The Brass Ring

"Why not shoot for the brass ring?'' asked New Hampshire's Republican Governor Samuel Wesley Powell Jr. "Why not go for the presidency?'' So last week mused Wes Powell, 46, even as he recuperated in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., from a mild heart attack suffered in March. The scoffers could scoff and the skeptics could skept, but Powell was in dead earnest about grabbing for the brass ring in 1964. He had already laid out a set of plans, based mainly on his record as a rip-roaring stump speaker, a perpetual-motion campaigner--and a fellow who has never seemed to know when he was whipped.

Brick by Brick. Powell, along with most others, figures that he is a cinch for re-election next November to a third gubernatorial term. But his figuring goes far beyond that. He plans to start barn storming nationally in 1963, then to enter New Hampshire's presidential primary, the first of the year, in March of 1964.

He will gleefully invite other Republican national aspirants to contest him in that primary. And, as it happens. Powell can only be bad news for New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who has a de voted Dartmouth College following and would love to get his own 1964 campaign off to a rousing start with a New Hampshire primary win. After that, Powell says he will enter the important Wisconsin primary -- "I think a man with my back ground will appeal out there" -- and then sweep on to the G.O.P. nomination.

That would leave only Jack Kennedy between Powell and the White House --and Powell says he has already figured out how to handle Kennedy. Beginning next January, Powell plans to take "a potshot a week" at the President. And if he wins the Republican nomination, Powell will really set out after Kennedy: "I'll just build up every brick, brick by brick, in that wall around Berlin. I'll ask every day. 'Why didn't you put those planes over the Bay of Pigs?'

" "By God." To Powell, the prospect is so real that he jokes with friends about becoming "the last President the country ever had who studied by lamplight.'' Powell has. in fact, climbed a long way. His father was a day laborer in Portsmouth.

N.H.; his mother worked as a maid in the mansion of ex-Governor Ichabod Goodwin. Both of his parents were members of the Salvation Army, and young Wes tooted the cornet while his father pounded the big bass drum.

Powell worked his way through two years at the University of New Hampshire, then set out for the West to earn enough money to finish his education. He rode circuit in Wyoming as a lay Congregational minister, got his law degree at Southern Methodist, and ended up in 1940 working for a young New Hampshire Senator named Styles Bridges. When Powell arrived at 8:14 a.m. on his first work day. Bridges exclaimed: "By God, you and I are going to get along all right." They did, indeed. As Bridges' political protege. Powell managed the offce of the man who managed New Hampshire. After combat duty in World War II (he was severely wounded in the left arm as a B-24 gunner), Powell returned to Bridges' office.

But in 1949 he quit to pursue his own political career and promptly ran into trouble. In 1950 and 1954, Powell was beaten in senatorial primaries; in 1956, he was defeated in the gubernatorial primary. Then, in 1959, he began his current regime as Governor. Last year, when Styles Bridges died. Powell completed his declaration of political independence by refusing to appoint the Senator's widow to his seat.

"Yes, Ma'am." A man who calls himself a "pragmatic" Republican, Powell's greatest political asset is his determination. In 1958, after years of defeat, he had just filed his papers for Governor when a woman approached him in the general store of his home town, Hampton Falls.

"You running again?" she sneered.

"Yes, ma'am," replied Powell. "The way I figure it, I've got a few times to go to catch up with Abe Lincoln. As I remember, he ran eight or nine times and was defeated.* Then they elected him President, and then they shot him. It's a hell of a future to look forward to." Come what may, Powell can hardly wait.

* In point of fact, Lincoln lost three elections for public office: one for the Illinois House of Representatives (1832) and two for the U.S. Senate (1855, 1858).

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