Return of the Boy Wonder

As Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs for most of the past five years, G. (for Gerhard) Mennen Williams made frequent trips through Africa, dazzling the natives with his colorful bow ties and -- even in his 50s--his youthful manner. Trouble was, "Soapy" Williams was getting almost more attention in Africa than he was in the U.S. Appointed by John Kennedy, he has never been particularly close to Lyndon Johnson and, in the staid halls of Foggy Bottom, never quite shucked his boy-wonder image. It was all a far cry from his six consecutive terms as Governor of Michigan, when political precociousness--he was 37 when first elected--carried with it both power and national notice.

Last spring, Soapy, now 55, returned to Michigan to make a bid for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Democrat Pat McNamara. Williams faced a primary challenge from another precocious Democrat: Detroit Mayor Jerry Cavanagh, 38, who, after winning two terms in the office, had decided that he was ready for better things. Soapy was practically an elder statesman beside the forceful and articulate Cavanagh, who was given a good chance of winning. Last week Soapy Williams showed that he has not lost his old political touch--nor the allegiance of the Michigan Democratic Party. By a primary vote of 435,848 to 289,643, he soundly trounced his younger opponent, sweeping even the mayor's bailiwick of Detroit by better than two to one and setting himself up as an excellent possibility to become Michigan's next junior Senator.

Pool & Personalism. Soapy decided not to seek a seventh term as Governor in 1960 after surveying a forbidding political landscape: a state that had gone bankrupt under his aegis and a Republican legislature that was determined to trip him up on every move. But after he got to Washington, he never lost sight of his base in Michigan, where he had built the Democratic machinery and bolted it down, even to the block level. He went back on weekends and vacations, usually showed up there right after one of his African trips. He bought a house in Grosse Pointe, made himself and his trademark green-and-white polka-dot bow tie conspicuous by talking and traveling throughout the state.

Once he began to campaign, he practically never stopped moving. While Jerry Cavanagh was initially tied down by his mayoral duties, Soapy scoured the state, shaking hands with everyone he could find (including the bums on Detroit's Skid Row), playing pool with unemployed Negroes, talking Polish at weddings, greeting mourners at a wake. He waited on guests at the buffet dinners he gave, then sat on the floor and listened to their views. It was an oldfashioned, personal, handshaking, back-slapping campaign for the age of TV--which Soapy largely ignored--and it frequently avoided issues in favor of platitudes.

Personality & Loyalty. Brash, liberal and articulate, Cavanagh took a more cerebral approach, but he failed to read correctly just what he faced, beginning with the opposition of the state Democratic hierarchy. Though both candidates were prolabor and pro-civil rights, Soapy had been helping Negroes and laborers when Cavanagh was in short pants--and they knew it. Cavanagh's 1% city income tax in Detroit proved unpopular, and many Negroes were alienated when he toyed earlier this year with the idea of a "stop-and-frisk law" that would allow police to search suspicious persons. Then, too, there was Viet Nam. Though Cavanagh vaguely supported the Johnson Administration's policies, an image of the dove fluttered above him after he advocated a cease-fire and the creation of a buffer state between North and South. Williams, also generally supporting the President's policy, more firmly urged "a firm military defense and an imaginative peace effort."

In the long run, though, the crucial tests were those of personality and loyalty. Put to the choice, Michigan's Democrats could not turn their backs on Williams, and he made it easy for them not to by being the old Soapy they remembered. Just about all the experts feel that Williams now has an excellent chance to knock off Senator Robert Griffin, the bright but diffident Republican appointed to McNamara's post by G.O.P. Governor George Romney. In labor-powerful Michigan, Griffin is marked eternally as co-author of the Landrum-Griffin Act, the 1959 legislation that imposed severe restrictions on the internal procedures of labor unions and generally curbed the powers of their leaders.

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