End of Innocence

Sadder but presumably wiser, Illinois' freshman Senator Charles Percy last week wrote to three Chicago friends: "It was a mistake on my part not to realize that your well-intentioned desire to help would be subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation." With that, Chuck dissolved the controversial "Percy Group," a six-month-old fund-raising campaign intended to help the Senator defray his considerable office expenses.

The arrangement was innocent enough. Though he ranks a lowly 97th in Senate seniority, Percy is deluged daily with some 1,500 letters and 200 telephone calls. Having exhausted his Senate office allowance of $279,306, he has had to dig into his own pocket for $80,000 to run his official business. The fund, led by the three Chicagoans, had as its goal $100,000 a year to meet Percy's expenses.

As of last week the group had raised some $60,000--none of which had yet been spent. Millionaire Percy himself could not have touched the money, nor would he want to. Yet many critics, including the Chicago Sun-Times, persisted in demanding that Percy name the contributors to his fund. He declined to do so, since some prominent Democrats were on the list, and might have been embarrassed by the disclosure. Embarrassed himself by the unfavorable publicity his fund has attracted, Percy finally decided to chuck the fund and finance office operations from his own resources.

Clouded Chances. The fund was only one issue on which Percy has been collecting bad notices. Last month when he took his wife Loraine into Dak Son during a five-day tour of South Viet Nam, the Viet Cong opened fire with mortars. The incident might have been all to Percy's good as publicity, but the popular reaction was: "Any man who would take his wife into a situation like that is plain stupid." Percy protests that his wife invariably travels abroad with him and produces politically useful movies of his adventures. Besides, says he, "it never entered my head that there was any undue danger."

While hardly major, such mortifications are helping to cloud Percy's chances of being Illinois' favorite-son candidate at next summer's G.O.P. Convention. Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, has indicated that he will not seek the role since he intends to head the platform committee. Now some downstate delegates, perhaps as many as 20 out of the total of 58, are threatening to ignore Percy and vote for Nixon or Reagan from the outset. Even so, Percy last week accepted the printing industry's Benjamin Franklin Award citing him as "a man of action and a man who has yet to travel far." To lend himself stature, he delivered his acceptance speech while standing on an empty wooden Coke case.

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