Peace & War in San Mateo

The congressional primary in Northern California's San Mateo County attracted national attention largely because Shirley Temple, who as a child was every moviegoer's lollipop, was in the race. But Mrs. Shirley Temple Black, 39, mother of three and as conservative as could be, was not a hit at the ballot box. She lost the Republican race to Attorney Paul N. McCloskey, a moderate, by 52,878 votes to 34,521.

A craggily handsome Stanford graduate and Korean War Marine hero, McCloskey tagged Shirley a superhawk and won a lot of points by her refusal to debate the issues with him on TV.

McCloskey's cause was aided by an army of young volunteers who saturated the district with campaign literature and followed their leader's 18-hour-a-day campaign pace. While McCloskey called for a negotiated settlement of the Viet Nam war and gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops, he rejected the wording of San Francisco's Proposition P, which called for a unilateral, immediate pullout. The issue had lost 2 to 1 in San Francisco a week earlier, and San Mateo voters would undoubtedly have rejected it even more decisively had it been on their ballot.

On the Democratic side, affable, grey-haired Roy Archibald, 47, defeated Edward Keating, 42, former publisher of the New Left Ramparts magazine, by 15,069 votes to 8,881. Keating, who billed himself as the "real" peace candidate, stood fast for Proposition P. Archibald, a wartime PT-boat skipper who is a West Coast spokesman for the National Education Association and an able former mayor of San Mateo, voiced mild qualms over U.S. tactics in Viet Nam but supported the U.S. commitment to the war.

Any party analysis of the vote in the traditionally Republican district was complicated by California's rules for special elections. On showing up at the polls, voters could decide to vote either Democratic or Republican no matter how they were registered. In this freewheeling situation, G.O.P. Winner McCloskey got well over three times the number of votes that went to the Democratic winner, and even the vanquished Shirley bested Archibald by more than 2 to 1. "A lot of Democrats went over to defeat that girl," said Archibald. "They'll come to my side."

When McCloskey and Archibald meet in the December 12 general election, the voters will have a choice between a Republican who is a professed admirer of G.O.P. Liberals Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay and Charles Percy, and an L.B.J. Democrat. All the indications give a clear edge to Republican McCloskey.

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