The Coming Battle

The Republican Convention in Chicago next week will doubtless seem quiet, plodding and highly predictable in comparison with last week's Democratic show in Los Angeles. But lurking beneath the calm will be a worrisome awareness that the G.O.P.'s ticket will have to face tough and formidable Democratic opposition.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his crew proved at Los Angeles that they are a political team worthy of respect. Despite Lyndon Johnson's belated drive, despite the boisterous demonstrations for Adlai Stevenson, the efficient, machinelike Kennedy team had the nomination won before the first gavel bang. Heralding the advent of a new political breed--youngish, polished, businesslike technicians with culture and wit, the Kennedy men made the convention oratory seem superfluous and the floor demonstrations archaic.

Shattered Hopes. A cool political technician like Richard Nixon could appreciate the cool engineering that brought Jack Kennedy his victory. Kennedy painstakingly gathered Midwestern Democratic politicians into his camp, used their convention votes to capture the nomination. The prize won, he turned his back on the Midwesterners, shattering their hopes that one of their own would be the vice-presidential nominee.

To please the party's liberals, most of them Stevensonians at heart, Kennedy saw to it that the party platform, largely the handiwork of Kennedy Man Chester Bowles, was a far-out liberal manifesto containing a tough civil rights plank that enraged the South. Then, ditching the liberals, Kennedy tried to placate the Southerners and give his ticket a conservative aura by picking Texas' Lyndon Johnson as his running mate.

Off the Hook. Johnson's unexpected presence on the Kennedy-Democratic ticket upset a basic assumption of Nixon's campaign strategy. To offset advantages that Kennedy's New England origin and Roman Catholicism will give him in the East, Nixon had hoped to win a clutch of electoral votes in the South, capturing at least the four states--Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia--that Dwight Eisenhower carried in both 1952 and 1956. By dimming Nixon's prospects in the South, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket confronted him with a tough problem in electoral-vote arithmetic. Even if Nixon can overcome farmer discontent and carry the farm belt, he cannot win the election unless he can also beat Kennedy in some of the big industrial states east of the Mississippi. To do that despite the Catholic bloc voting for Kennedy that showed up in primaries, Nixon will have to 1) appeal to Negroes and 2) wring a lot of votes out of his chief vote-getting advantage over Kennedy: greater foreign policy background.

Nixon had been considering G.O.P. National Chairman Thruston B. Morton, U.S. Senator from Kentucky, as the vice-presidential prospect most likely to help the ticket in the Border States and the South. But when Johnson joined up with Kennedy, Morton's appeal in the South lost much of its value. Morton does not want the vice-presidential nomination anyway, was relieved when he heard the Johnson news on TV. "We're off the hook!" he yelled to his wife.

There was new Republican talk of getting New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller to run with Nixon. But Rocky stiffly announced that he had turned down a chance to second Nixon's nomination, and that he would not consider the vice-presidential nomination even if it were offered by Ike.

Profit & Loss. Nixon's running mate will probably be husky, handsome Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and widely known because of his televised battles with Soviet U.N. delegates. A New England patrician (TIME cover, Aug. 11, 1958), Lodge would have little farm-belt appeal, but he would add plenty of foreign policy luster to the ticket if the election fell in a time of international crisis.

So evenly matched are the nominees, so skilled in political engineering, so equal in oratorical dueling (Kennedy has decided to make plenty of TV appearances on the simple theory that he is better looking than Nixon), that the election may well be won or lost on the basis of events. Kennedy would gain an edge if the nation slipped into recession before November. Likewise he would gain if the Administration ran into medium-grade foreign policy troubles, e.g., neutralization of any current ally. Nixon stands to gain from any sharp increase in tension, e.g., a new Communist thrust, a step-up of Khrushchev's screeching threats, that prompts a demand for experience in office.

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