The Bowles Boomlet

The trickiest carpentry job of the year belongs to the man who will have to hammer together a campaign platform for the much-splintered Democratic Party. Last week National Chairman Paul Butler picked a platform chairman who, like Butler, 1 ) wants a strong civil rights plank, and 2) is on record as supporting Jack Kennedy for the presidency. Butler pushed Connecticut's freshman Congressman Chester Bowles, 59, and the party's arrangements committee, meeting in Los Angeles, unanimously accepted him.

Something for Everybody. Whether Bowles, Kennedy's chief foreign policy adviser, will be able to hammer home some of the Kennedy policies remains to be seen. But the appointment will at least flash the six-foot, well-bred (Yale '24) image of Chester Bowles before the convention delegates and onto the nation's TV screens. That will be more important for Bowles than for Kennedy. Reason: out of nowhere in the wide-open race, Bowles has become the darkest dark horse for the Democratic nomination. Bowles-for-President groups have sprung up in points as far apart as California and Florida, Michigan and North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Missouri. Last January he won a Page One endorsement from the New Republic.

What does Bowles have? The answer of his partisans: something for everybody. Businessmen can remember him as a whiz-bang adman; as co-founder of Benton & Bowles (with Connecticut's onetime Democratic Senator William Benton). he became wealthy by 40, then moved into politics, won a term (1949-51) as Governor of Connecticut. Many veterans of the clerical army of hundreds of thousands who worked for him as wartime Price Administrator are still fiercely loyal to him. Liberals fondly remember that as Harry Truman's U.S. Ambassador to India and Nepal (1951-53), he fought hard for a U.S. understanding of Nehru's neutrality--which was highly unpopular in the State Department and Congress. They fondly tend to forget that he has less support than Kennedy in his home state of Connecticut, was defeated when he ran for re-election as Governor in 1950, was also defeated in the primary when he tried for the U.S. Senate seat in 1958.

Something from Everybody. Of his presidential chances, Unitarian Bowles insists that "I am not bitten by the bug." Yet every time he rises to speak--and he gives about 100 speeches a year across the land--Bowles rolls his I's, manages to mention his personal experiences in high political jobs. He is also a prolific author (half a dozen books on politics and international affairs since 1954 ), magazine contributor, letter-to-the-editor writer, interview giver. To his benefit, Bowles is an intimate of most of the top candidates. The jacket of his latest book. The Coming Political Breakthrough, is alive with blurbs from Jack Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and even Harry Truman.

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