Faubus in a Six-Ring Circus

...The early polls, however, showed Senator Fulbright to have surprising residual strength in spite of a virulent propaganda campaign carried out by extremist groups inside and outside the State in the wake of his celebrated memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara...

...Alford, the darkest of horses, is moving up fast on the outside, heralded all the way by one of the "gospel quartets" that are a lingering feature of the Southern political scene...

...At the same time, it would be most unwise to conclude that there was not a considerable popular demand for Faubus' return...

...At another level, something called the Christian Civic Foundation is leading a campaign against wide-open gambling and other evidence of high-jinks at Hot Springs and elsewhere in the State...

...The durability of the race issue will be of special concern to Sid McMath, who is favorably remembered by Arkansas' Negroes for, among other things, having formally scrapped the State's "white primary rule"—to the tumultuous applause of the 1950 Democratic State Convention...

...Logically, "segregation" as a viable issue in Arkansas should have expired with the last session of the 1961 State General Assembly, when neither the Governor nor a captive Legislature offered so much as a single piece of serious or even seriously intended new segregationist legislation...

...Jerry Neil is an associate editor of Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette...

...His five rivals for the Democratic nomination to be decided in the July 31-August 14 primaries range in seriousness from former Governor Sid McMath, the very model of the loyalist Southern Democrat redivivus...

...Much may depend upon the depth of two apparently unrelated reform movements now afoot in the State...

...Since his last primary outing, moreover, Faubus has taken bad beatings on two ballot proposals— an amendment to the State Constitution which would have permitted closing down the public schools as a device for preventing desegregation, and a massive bond issue for institutional construction which critics attacked as an equally massive boondoggle for the bond brokers among the Governor's more prominent financial backers...

...all the way down to David A. Cox, an eccentric rice farmer who fled the Arkansas Secretary of State's office immediately after filing his party pledges, protesting that he didn't "want any publicity," but who has since spasmodically emerged as the nearest thing to an avowed "integrationist" in the race...

...Still, Orval Faubus has built a whole political career on illogic, aided by quite a lot of pure, unadulterated luck at critical moments...

...Chandler is not expected to be a serious threat, except possibly in the role of hatchetman, and may in fact pick up little more than the Fulbright "scratch" vote...

...Until proved otherwise, he is and will be the favorite...

...The first is concerned principally with political reform (i.e., a voting machine amendment and, possibly, a new, streamlined State constitution), and is led by a small group of legislators operating outside the Faubus organization, together with such women's groups as the League of Women Voters, the Arkansas Association of University Women and the Little Rock Women's Emergency Committee, which bore the early brunt of the fight to reopen the City's public high schools in 1959...

...Governor Faubus may even come to be known as a sort of Romulus with an Uncle Remus accent...

...Since then, Faubus has missed few opportunities to revive the issue...

...But the Governor and Dr...

...And the very size of the current field, if nothing else, would seem to increase the possibility of such a denouement...

...The political ossuaries are full of the remains of men who have underestimated Orval E. Faubus...

...This was the occasion of the Governor's "retirement" announcement—he was back in again exactly 32 days later— and he spared none of the emotional stops in going out of his way to conjure up the old bugaboo of miscegenation...

...But the biggest imponderable of all is how lively the segregation issue may still be...

...It is a fact, however, that Faubus' percentage of the popular vote declined noticeably between the 1958 and 1960 primaries, and the Governor conceded to himself a marginal lead of only 52 per cent over the rest of the field in his early polls this year...

...But a lot has happened since 1950, and especially since 1957...

...through lameduck Congressman Dale Alford of Little Rock, an ophthalmologistturned-politician and a segregationist to pale even Faubus' pretensions...

...If this year's frontal attack fails all along the line, there will be the prospect of more circuses and more welfare-politics bread stretching infinitely into the distance...

...The Governor was first introduced to State politics by McMath, in whose administration he served as highway commissioner and highway director during a period of scandals in the Highway Department which, though by now a decade old, constitute another roadblock for McMath...

...For that reason almost nobody tends to underestimate him today...

...The nursing theme is not at all inappropriate: For of all the forces that contributed to the Governor's decision to try it again, none was louder or more poignantly in evidence than the cries of hangers-on on the swollen state payroll (up almost 100 per cent in seven years), who are confronted with the threat of finally having to be weaned —at their ages...

...and Kenneth Coffelt, a fire-breathing Little Rock lawyer with impeccable bona fides among the segregationists, who is, however, making his strongest campaign pitch to church and other groups bent on cleaning up gambling and liquor-law violations...

...Governor Faubus, though, has made a career out of fracturing the laws of probability...

...Not surprisingly, though, he has been called and raised at almost every turn by Dr...

...McMath, Alford and Cox, the challengers include Vernon H. Whitten, the inevitable "businessman's candidate," who in recent years has made two creditable races against Congressman Oren Harris, the Chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee...

...Alford, a former protege who, speaking with the special knowledgeability of the onetime insider, has been able to damn "Faubusism" with particularly telling effect...

...The breach was made formal early last year, when the Faubuscontrolled State Legislature approved a Congressional redistricting plan which left Alford, the junior member of the delegation, without a seat to turn to...

...Alford, on the other hand, was projected onto the political stage almost overnight in 1958...

...Alford had drifted apart well before the latter's decision to file ahead of Faubus in the current election—at least partly because of the eye surgeon's own Mount Rushmore complex...

...NATIONAL REPORTS Faubus in a Six-Ring Circus By Jerry Neil Little Rock Orval E. Faubus' campaign for an unprecedented fifth term as governor of Arkansas is being carried forward in an atmosphere that can only be likened to that of a six-ring circus...

...The Governor is already a legend, and regardless of the outcome this summer, there undoubtedly will be some men a generation or more hence to boast that they "shook the hand that shook the hand...

...At that time he unseated veteran Congressman Brooks Hays with a lastminute write-in campaign planned and executed by a Faubus cohort in reprisal for Hays' role as intermediary in the Faubus-abrogated Treaty of Newport the year before...

...The evidence that Faubus and Alford both possess ambitions that somewhat exceed the boundaries of a single state led to early speculation that one or the other would move into the race against J. W. Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...In addition to Messrs...

...Meanwhile, the list of candidates opposing the Governor this year offers something for almost everyone who is seriously looking for a reason to vote against him and for something else...

...Faubus has said privately that the issue is far from dead—at least in Arkansas—and his performance on a state-wide television hook-up on March 31 did almost everything that could be done to keep it alive...

...Of the lot, it is evident from Governor Faubus' own campaign strategies that McMath, who has effectively concentrated upon Administration tie-ins with utility and bond-holding interests, is regarded as the principal challenger...

...The anti-Fulbright camp was finally forced to fall back on Winston G. Chandler, a little-known Little Rock hauling contractor and professional Legionnaire who has occupied a place on the overlapping outer circles of both the Faubus and Alford inner circles...

...In each case, he committed his full prestige to the losing fight...

...A recent example is the Supreme Court's June 25 ruling in the New York Regents' Prayer case: This issue has tended to dominate the editorial and letters columns of Arkansas newspapers at a time when campaign charges of corruption and special privilege inside the Faubus Administration would otherwise have attracted more attention...

...Traditionally, an incumbent governor of Arkansas who is forced into a run-off primary is himself a likely candidate for the ossuary...

...This impression was heightened around the turn of the year, when the public speeches of both men gave the impression that they were running principally against Marshal Tito...

...When Faubus now charges that Alford has become an unwitting agent of the Integrationist Conspirators, Alford coolly lets drop the broadest of hints that the Governor himself may well have been a witting agent of the same conspiracy all along, judging from the fact that desegregation has proceeded apace since his 1957 gesture of defiance...

...But Dr...

...One of the more interesting aspects of this year's gubernatorial campaign concerns the compounded Frankenstein theme involved in the relationship of McMath to Faubus and of Faubus, in his later turn, to Alford...