Kentucky Horse Race

On their doorsteps along with the milk and newspaper, white residents of Madisonville, Ky., found a handbill with the headline: I WILL SUPPORT N.A.A.C.P. LAWS. Beneath it was a smudgy picture of a smiling white girl and Negro boy holding hands, with the statement: "God created us equal. We should live together equally." The photo, said the broadside, had been taken at a recent rally for Edward T. Breathitt Jr., 38, Democratic candidate for Governor.

Also included was the notation that the flyer was a paid advertisement of "CORE (Committee on Racial Education) for Breathitt."

The author was, of course, anonymous, the photo phony, the organization nonexistent--and a play on the real CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). The man who presumably would hope to benefit most from the scurrilous handout--Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Louie B. Nunn, 39 --denied that he or any of his regular helpers had had anything to do with the fraud.

Nunn, who successfully managed the 1956 Kentucky campaigns for Dwight Eisenhower and Republican Senators John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton, is a respected politician whose denial of this groin-type tactic seems worthy of belief. But there is no question that Nunn is using the civil rights issue for all it is worth, and that may be plenty in border state Kentucky. He was handed a readymade platform when Governor Bert Combs issued an executive order last June banning discrimination in all business establishments licensed by the state. Combs is not allowed to succeed himself, and Breathitt is his hand-picked Democratic candidate. Nunn has tirelessly hit at Breathitt through Combs.

"Combs is the only man in the country who went further than Bobby Kennedy on the race issue," he said last week. If elected, Nunn said, he would not only rescind the Combs order, but also would not introduce civil rights legislation in the state general assembly and "would veto any legislation introduced under the guise of civil rights if it infringes on the constitutional rights of the citizens."

While denying any involvement with the Combs order, Breathitt has promised to put a civil rights bill before the general assembly next year--though he has not given a clue as to what the bill might include. Says he vaguely: "I shall recommend such action as seems to me just and fair in the light of conditions then prevailing. Once the legislature has made known its will, the executive order will have served its purpose and will no longer continue."

Under ordinary Kentucky circumstances, Democrat Breathitt would be rated an easy winner. But during the era of the Negro revolution, circumstances are not ordinary anywhere. And Kentucky observers consider it entirely possible that in the Nov. 5 election Nunn might become the first Republican Governor Kentucky has had in 18 years.

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