay for me, people will say, 'Who the hell does this guy think he is?' ").

Lyndon Johnson was on his LBJ Ranch in Texas answering telephone calls from newly elected Democrats, greeting visitors, wheeling and dealing as the Democratic Party's leader-in-action. Pat Brown, who needs to get himself known outside California, was off on a get-acquainted tour, visiting such elder Democrats as Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman and Harry Truman. Stu Symington was vacationing in Puerto Rico; his strategy has been to keep quiet and let his competitors knock one another off. And Jack Kennedy was campaigning in Alaska--just as he has been campaigning ever since 1956 in a marathon effort to make friends and influence people.

Humphrey: Leading Liberal

Of all the Big Six, Minnesota's Humphrey appeared to have gained the most from the 1958 elections--but he had a lot of ground to make up. Before the elections, Humphrey probably stood behind both Michigan's Governor G. Mennen Williams and New York's Governor Averell Harriman as the strongest entry from the Democratic Fair Dealing wing. But Harriman was torpedoed in the elections, "Soapy" Williams ran fifth on his state ticket--and Humphrey moved past them both.

Hubert Humphrey masterminded his-Minnesota Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party to a sweeping 1958 victory (TIME, Nov. 17) and still managed to roll up 20,000 miles campaigning for Democrats in i& states. He is an avowed Fair Dealer, but separates himself from past liberal flops by explaining that he is a "visceral" liberal--strong on farm supports, reclamation, competitive coexistence with Russia, civil rights, etc.--as opposed to an "intellectual" or "New York" liberal -- inter ested "only in civil rights and immigra tion." As a Senator. Humphrey has worked hard and with some success at winning the regard of conservative Southern politicos, hut as a presidential candidate, he still cannot realistically expect Southern sup port. This pains Humphrey. "I can do pretty good." he says, "in campaigning among the liberal Southerners." The Humphrey camp bases its strategic presidential planning on the argument that the Democratic balance of power shifted westward in the last elections.

Using Minnesota's bursting-with-health D.F.L. as their power base. Humphrey planners hope to throw out presidential lines into nearly all Midwestern and West ern states. A crucial part of their plans: an attempt to persuade Michigan's Wil liams not to lock horns with Humphrey, thereby leaving Hubert a clear liberal field. A limiting factor in Humphrey's strategy: he is up for Senate re-election in 1960. therefore will probably not be able to enter and campaign in presiden tial primaries.

Hubert Humphrey has come a long way from the damn-the-consequences liberal who first came to the Senate in 1949 after helping drive the South out of the 1948 national convention with a humdinging civil rights speech. "There is no radical movement in America today." he told a TIME correspondent last week aboard the Liberte, "and no call for one. It's a progressive party, an adventurous and international one. with vigor, not just vivacity, that is called for." Senator Humphrey might have been describing a party after his own image. But as he spoke, he realized that his chief competition might well come from someone less progressive, less adventurous, less international, less vigorous and certainly less vivacious--someone like Fellow Midwesterner Stuart Symington.

Symington: Everybody's Second

Missouri's Symington plays it safe. As a U.S. Senator, he has proved himself a master at not making enemies. With his authority as Harry Truman's Air Force Secretary (1947-50), he has spoken up determinedly for stronger national defense. Organized labor rates him as one of twelve Senators with a "perfect" voting record; yet. as the onetime board chairman of St. Louis' Emerson Electric Manufacturing Co., Symington is viewed benignly by businessmen. His close personal and political friends range from Convair Vice President Tom Lanphier to the Electrical Workers' President Jim Carey. He has stood consistently with the Senate's liberal civil rights bloc; yet he has somehow managed to keep in the good graces of the South.

Symington's strategy has been to act as if he never heard of the word "President." Early last winter he had a visit from Indiana's Frank McKinney, former Democratic national chairman (1951-53). who still speaks with the political voice of Harry S. Truman. McKinney wanted to get going right away on a Symington-for-President organization. Stu Symington threw up his hands in horror. All he wanted, he cried, was to campaign hard for re-election in Missouri--and win big.

He did campaign hard, and he did win big, by a near-record 402,000 votes over a nice Republican lady. That consolidated his position as a Democratic hopeful:

Symington is the first choice of Harry Truman's dwindling band of intimates and. as the man who has made no ene mies, stands No. 2 on nearly every other list. Last week handsome, athletic Stu Symington was playing golf (mid-70s) in Puerto Rico, still keeping his silence, still making no enemies. But there is a peril in his policy: if Symington has given no one reason to be against him. neither has he given anyone much reason to be for him.

The greatest danger for Stu Symington is that someone like Jack Kennedy or Hu bert Humphrey will walk away with the nomination before anybody gets around to second choice.

Kennedy: Man Out Front On the record of his accomplishment.

Jack Kennedy is the early-season Demo cratic favorite by general agreement. Says an aide to Michigan's hopeful "Soapy" Williams: "If the convention were held today. Kennedy would win on the first ballot, period." Kennedy has New Eng land's loo-plus delegate votes virtually sewed up, stands well in a dozen Mid western and Western states and has sur prising strength in the South. "Kennedy is sober and temperate on civil rights." says Mississippi's Governor J. P. Coleman. "He's no hell raiser or Barnburner." Kennedy came out of nowhere in 1956 with a breathless, near-successful try. with heavy Southern support, at plucking the vice-presidential nomination out of Estes Kefauver's shaken hands. A few months later, after Dwight Eisenhower's election, Kennedy was set to thinking hard when Hubert Humphrey's wife Muriel remarked at a cocktail party: "If Stu Symington is the competition for President, then it's a wide-open race." Kennedy has been campaigning ever since. He has been in every state of the Union except Tennessee, has come to know and be known by some 1,500 professional Democrats who generally go to conventions. During the 1958 campaign alone he traveled 25,000 miles in 19 states. Between times he managed to cover Massachusetts like a quilt, post volunteer "secretaries" in more than 300 of the state's 351 cities and towns, and win a spectacular 870,000-vote plurality over hapless Republican Vincent Celeste (Kennedy lost $10 to a campaign worker by betting that he could not break 700,000).

But Jack Kennedy could turn out to be one of the flowers that bloom in the spring. Even after the successful election of Roman Catholics to major offices in such states as Minnesota, California and Pennsylvania, Kennedy's Catholicism could still be held against him when kingmakers are looking for winners at convention time. Another danger to Kennedy is the idea that his millionaire father, Boston Financier Joe Kennedy, is willing to spend any amount of money to get him elected--an idea forcefully denied by Kennedy and carefully spread by his opponents ("He's a hell of an attractive fellow," says a Meyner man, "but he's trying to buy the convention"). Also, Hum-phreyites will make it clear to farmers that Kennedy has, on occasion, voted against high price supports (although he won the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s 100% approval for his votes on 15 key issues in the 85th Congress).

Kennedy's strategy: to spend the next year paying the strictest attention to his Senate business. He expects to be in the presidential primaries up to his tousled hair; he would like nothing better than to entice that great primary campaigner, Estes Kefauver, into the early-bird New Hampshire primary, and beat him. "It may be a little decadent," says Kennedy wryly, "but popularity's still very important."

Meyner: Regional Entry

New Jersey's Robert Baumle Meyner is an eminently practical politician who knows he has a long way to go. "People," he mused one day last week, "keep coming up to me and saying, 'Oh, you're going for it, aren't you? You're going all the way.' Well, these are people who just don't understand political nuances. This is a very delicate and tricky business, politics."

Meyner's understanding of the delicate and tricky business of politics has converted New Jersey, for decades a Republican stronghold, into a Democratic state. This year Meyner gained prestige when his protege, former Congressman Harrison A. Williams, won by 89,000 votes against rugged Republican opposition and became U.S. Senator. Moreover, for the first time since 1937, the New Jersey general assembly went Democratic, 42 to 18.

Meyner has some presidential handicaps. He was born a Catholic, left the church at 18 and has not joined another (whispers a Kennedy backer: "Meyner's not too popular among Catholics, you know"). He is hardly known outside New Jersey, and his rare ventures away from home have been singularly unfortunate. In a nine-state speaking tour last August, he chose a shirtsleeved Minnesota farm audience, ready to plow under Ezra Benson, to lecture on the subject of "The Current Congressional Inquiry into the Operation of the Federal Regulatory Agencies."

Nonetheless, Meyner followers hope to get their regional entry to announce soon, hope by next January to have a start on a presidential organization divided into three sections: political, research and financial. "Intelligence papers" will be compiled on the delegates to the 1956 national convention ("On the theory that 75% of those who go to the next convention were there before"). Prospective delegates will be approached with a soft sell. "We won't be knocking anyone else," says a Meyner man. "If they say they like Kennedy, we'll say fine, he's a splendid guy, but if he doesn't make it, we'd like them to consider Meyner as a second choice."

Brown: Delightful Dilemma

California's Pat Brown is happily aware of the national prominence into which he was catapulted by his 1,012,000-majority victory over Republican Bill Knowland for Governor. Last week, at La Quinta, a resort about 20 miles southeast of Palm Springs. Brown, dressed in swimming trunks and a flowered sports shirt, sat basking in the desert sun and in a delightful dilemma: whether to hew sternly to a campaign pledge to serve his full four-year term as Governor or to sound like an oracle when people talk about him for the Democratic national ticket in 1960. He chose the oracular: "I believe in a certain philosophy of government--of a government which serves all the people--and I think that as Governor of California I'll have a chance to work for that kind of government not only in this state but in the entire nation."

In an era of handshaking, get-out-and-meet-'em presidential primaries, friendly Pat Brown, the man from the nation's second biggest and fastest-growing state, is a living ad for the paws that refresh. In a day of political moderation. Brown yields right of way to none as a middle-of-the-roadhog. As potential leader of California's big (at least 68 votes) delegation to the national convention, Brown may hold make-or-break power over other party hopefuls. If nothing else, that kind of power may be clipped as coupons for the vice-presidential nomination.

But Catholic Pat Brown has his debits too: 1) a haphazard administrator during his eight years as state attorney general, he must prove himself in the infinitely tougher job of Governor; 2) a political loner, Brown has stood aloof from the Democratic professionals and made enemies in the process ("There are something like 30,000 Democratic Club workers," says a top California party leader, "and at least half of them are just waiting for Brown to make his first mistake. Then they're going to run wild"); 3) even to control the California delegation as a favorite-son candidate, Brown may have to fight Senator-elect Clair Engle and National Committeeman Paul Ziffren, both longtime Adlai Stevenson rooters, and neither very fond of Pat Brown.

At La Quinta last week, Brown had no mind for such worries. He posted a clear no-trespassing sign to out-of-state Democratic delegate hunters: "I think if anyone did come in here and try to capture the primary, we'd meet them headon. If they lost the primary, as I'm sure they would, then they'd have no subsequent chance of support from the California delegation."

Two days later Brown was off on his cross-country get-acquainted tour, seeing top Democratic leaders, paying his respects to Stevenson, Harriman, Meyner and Truman. An omission that may prove to be unfortunate: the Texas ranch of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, a man who knows most of the party answers and a presidential possibility in his own right.

Johnson: Democratic Father

Of all the Democrats industriously denying presidential aspirations, Lyndon Johnson sounds most as if he means it. Of all the prospects, he has the weightiest reasons for meaning it: 1) in 1955 he suffered a heart attack more massive than Dwight Eisenhower's; 2) he can be classed as a Southerner at a time when the Democratic Party is less likely than ever before to nominate anyone from below the Mason-Dixon.

But if there is such a thing as "deserving" a presidential nomination, then Lyndon Johnson is probably the most deserving Democrat. A Senate leader of superb skills (TIME, March 17), he pushed, pulled, cajoled and bullied Senate Democrats along a moderate course that made for a party image overwhelmingly approved at the polls. In the 1958 elections, when Democratic organization showed up dramatically against Republican confusion, a major fundraising, advice-giving role was played by the Johnson-bossed Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Johnson personally campaigned in five states where Democrats ousted Republicans from six Senate seats: two in West Virginia, one each in Indiana, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada.

Last week at the LBJ Ranch, along the Pedernales River in central Texas, Johnson was enjoying the fruits of a job well done. On his antique desk (a gift from his staff) lay the evidences of his whirlwind activity, e.g., a White House-State Department request that he represent the U.S. in United Nations discussions on space problems, an urgent request that he attend the inauguration on Dec. 1 of Mexico's President-elect Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The three beige telephones on the desk rang constantly. One call came from a newly elected Western Senator thanking Johnson for campaign help. "Thank you. Senator," replied Johnson, "you're very kind. I'd like very much for you to come down here, come down to the ranch. We'll talk about what committee assignments would be best for you and anything else you want to bring up. Bring your wife."

Hanging up, Johnson turned to a visitor. How did he see Democratic presidential prospects shaping up? "We've got a lot of good men," said Lyndon Johnson. "I know only one thing: it's not going to be me." He was even able to talk paternalistically about other Democratic presidential possibilities in the Senate. "You know," he confided, "I feel sort of like a father to these boys. A father loves his sons, though one son may drink a little too much, another may neck with the girls a little too much. A good father uses a gentle but firm rein, checks his sons, guides them and. above all. understands them." Lyndon Johnson's best chance is that the Democratic Party in 1960, having considered all the boys and found them wanting, might turn to the Democratic daddy himself.

In the Wings

Thus, just after the elections of 1958, the Democratic Party finds itself in the pleasant position of having at least half a dozen good Men Who. But The Man Who might also be Two-Time Loser Adlai Stevenson, with ardent disciples spotted across the U.S. and feared by more active hopefuls as a strong deadlock possibility. The Man Who could be Soapy Williams, who, despite his 1958 setback, has an organization aborning and appears ready to make a now-or-never try. It could be Estes Kefauver, even though he suffered almost irreparable damage by failing to live up to his vote-getting reputation as the vice-presidential nominee in 1956. It could be one of the 21 other Northern and Border State Democratic Governors.

Indeed, in the wild scramble for the precious Democratic nomination in 1960, The Man Who could be almost anybody except Dick Nixon. And as the days pass and the tension grows, the candidates themselves will be moving to the front and hurling themselves into active battle. When that happens, the U.S. voter is in for a wonderfully exciting time--if his eardrums hold out. And at that delirious moment when the hush falls on Convention Hall, and Sam Rayburn introduces the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, the Democrats can only hope that someone has survived to come marching out to accept the nomination.

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