Round Two

Traditionally. Labor Day marks the beginning of U.S. presidential campaigns, but in the hard-fought and suspenseful campaign of 1960, two rounds are already over--and both have gone to Richard Nixon. Round One was the much-tele vised convention process; polls show that Nixon's acceptance speech and his choice of Henry Cabot Lodge as a running mate have gone over with the public a lot better than Kennedy's speech (which swiped at Nixon) and his tactical choice of Lyndon Johnson. Round Two is the dead-end session of Congress, which is creaking toward adjournment. There Kennedy met with a nightmarish series of grim surprises and jolting defeats.

Senate Majority Leader Johnson had scheduled the post-convention session as part of his pre-convention strategy for trying to wrest the presidential nomination away from Kennedy. Once Kennedy got the nomination and tabbed Johnson as his running mate, he had hopes of wringing political gains out of the session by pushing through vote-catching welfare measures. But Kennedy's political gains from the session came to zero: no housing bill, no aid-to-education bill, modest minimum-wage and medical-care bills quite unlike those he had advocated, no sign whatever of the farm bill he promised at the Los Angeles convention. Said President Eisenhower at his press conference, keeping up his effective partisan needling of recent weeks: "The Democrats have a 2-to-1 majority in the Congress, in both houses. And I don't see how they could want more."

Bumbling Battler. The next big round of the campaign will also be an unorthodox sort of political battle: the coming TV encounters, which both men will go into aware that their clashes before the cameras and microphones, watched by perhaps more than the estimated 45 million who viewed the conventions on TV, might decide the November outcome. Mindful that much will be at stake, the two candidates are working out the arrangements with care. Nixon, convinced that he is the better debater, wanted to limit the TV series to three sharp encounters. Kennedy, convinced that his looks and personality would wear better over the long run, wanted five or more. The compromise, settled on last week by Nixon and Kennedy negotiators: four one-hour shows, spread out between Sept. 25 and Oct. 21. They will not be formal debates, but rather press conferences, with both men replying to each question.* The early rounds provided opportunities for measuring off the candidates as tacticians. Nixon kept off the stage as much as possible during the short session of Congress, did his work behind the scenes. Instead of trying to beat the Democrats at their own welfare-legislation game, he showed his tactical skill by concentrating on balking the Democratic program. With Dwight Eisenhower's help, he welded the outnumbered Republican band in the Senate into a disciplined defensive force, not strong enough to push legislation through, but strong enough, with help from Southern Democrats, to frustrate Kennedy's political game.

Kennedy in contrast, for all his magic with crowds and his keen-minded calculations during his run for the nomination, showed himself something of a bumbling battler during the post-convention session. If he had stayed in the background, letting Johnson maestro the show, the results in legislation might have been the same, but Kennedy would not have been politically hurt. As it was, he damaged his image as an efficient and forceful leader by needlessly exposing himself to public defeats, tying his own prestige to getting a doomed package of welfare legislation enacted.

In the dead-end session, Kennedy embarrassingly showed what a lot of his fellow Senators already knew: that he was never a real insider in the Senate, had never mastered its nuances. Accordingly, he greatly overestimated his capacity, as his party's presidential nominee, to control the course of legislation. Oldtime Southern lawmakers, grown powerful through seniority, were confident of retaining their seats and seniority whether Kennedy wins in November or not. They felt no need to follow his cues, badly messed up his plans (see The Congress).

Heady Prediction. Battered on Capitol Hill, Kennedy had other worries besides. Midwestern polls suggested that the force of the farm revolt against the G.O.P. has been overestimated. Anti-Catholic prejudice was looming bigger in the South and Midwest than Kennedy had expected. In New York, a nonprofit organization called the Fair Campaign Practices Com. mittee gloomily reported that it saw "a substantial danger that the campaign in 1960 will be dirtier on the religious issue than it was in 1928." With religion hurting Kennedy in Dixie, Republicans were headily predicting that Nixon would carry Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and even North Carolina (see The South).

As the dead-end session of Congress limped to an end, Kennedymen were confidently predicting that Jack's way with crowds would start gaining votes as soon as he could get out campaigning. The campaign had hardly begun. It would be won or lost, not in the South or the Farm Belt, or even in the big industrial states --New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and California--where Kennedy confidently counted his Catholicism an asset rather than a liability. It would be won or lost in the nation as a whole. For this is the first truly national campaign in which both candidates will have undreamed-of exposure, ample time to present their cases and display their judgment and temperament--a campaign in which sectional, class and sectarian viewpoints will count for less than ever before.

*To clear the way for the TV battles, Congress last week passed, and the President signed, a bill revising "equal-time" regulations so as to bar any splinter-party candidate from claiming equal network time with Kennedy and Nixon.

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