"Tough as Boiled Owls"

The West Virginia primary campaign highballed into its final week like a Norfolk & Western coal train whistling across a trestle. Both candidates were on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Hubert Humphrey, rolling through the Alleghenies in his Scenicruiser bus, grabbed sleep in fitful catnaps between stops in coal-mining camps and mountaineer hamlets. Jack Kennedy virtually lost his voice, but doggedly kept up the campaign with weary smiles while his aides read his speeches for him.

Kennedy's camp was plunged in gloom: all the portents indicated a Humphrey victory next week. "Things aren't as bad as we say they are," said a weary Kennedy aide. "They're worse." Humphrey fluctuated between doubt and exultation. "You know what?" he told a reporter, only half in jest, "I may win this primary. It scares me to death. Then what will I do? Every favorite son in the country will begin to quiver again. They'll get as tough as boiled owls."

Little Black Bag. With each weary day, the campaign grew more bitter. Humphrey hinted darkly that his opponent was buying West Virginia votes. "I can't afford to run through this state with a little black bag and a checkbook," he cried in Kingwood. And again, at Philippi: "I don't think elections should be bought. Let that sink in deeply." But there was no more evidence of political payola than rumors and hints, and even less that the West Virginia vote could be bought at any price. Said a state official in Logan County: "This county's been bought. But Humphrey will get it anyway."

Humphrey, who cut his political teeth on New Deal oratory in the Depression '30s, sparked like a mountain evangelist to the bleak depression in West Virginia's coal counties. He slashed the Republicans for indifference, flicked Kennedy for his wealth, reminded his listeners that he, too, had been a poor boy. "American politics are far too important to belong to the moneyman." he said on Milton's Main Street. "I want to bring back politics to the people, to Main Street." In Hamlin he rose to a high for hokum: "They say, 'Don't cut foreign aid to Formosa, but don't give one dime to West Virginia.' This is a one-eyed Government: one eye looking overseas and the other eye closed."

"My Father." Kennedy, too, hit the economic theme with a glancing blow at Lyndon Johnson and Stuart Symington, the candidates who have sidestepped primaries, and another at the White House. In East Bank he croaked hoarsely: "I wish every candidate for President could come here and see these conditions. If I am elected, West Virginia will have done it, and I'll do everything I can for the interests of this state."

Kennedy had a New Deal heirloom that Humphrey could not match. Campaigning hard for him through desolate coal fields of southern West Virginia was New York's Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and every time he mentioned "my father" he raised a storm of applause.Roosevelt even addressed his listeners as "my friends," and said of Kennedy: "He hates war." (In a below-the-belt attack on Humphrey's in voluntary 4-F status in World War II, Roosevelt praised Kennedy's war heroism, said that Humphrey "is a good Democrat, but I don't know where he was in World War II.") Across the state, Humphrey got the message, began salting his speeches with the magic name -- and getting the same thunderous response.

Paramount Issue. Though both candidates played down any reference to it last week, Jack Kennedy's religion continued to be the paramount issue. The Rt. Rev. Wilburn C. Campbell, Episcopal Bishop of West Virginia, said he would rather not vote for a Roman Catholic, but retired Bishop Robert E. L. Strider, Dr. Campbell's predecessor, gave Kennedy his warm endorsement. Anti-Catholic pressures and threats forced a Kennedy worker to stop distributing literature and with draw from the campaign in tiny Parsons.

In Chelyan a Baptist minister distributed to his congregation copies of a phony Knights of Columbus oath,* an ancient political artifact. Kennedy made some converts. After hearing a Kennedy speech in Oceana, Mrs. Wanda Grey, a Baptist, had a change of heart: "I was surprised at myself. I thought I had my mind all made up. Then I heard him, and I decided being Catholic isn't so bad. I'm for him.

" But Hubert Humphrey was in his element in West Virginia as he never was in Wisconsin, and he was clearly the candidate who was setting the pace. Kennedy's response to Humphrey's rabbity race was to say that Humphrey had no chance for the nomination anyway (or, as Roosevelt said, "A vote for Humphrey is a wasted vote") and that it was not winning him any new friends. Humphrey hinted that the Kennedy camp was showing signs of panic, claimed that he was getting offers of a deal to run for Vice President on a ticket with Kennedy. His stock reply: "Fine, go ask Jack if he'll be my Vice President."

There was a rare irony in Kennedy's West Virginia predicament: he had pegged his campaign to primaries to prove he could be a winner. Yet he stood in danger of being knocked out, or badly hurt, in a state that proved very little about the other 49. The West Virginia primary itself is meaningless. It does not even bind the delegates. Said Kennedy glumly at week's end: "If I lose in West Virginia, it'll just throw the race open to all the contenders--including myself, I believe."

* A bogus document that was designed years ago to arouse anti-Catholic feeling. The "oath," which has been repudiated by the Knights of Columbus, presumably bound each Knight to kill Protestants. The scurrilous "pledge" is markedly similar to the false, anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."

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