Voices of Veeps

Two voices that had been pretty quiet on political matters since the conventions spoke out last week, as Vice Presidential Candidates Henry Cabot Lodge and Lyndon Baines Johnson hit the campaign trail.

Following up a fast trip to Jewish resort hotels in New York's Catskill Moun tains, where he won strong applause from mainly Democratic audiences, Lodge made a tour of New York beaches with Gover nor Nelson Rockefeller, and proved that the G.O.P. politicians who had considered Patrician Lodge too snooty to appeal to plebeian voters didn't know their man. Recognized by beachgoers as the strapping, handsome guy they had seen battling the Russians in televised United Nations debates, Lodge had a great day. At Long Island's Jones Beach, he kissed his first baby of the 1960 campaign and got the father's promise of a vote. At Coney Island, a coatless, tieless, wide-grinning Lodge, ringed by a flock of oohing-aahing teenagers, made his way to Nathan's celebrated hot-dog emporium, cheerfully gulped down a well-mustarded Nathan's Famous Hot Dog.

In a speech to a Republican audience in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington, Lodge said that the way to "reduce the danger of a hot war" was to "win the cold war." On Lodge's Boston home grounds, during what was billed as a nonpolitical "homecoming," a newsman asked him how he proposed to go about winning the cold war. One way that would help, said Lodge, would be to "follow the maxim of Stone wall Jackson--'Mystify, mislead, and surprise' "--and therefore he wasn't telling.

Texan Johnson invaded the unfamiliar territory of Boston earlier in the week, and for the first time, after all the years of soft-pedaling criticism of foreign policy in the national interest, really opened up. He struck a cowboy pose atop a police man's horse and declared that the "basic issue in the campaign" was "trying to restore the prestige of the United States." In a speech to a Democratic gathering in Boston's Symphony Hall, Johnson hammered away at his point. "America no longer stands pre-eminent," he said. "Her friends are uncertain of her. Her adver saries boast, and with obvious relish, that they are certain--certain that they can and will overtake us and bury us. Under no single Administration in American history has the position of our nation in the world declined so far or so fast as it has under the Republicans now serving in Washington."

Jabbing at the G.O.P. claim to greater "experience" in world affairs, Johnson broke into rhetorical questions that dripped sarcasm as a Nathan's Famous drips mustard: "Where is the evidence of their victories and successes in the world we look upon today? Where are the fruits of that maturity and that experience?" In Kennedy's home town of Boston, Johnson seemed to stir far less crowd-pulling curiosity than Cabot Lodge, the Boston Brahmin, on the beaches of Coney.

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