Madam Candidate

The written history of U.S. presidential campaigns is speckled with many a remarkable asterisk, not the least of which does homage to women. There is, for example, a bosomy young New Yorker named Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who ran for the presidency in 1872 as the Equal Rights Party candidate. Victoria billed herself as a Wall Street "businesswoman," publicly proclaimed her belief in spiritualism, vegetarianism, short skirts, legalized prostitution and free love. On election night she was in jail on an obscenity charge. She got very few votes. Ulysses Grant beat her out. Then there is Washington, D.C.'s Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood, the first woman lawyer ever to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. She ran in 1884 and again in 1888 on the Equal Rights ticket--but, as the victories of Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland proved, the nation wasn't ready for her either.

Actually, neither Victoria nor Belva Ann expected to win; they were merely highly vocal suffragettes. Not so Maine's trim, white-haired Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith. Last week Maggie Smith, 66, confessed before the National Women's Press Club in Washington that she has no money, no time to campaign and no organization to speak of. There upon she announced saucily that she is going to run for the G.O.P. presidential nomination just the same.

Stickler. Many people shrug off the lady Senator's declaration as something frivolously feminine. They don't know Maggie. Feminine she is, but not frivolous. Daughter of a barber in Skowhegan, Margaret Madeline Chase never went to college, clerked in a dime store for 100 an hour, worked on a newspaper, taught school, filled in as a night switchboard operator for the phone company. Her husband Clyde, Skow-hegan's first Republican selectman, won 48 straight elections in his lifetime, got elected to Congress in 1936. He died four years later, and Maggie took his place, winning a crashing 25,000-vote victory in the 1940 election. She has been winning ever since, is now serving her third term in the Senate.

A stickler for perfect attendance, she set an alltime record with her presence at 1,590 consecutive Senate roll call votes. In all that time, she has refused to settle into any political mold, has crossed party lines again and again, views herself as a Republican who is "still to the right of Rockefeller and to the left of Goldwater." She can be, as John Kennedy once called her, "a very formidable political figure." She tried for nearly two years to prevent the Pentagon from promoting Actor James Stewart to brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve; she didn't think he warranted the rank. And when Maggie denounced the nuclear test ban treaty last year, Nikita Khrushchev was moved to observe: "It is hard to believe how a woman, if she is not the devil in disguise of a woman, can make such a malicious, man-hating call."

An Unconvincing Outcome. Maggie's entry into the New Hampshire race, along with burgeoning write-in campaigns for Nixon, Scranton and Henry

Cabot Lodge, can only add up to a confusing and uncertain result. Once, it seemed that either Rockefeller or Goldwater would emerge from New Hampshire with a clear-cut victory and a barrelful of prestige to help guarantee the nomination. Not so any more. Groused Goldwater: "I don't think the outcome can possibly be convincing as of now."

Maggie claims that she is not out to monkey-wrench any other candidate. "I am going to run my own campaign on my own record," says she. "I am running against no one. I'd like to be President. I think my experience and my record are greater than any other candidate or any other of the unannounced candidates. It's a real chal lenge, and that's one of the paramount things. When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.