How Long Are the Coattails?

The candidate forlornly scanned the quiet streets of Watertown, spotted a few homebound workers strolling out of the New York Air Brake Co., and practically broke into a gallop as he headed their way. His smile crinkled, his blue eyes twinkled, and his right hand shot out. One worker nearly got by, and the candidate went after him like a middle linebacker. "Pretty near missed you," he cried. Another worker poked his head out the door and asked, "Is Kennedy here?" Somehow, Kenneth Barnard Keating, 64, Republican Senator from New York, managed not to wince.

Keating has had plenty of practice at restraining winces during the past few weeks. A veteran of twelve years in the House and six in the Senate, he is a respected public servant with a record anybody but a reactionary can admire. Under ordinary circumstances he would be considered a near certainty for reelection. But this year's circumstances are far from ordinary.

For one thing, Keating's opponent is a Kennedy -Robert Francis, 38, recently resigned as U.S. Attorney General. Bobby plays heavily on the family name, constantly evokes the memory of his older brother, has even taken John F.

Kennedy Jr. ("John-John"), 3, campaigning. Such is the Kennedy charisma that Bobby has been mobbed wherever he has gone, while Keating has had to beat the bushes for audiences.

Adding to Keating's difficulty is the fact that New York Democrats enjoy a huge registration edge -normally up wards of half a million -over Republicans. And likely to siphon 150,000 or more votes away from Keating is Henry Paolucci, 43, a history and political science teacher at New Rochelle's Iona College, who will appear on the ballot as the candidate of the Conservative Party, which is angry at Keating for his refusal to endorse Barry Goldwater.

Confirmed Splitters. Goldwater, in fact, is Keating's heaviest burden. With a record 8,500,000 voters on the rolls this year, Johnson is expected to win the state by somewhere between 750,000 and 2,000,000. It is taken for granted that Bobby will run far, far behind Johnson on the Democratic ticket, but for Keating to have a chance it will require ticket splitting of heroic and historic proportions. In this, Ken Keating finds himself in the same dilemma as Republican candidates in a score of other states. For as Election Year 1964 nears its end, the big political question is less whether Barry will win or lose than how many Republicans he will drag to defeat.

Fortunately for Keating, New Yorkers are confirmed ticket splitters, as Republican Senator Jacob Javits, the state's best vote getter and a staunch Keating ally, proved in 1962 when he was re-elected by 983,000 votes while Democrat Arthur Levitt, running for comptroller, was re-elected by 791,000-a split of 1,774,000. New York, in fact, makes it impossible to vote a straight ticket by pulling a single lever in a voting booth or marking a single X on a paper ballot to choose all candidates, instead requires that voters indicate each choice separately. So do 22 other states.* That makes coattail riding difficult, could mean the difference, for example, to Republican Senatorial Candidates Robert A. Taft in Ohio and George Murphy in California.

Even among the 20 states where a voter can pick everyone from President to dogcatcher with a single X or one tug on a lever,* several boast long ticket-splitting traditions. In Michigan, Democratic Governor "Soapy" Williams was re-elected by 290,000 votes in 1956 while Ike carried the state by more than 350,000; this year that tradition bodes well for Republican Governor George Romney. Pennsylvania's voters elected Republican Bill Scranton Governor by 486,291 votes in 1962 but also re-elected liberal Democratic Senator Joe Clark by 103,734; hard-pressed Republican Senator Hugh Scott hopes that there will be as much ticket splitting this election.

Born Politician. In New York, the man faced with the formidable task of persuading hordes of voters to split their ticket is one of the friendliest men in U.S. political life. An inveterate joiner, Ken Keating is a Moose, Eagle, Elk, Shriner, 33rd-Degree Mason, Kiwanian, Legionnaire, Veteran of Foreign Wars and, through his mother's side of the family, a Son of the American Revolution. At 5 ft. 9 1/2 in. and 165 lbs., Keating looks every inch a Senator. His magnificent mane of white hair is the most convincing symbol of senatorial dignity since Borah's stately mien. That, together with his ruddy complexion, cultivated under a sun lamp, gives him a kindly, grandfatherly air. He is, in fact, the doting grandfather of the children of his daughter, Mrs. Judith Howe, who lives in Manhattan. Keating's wife, an invalid since 1949 with multiple sclerosis, lives in Rochester.

Just barely a man of this century, Keating was born May 18, 1900, in the upstate hamlet of Lima, near Rochester. His family followed politics closely. "Grandmother Barnard was 991 when she died in her rocking chair," he says. "She was reading about politics in the paper."

Give the Boy a Chance. His mother, an intense, scholarly high school language teacher, taught Ken to read at three. At 15, he graduated from Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, won $15 on commencement day for an oration titled, "Give the Boy a Chance." He made Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Rochester, taught high school Latin for a year after graduating at 19, then got a law degree at Harvard and launched a successful career in Rochester. He was in both World Wars, wound up a sergeant in the first and a colonel in the second, after serving as an administrative officer in the China-Burma-India theater. He is now a reserve brigadier general.

Elected to Congress in 1946, Keating lost no time establishing himself as a loquacious legislator of wide-ranging interests. With what seemed like impertinent haste to older House members, he delivered his maiden speech less than a month after his swearing-in, has rarely stopped talking since. He voted conservatively on most economic questions, but his growing interest in issues such as civil rights, immigration and Israel marked him as a man who seemed to be aiming for higher office.

A New Equation. But when his chance to run for the Senate came in 1958, he was reluctant to take it. The U.S. was in the midst of a mild recession, and it looked like a big Democratic year. He entered the race a distinct underdog against Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan. He was helped by the usual factional row between New York's Democratic bosses and reformers, and he made devastating use of Jim Farley's scornful remark that Hogan's experience in national and international affairs "extends from the Battery to the Polo Grounds." In an upset victory, Keating squeaked in by 132,992 votes.

Before he got to the Senate, Keating used to say: "I don't like to be tagged conservative or liberal. I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'm a liberative or a conserveral." Once in the Senate, he quickly made up his mind: liberal. Over the next six years Keating established a Senate roll-call record next only to that of Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith, but still managed to hop the shuttle to New York two, three and four times a week to attend a bar mitzvah, a Negro Elks meeting, a Roman Catholic communion breakfast. He kept his face before his constituents with a regular radio-television show, Senate Report, carried on 36 New York stations. And he kept his name in print with his disclosures of Russian missile bases in Cuba.

All this should have made Keating a shoo-in for reelection. Then came Jack Kennedy's assassination and a whole new equation.

First All the Time. In the aftermath of the Dallas slaying, Bobby Kennedy was a shaken man, and for months afterward he moved about mechanically. But slowly the old combativeness began to return-and Bobby, seventh of the nine Kennedy children, is the most combative of the clan.

"Bobby Kennedy," said Dave Powers, White House courtier in Jack's Administration, "has to be first all the time." That goes for everything, from a pickup game of touch football to managing his brother's presidential race. When he played touch football, his daughter Kathleen, now 13, would occasionally show up with her friends to cheer: Clap your hands and stamp your feet 'Cause Daddy's team, Daddy's team, can't be beat.

Last spring, when the first feelers were put out to him about the New York Senate race, Bobby seemed uninterested. "All things being equal," he said, "it would be better for a citizen of New York to run." In fact, Bobby had set his sights on the vice-presidency. But he was kidding himself. For one thing, he and Lyndon have always been able to restrain their enthusiasm for one another, and anyhow, Johnson, who understandably wants to be known for his own achievements, had pointedly advised longtime Kennedy Aide Kenny O'Donnell only one month after Dallas: "I'll never have a Kennedy on the ticket."

U.S. of Kennedy. Still, Bobby pursued the mirage, until Lyndon finally scratched Kennedy from the sweepstakes in late July in that strange and impulsive performance in which he simultaneously ruled out all Cabinet members and officials who met regularly with the Cabinet. Crestfallen, Bobby declared: "I don't think there is much future for me in this city now." Three weeks later, he thought he glimpsed a bearable future in New York, and he jumped into the Senate race. "If the Democratic Party could have agreed on any other candidate," said he, "I wouldn't have come in. But there wasn't any agreement."

Bobby's move provoked inevitable cries of "carpetbagger." Despite his protests that he had spent more time in New York than anywhere else, Bobby was Massachusetts-born and -oriented, and a resident of Virginia besides. But he knew where the power was, quickly lined up New York's Democratic bosses behind him, notably Buffalo's Peter Crotty, Brooklyn's Stanley Steingut, and Charlie Buckley of The Bronx. New York's Mayor Robert Wagner, reluctantly, also fell into line.

Many Democrats recoiled. "The political arm twisting has been the worst I've ever seen," said Utica's Richard H. Balch, onetime Democratic state chairman. Noting that Bobby's allies were running in three other states-Pierre Salinger in California, Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts, and Joseph Tydings, who was a U.S. Attorney under Kennedy, in Maryland-with a total of 64 electoral votes among them on top of New York's 43, one Democrat cried: "It will be a United States of Kennedy." In a meeting with Mayor Wagner, a group of reformers protested: "Bobby Kennedy is a ruthless, unprincipled, frighteningly ambitious young man who intends to use the New York State Democratic Party to launch his presidential ambitions." Later, 120 reformers, including Playwright Gore (The Best Man) Vidal, Niagara Falls Mayor E. Dent Lackey and Actor Paul Newman, established a noisy Democrats for Keating Committee. Bobby viewed the reformers with the professional's habitual scorn for the idealistic amateur. "These people hate everything and everybody, even each other," he snapped.

Screamers & Jumpers. In early September, at a sweaty, tumultuous Democratic convention in the musty 71st Regiment Armory on Manhattan's lower Park Avenue, Kennedy steamrollered Upstate Congressman Sam Stratton, his only rival, 968 to 153. He won the Liberal Party's endorsement the same day. Aware that the Liberals delivered 406,000 votes to Jack Kennedy in 1960 -more than J.F.K.'s 3 80,000-vote statewide margin of victory-Bobby welcomed their support.

The first days of his campaign were a wild triumphal march. He was swamped on Long Island's beaches by hundreds of thousands of Labor Day weekend bathers. In a three-day swing around "the Southern Tier," he made 51 stops in 21 cities, got such an overwhelming reception that people began to talk about "poor old Ken." In Watertown, he outdrew Keating 45 to 1. In Ogdensburg, where Keating spoke to a lonely knot of 24 listeners, Bobby drew 2,000. In Jamestown, where G.O.P. Vice-Presidential Candidate Bill Miller had a crowd of 250, Bobby lured 4,000. In Glens Falls, Bobby arrived just before 1 a.m., still found 4,000 people, more than one-fifth of the populace, waiting for him, many in nightclothes. "I still have problems in this state," said Bobby, "but at least I'm getting a hearing."

"Outrageous." But was he? People were seeing him, but the crowds did more hollering than listening, and they were young crowds to boot. "If I had my way," Bobby told the teenagers, who thronged him at every stop, "I'd lower the voting age to six-before the election."

While Bobby was making what Keating called a "blatant emotional appeal to the teen-age screamers and jumpers," the G.O.P. was mounting a well-financed campaign with headquarters on the fifth floor of 521 Fifth Avenue-one flight above the Goldwater-Miller operation but totally divorced from it.

Former Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who steered Tom Dewey to prominence and helped catapult Ike into the presidency, emerged from seven years of political retirement to run Keating's campaign. "This thing got me sore," he said. "If Kennedy is elected, it will establish that a rich man can come in, make a deal with bosses, and change our whole constitutional system. H. L. Hunt could go in and run in some Rocky Mountain state. Governor Wallace could run where he pleased. This is outrageous."

Patiently, Keating and his crew worked on the racial and religious minority groups that make a majority of New York's votes. No state has quite the complicated ethnic mix that New York has, and Ken Keating, with 18 years of experience, knows almost instinctively what each of the groups wants. A more adventurous gastronome than Bobby, he sampled kosher hot dogs, pickles, and cheese blintzes during a walking tour of the predominantly Jewish Lower East Side. Keating is a familiar figure there, and one sign that greeted him read: KEATING AND ISRAEL go TOGETHER LIKE BAGELS AND LOX. In that same district, Bobby spurned the ethnic diet, chose melon, split-pea soup and chocolate milk. In lower Manhattan's "Little Italy," he asked for a fork when someone offered him a slice of pizza. "You don't need a fork," he was gently advised.

Winning Formula. To his dismay, Kennedy found himself running poorly among New York's 2,500,000 Jews, who gave nearly 90% of their votes to his brother in 1960, and its 1,500,000 Italians. Keating's managers talk of getting half of the Jewish vote, two-fifths of the Italian vote-and that, combined with normal G.O.P. majorities upstate and in the suburbs, would be a winning formula.

Kennedy's troubles with the Jews stemmed from the days when his father, Joseph Kennedy, while Ambassador to Britain, delivered too-vigorous warnings against going to war with Nazi Germany and a too-gentle appraisal of Hitler. Jack overcame their distrust, but Bobby seemed more like his father's son. And Bobby's onetime association with Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigating committee and his seeming indifference to the fine points of civil liberties roused further suspicions.

Playing on these suspicions, Keating charged that Kennedy, while Attorney General, had made a "deal" to sell off part of the Government-held General Aniline & Film Corp.'s assets to a Swiss holding company that was once run by Germany's I. G. Farben, a notorious exploiter of Jewish slave labor. Keating had proposed selling the assets-some $200 million worth-exclusively to private U.S. interests, but made no protest when the deal was announced in 1963.

Lurid Tales. Jewish liberals began channeling their contributions to the Johnson-Humphrey campaign and the Keating campaign, shutting Bobby out. To finance his $1,500,000 campaign, Bobby is probably dipping deep into his personal $10 million fortune.

Among the Italian-Americans, Keating made inroads by playing on their resentment of the Justice Department's Valachi hearings, in which lurid ta'.es of hoodlums with Italian names were told to the American public. Keating also nailed down the Greek vote by condemning Turkey's actions in Cyprus. There are only 31,000 Turks in New York, but there are 77,000 Greeks.

Still, Bobby stands high with other ethnic groups: the Germans (675,000 strong in New York), the Irish (492,000) and the Poles (685,000). He has paid particular attention to the state's 2,000,000 Negroes and Puerto Ricans, traditionally Democratic and overwhelmingly anti-Goldwater. At the urging of Kennedy headquarters, New York City Democrats mailed out nearly 4,000,000 pieces of mail, made thousands of phone calls to encourage new voters to register. The result: a city registration record of 3,636,634. For a Democrat, who normally needs a cushion of up to 700,000 votes in the city if he is to have a prayer of winning the state, that was good news. Said one Kennedy aide: "These new Negro and Puerto Rican votes were expected to be the frosting. But now they're turning into the whole cake."

Each candidate righteously deplored the other's exploitation of the ethnic vote, then went right on cultivating it himself. "I do not campaign in search of a Jewish vote or a Catholic vote or a Negro vote," said Bobby. But there he was, wearing a yamilke (skullcap) for a chat with a rabbi. And there he was at Grossinger's, assuring an audience that his father, in his Hollywood days, was so impressed at how Jewish moviemakers like the Warner brothers and Sam Goldwyn raised their children that "he decided to bring his own up that way." In turn, Keating complained about Bobby's "constant talk about the Jewish vote, the Italian vote, the this-that-or-the-other vote. I don't believe there is such a thing as bloc voting in this state." Not much. Keating has a 50-acre forest in Israel named after him, and he is the darling of the Italian-Americans for proposing to make Columbus Day a national holiday.

Tarrytown Cigarettes? Ethnics aside, there are few issues between Keating and Kennedy. Each claims to be more liberal than the other; yet both are moderates with similar positions on most issues. The chief difference is that Keating might be more hesitant than Bobby about committing federal funds for a vast array of projects. And when Bobby starts talking grandly about huge transportation and air-pollution-control projects for the whole Eastern seaboard, Opponent Keating chuckles: "I can't figure out whether he thinks he's running for President of the United States or is looking for some kind of new federal job like High Commissioner of the Northeast."

Bobby's big pitch is that he can do more for New York, that Keating has been an uncreative legislator. "Name me a Keating bill," he cries. "What legislation has he introduced?" For his part, Keating hammers ceaselessly at the carpetbagger theme. In mock astonishment, he declares: "Why, there are people who have been standing in line at the World's Fair longer than he has been living in New York." Or: "Why, Bobby thinks the Gowanus Canal is part of the lower intestinal tract." Or: "He thinks Tarrytown is a new brand of cigarette."

When Bobby tries to refute the charge by noting that one of New York's first Senators was a Massachusetts man named Rufus King, Keating beams mischievously. "It was a girl, not politics, that brought Rufus King to New York," he says. "He came here to live with his bride, a resident of New York." And while Bobby has leased a 25-room Dutch colonial house in Glen Cove, L.I., Ethel, who is expecting her ninth child in December, still spends most of her time in Virginia with the eight Kennedy kids.

There is also the lingering suspicion that Bobby hopes to use the New York Senate seat only as a springboard to the White House someday. He denies this, but he certainly doesn't slam the door. "Truthfully, now," he says, "I can't go any place in 1968. We've got President Johnson, and I think he's going to be re-elected in 1968. Now we get to 1972. I'm going to have to be re-elected in six years. I'm going to have to do a tremendous job for the State of New York. If I have done such an outstanding job that people just demand all over the country that I be a presidential candidate, I don't see how New York suffers."

If Ken Keating has anything to say about it, New York will not have to take that chance. And Keating just might have something to say about it-for he is running nip and tuck in a race that will be decided not so much by Bobby's popularity as by the length of Lyndon's coattails.

*Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

*Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. There are also seven states where ballots have a separate section for the presidential election but permit the voter to choose a straight ticket for all other offices. They are Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Vermont and Wisconsin.

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