CHESTER BOWLES: THE CONNECTICUT DARK HORSE
Riggs, Robert L.
Chester Bowles: the Connecticut Dark Horse by ROBERT L. RIGGS One of the most intriguing aspects of the current campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination is the modest yet persistent...
...He is so convinced today of the righteousness of the cause of internationalism that he believes the American people would vote to uphold those who favor large expenditures for economic assistance to the free nations...
...When Prentiss Brown quit as head of the national OPA in July, 1943, Roosevelt brought Bowles to Washington with the title of general manager of the agency, then made him administrator...
...This is said to represent a lack of enthusiasm for the detailed work of organizational politics rather than an avowed desire to build a larger constituency...
...But some Connecticut politicians recently have found that there are many divisions among Catholics themselves...
...No one who knows him well questions his sincerity...
...But it was his house-to-house visits and his face-to-face interviews as an advertising agency research man during the depression that gave him an opportunity to see poverty and misery at first hand and turned him into a liberal...
...As for the larger question, however, both the Soviet and the Chinese Communists seem to feel that it is they who hold the long-range military, political, and economic advantage...
...For the last two years of the Truman Administration, after his failure to be re-elected governor, Bowles was our ambassador to India...
...But unlike Stevenson, he has remarried...
...granted that any Democrat elected President in 1960 would select Stevenson for that post...
...The appointment of Bowles to that post has led many to expect that a victorious Kennedy would appoint Bowles his Secretary of State...
...Among the accomplishments he looks back upon are these: f Connecticut's $175 million housing program enabled its people to build 14,000 state-financed homes both for rent and sale in a two-year period...
...He is one of them—a Stevenson worshipper himself...
...Despite the part the unpopularity of wartime regulations may have played in the Republican Congressional victories of 1946, Bowles is more than ever convinced that the average citizen has a genuine sense of appreciation for the attempts the government made to meet the problem of scarce supply and huge demand...
...It is true, he says, that individual members of Congress, representing certain narrow local interests, can appeal to the nostalgic desire for a return to the Nineteenth Century both in domestic and foreign policy...
...Out of that mixture has come his pet theory of political history as one periodic "consensus" after another...
...One is that so many qualified candidates are seeking the prize that a growing number of Democrats, confused and frustrated, are turning hopefully to someone not heretofore seriously considered a contender...
...But he hastens to add that any such result would involve a most unlikely combination of circumstances—and one he insists he is seeking to prevent...
...Perhaps his most notable achievement, as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, was his successful effort to achieve a significant change in emphasis in the Mutual Security Act of 1959...
...Although Bowles is a full-fledged member of the egghead wing of the Democratic Party, he prides himself on being a practical politician who knows about patronage, district leaders, and the location of the centers of power...
...In 1939, he was prominent in the America First Committee of Connecticut...
...Bowles plunged into the Kennedy movement because he believes that of those apparently available for the nomination, the Massachusetts Senator would be the best choice for the Democratic Party and the best choice for the nation...
...our wives and daughters thrown into the stews...
...A genuine peace can be achieved only by negotiation...
...Although reorganization and Bowles were both defeated, Governor Ribicoff has put Bowles' proposed changes into effect...
...A man who could make himself wealthy between the ages of 30 and 40, in the depression decade that began in 1929, has received a certificate of merit which will pass without question in the business world...
...He also recalls that his heroes of the Progressive movement, the senior Robert M. LaFollette and his two sons, as well as Burton K. Wheeler, had conditioned him to accept the teaching of America First...
...One of the largest construction programs for mental hospitals in the state's history was adopted...
...Most of them are poor, and they are unsympathetic to what impresses them as the arrogance of American wealth...
...He feels we are on the verge of still another in 1960...
...Devoted to many good causes, including the Urban League, she stirred young Chester to excitement over Woodrow Wilson in the face of paternal disapproval...
...A commission was established to make recommendations on the modernization of the state's government...
...Bowles insists that the money he received when he sold his ten-year-old advertising business was not the million dollars many writers have credited to him...
...Republican Senator Cooper, who went to New Delhi two years after Bowles departed, is an eager witness to the remarkably effective job the Connecticut Democrat did there...
...As a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he has fought hard to prevent cuts in President Eisenhower's requests for appropriations for foreign aid...
...Eleanor Roosevelt to advise him about entering public life...
...He believes that many who now talk about him as a Presidential possibility are moved by warm memories of his efforts on behalf of consumers...
...Indeed, this is precisely what much of the world fears has already happened...
...It also betrays a narrowly mistaken view of what the world struggle is all about...
...Washington newsmen who have been studying the life and ways of this Connecticut dark horse are impressed by the fact that unlike many Congressmen whose districts are close to Washington, Bowles does not spend most of his weekends in his home district, but prefers to embark on speaking engagements throughout the country...
...If he were President, he says, he would have asserted his support for the Supreme Court's desegregation decision—a declaration President Eisenhower has avoided up to now...
...Bowles is more interested in what Connecticut Democrats will do at the Los Angeles convention than in what they did at Hartford two years ago...
...The largest program for construction in the history of the state university and colleges was enacted...
...But he calls attention to the fact that no leader on the national scene, Democratic or Republican, has failed to espouse liberalism and internationalism...
...But when he sold his interest in Benton and Bowles in 1940, he set about immediately to devote his attention to public affairs...
...It is a conflict between those who believe in the dignity of the individual and those who would deny him that dignity...
...If the former governor of Illinois had shown the least inclination to make a fight for the nomination, Bowles would have been part of his organization...
...our children cast into the world from the breast and forgotten...
...Such a new consensus, or shift in national attitude, was ushered in by Thomas Jefferson...
...But when word of the decision reached Hartford, Republicans objected...
...Of course I would accept," Bowles says when urged to say what he would do if lightning should strike him at a deadlocked convention...
...For all his intense interest in a wide variety of subjects, Bowles is not the type usually given to ulcers...
...When the national mind has made a shift in its position, he holds that the people have arrived at a new consensus...
...His immediate family had no interest in the Springfield Republican, but he served on it briefly as a cub reporter...
...They liked him also because, although he dealt with government officials, he was accessible to students or any other Indian who wanted to talk with him...
...The left side is partly paralyzed because of a childhood mastoid operation...
...He also believes Kennedy would make a better President than any of those in the race...
...While all the Democratic hopefuls have demonstrated their interest in foreign affairs, Bowles has one achievement in his record not matched by Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, or Stuart Symington: he has served his country's State Department abroad...
...With the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bowles tried to enter the Navy but was turned down because of an injured ear...
...Chester Bowles: the Connecticut Dark Horse by ROBERT L. RIGGS One of the most intriguing aspects of the current campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination is the modest yet persistent boom for a freshman Congressman in a field of seasoned Senators...
...The best example of a pressing need offered by Bowles is the problem of urban renewal...
...Representative of the letters he has written was one to a woman in California...
...To call upon the non-Communist two-thirds of mankind to join us in a crusade for the American way of life is, therefore, self-defeating and futile...
...So well pleased with him were the Indians that some of their spokesmen, aided by Paul Hoffman and other Eisenhower internationalists, persuaded the new Republican President in 1953 to keep Bowles in the New Delhi embassy...
...He stayed on the job until the summer of 1946 when he felt that Congress had destroyed the agency's usefulness...
...Those now so exercised over the fear of inflation, he argues, are the same men who did everything they could in 1943 and 1944 to prevent the government from putting into effect an anti-inflation program that would have worked...
...Among the many boats anchored in that harbor is the 38-foot yawl which Bowles and his wife operate together...
...f A school building program which now accounts for nearly one-half of all classrooms in Connecticut...
...But it was an aunt, Ruth Standish Baldwin, who started Bowles on the road to liberalism...
...This confidence that good government is the best politics contributed to his defeat when he sought re-election as governor in 1950...
...During the two years he sat in the governor's chair at Hartford, Chester Bowles not only established an impressive record of immediate accomplishment, but he laid some of the foundations upon which Connecticut's present Governor Ribicoff has built his own impressive list of achievements...
...In his present mood of active cooperation with all elements of the party in Connecticut, Bowles is eager to forget about 1958, happy to be in the House, and to be listed among the dark horse Presidential candidates...
...Our primary task, therefore, is to rally other non-Communist peoples in the common defense of certain primary principles of human conduct which are deeply rooted in most religions and which have provided the central driving force for human freedom and betterment since the beginning of time...
...Again he did well enough at the precincts to win election to Congress...
...Before succeeding in his second attempt two years later, Bowles got some foreign affairs training with some of the United Nations agencies, including its Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO...
...Bowles-for-President clubs have sprung up in a number of communities, but the Connecticut Congressman writes letters to discourage them...
...It was under her auspices that he launched his political career by becoming a delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention...
...Another was brought about by the infant Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln...
...If the selections committee recalled how businessmen cried out that the zealous men who staffed the wartime control agencies had "never met a payroll," the record would quiet such doubts about Bowles...
...Although Bowles works hard on his legislative duties, as he does on everything he tackles, he is not exactly smitten with a passion for details...
...Kennedy's selection of Bowles to be official pre-convention campaign adviser on foreign policy questions reflects their identity of views in this critical area...
...The expression of our national purpose must involve not only the enunciation of great truths, but the initiation of great action, reflected in day-to-day policies, appropriations, and administration...
...It is my own strongly-held conviction," Bowles contends, "that the principal economic danger we now face is not inflation, but our slow rate of growth compounded by our disturbing recent history of recurring recessions...
...His first effort to become governor failed in 1946...
...He is an unusually warm human being who derives genuine pleasure from dealing with people...
...A big (six feet, one hundred and ninety pounds), rather rumpled figure, he looks somewhat younger than his fifty-nine years...
...Those who have been in New Delhi report that Bowles and Kentucky's Republican Senator, John Sherman Cooper, occupy a higher place in the esteem of the Indian government than any other envoys this government has sent there...
...If the committee remembered the great protest practical politicians made against Franklin D. Roosevelt's bright young New Dealers because so many of them had "never carried a precinct," it could be freed from concern on that score...
...He made the Indian people feel that the United States was their friend...
...I learned in New Delhi," Cooper says, "that Chester Bowles understood that India, having only recently obtained its independence from Great Britain, did not want to tie itself up to any great power...
...When he left the advertising business in 1940, Bowles asked Mrs...
...For thirty years, it had been accepted tradition that one of Connecticut's Senators must be Catholic, since at least eighty-five per cent of the Democratic Party of Connecticut is said to be of that faith...
...Already faced with other confirmation problems in the Senate, the White House dropped the idea of keeping Bowles on the job...
...Federal funds without federal interference are the only alternative...
...Our objective must be to create the global conditions which at some future stage will make possible some meaningful and enforceable agreements...
...For the balance which must be struck between waging a cold war and seeking a genuine peace with an enemy whom we have found no reason to trust, Bowles offers this counsel: "Unless we can move off our present tight-rope of terror, the future of civilization will continue to hang in the balance...
...To accomplish his goals, Bowles had to deal with a Republican house, and he demonstrated that he knew how to persuade legislators of an opposing party to support his measures for the public welfare...
...Most of them are colored and they resent the continued racial discrimination that exists in much of America...
...This requires of us a carefully balanced effort in the fields of military defense, economic policy, and diplomatic maneuver...
...But he had to skip a generation to find it in the Bowles bloodstream...
...Whether we like it or understand it, a clear majority of the non-Communist people of the world are unprepared to accept the American way of life as their model...
...This led one seasoned observer to comment that if Bowles is spending half his time trying to suppress the Bowles-for-President movement, he seems to be spending a good part of the other half building it up...
...But he also has demanded that more money be put into economic programs and less spent to provide weapons for every dictator, big and little, who claims to be on our side...
...Unless we thus deliberately place our national resources in this context, and unless we learn to act in behalf of our interests in the broadest and most generous terms, we will almost surely fail to secure these interests...
...He has turned to boating as a sport which the entire family can enjoy together...
...On the domestic front, Bowles casts his lot with those who believe the government has a vital part to play in our economic, social, and cultural lives...
...He carried even more in 1950, but not quite enough to win a second term as governor...
...These stalwart Stevenson supporters showed sound instinct when they turned to Bowles as a successor to Stevenson...
...He believes Kennedy has a better chance to win in November than any other Democratic aspirant...
...Up to the point of his attempt to wrap the sprawling bureaus of the state government into fifteen departments, Bowles had shown considerable talent in working with the legislature whose Senate was Democratic but whose house was Republican...
...They complained that if Bowles were accorded the prestige of reappointment by Eisenhower, he would return to Connecticut and become governor again...
...But, beyond that, it is also necessary and proper that government concern itself with adequate housing, better education, and expanded cultural facilities such as symphonies, operas, libraries, museums, historic buildings, recreation, and sports...
...Or, if that career comes to an end, he could afford to turn to his second love and become a college professor...
...But it was enough so that he can afford to provide well for his family while leading the satisfying life of public servant...
...When Governor Abraham Ribicoff's friends made Dodd the state convention's choice, Bowles cheerfully took on the assignment of Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in the strongly Republican second district...
...He relaxes easily...
...Our present consensus, he believes, emerged under Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...He has identified himself largely with the fields of civil rights, foreign affairs, and housing, but he is the author of no major legislation in any field...
...While Bowles values the insight he gained into the new consensus on foreign policy during his service in New Delhi, he is equally proud of the part he played in its domestic phase as governor of Connecticut...
...Audiences have long noticed that Bowles has a tendency to talk out of the right side of his mouth...
...In this year of 1960, the selections committee considering the qualifications of a Presidential possibility would want to know how much interest, knowledge, and experience he has in the field of foreign policy...
...Bowles possesses in considerable degree one of the major requisites of a successful politician...
...But he has not touched a golf club for ten years...
...It is a curious commentary on our times and on our system of choosing Presidential candidates that after brushing off the Bowles candidacy as hopelessly unrealistic, one finds himself asking, "Why couldn't Chester Bowles be the man to whom the convention would turn after rejecting those now in the running...
...Bowles himself takes it for ROBERT L. RIGGS is chief of the Washington bureau of the Louisville Courier-Journal...
...He was captain of the Yale golf team and for a time thereafter was rated one of the better players in the New York area...
...f The minimum wage was increased to one dollar at a time when the national government called for a minimum of only seventy-five cents and few states had minimum wage laws of their own...
...His own father, a most proper New England businessman, looked upon Woodrow Wilson as a dreadful person...
...The Indians liked him also because, with the start of their five-year plan, he was not only sympathetic toward their efforts, but he persuaded officials in Washington to be sympathetic...
...As for the issue of federal aid to education, he believes that "It has become clear that state and local revenues cannot meet the need...
...But his friends still feel that if Ribicoff and Benton had given him proper support Unitarian Bowles would have gone to the Senate instead of Catholic Dodd—even in Catholic Connecticut...
...After public schools in Massachusetts and the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, he received a bachelor of science degree from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School...
...This conflict goes beyond differences between America and the Soviet Union...
...They also have found, he says, that it is politically unwise to make a frontal assault upon what they call the welfare state...
...Despite the Federalist ancestor at Yale, despite the grandfather who guided the infant Republican Party, despite his Wilson-despising father, Bowles voted for Alfred E. Smith for President in 1928 in preference to Herbert Hoover...
...This interpretation places us at a supreme disadvantage...
...Pressed at a private dinner recently, Bowles, with what was described as rather convincing earnestness, insisted: "I have not been bitten by the Presidential bug...
...Local adjustments may be made, as in the Austrian peace treaty, and perhaps in regard to Berlin, where both sides come to see that their interests are best served by eliminating a specific source of conflict...
...And a successful adjustment of the major issues between the Atlantic nations and the Communist bloc appears unlikely under present conditions...
...But, so far as words go, he points out, even Nixon is as much committed to the new consensus as any Democrat...
...This brings our task into clear focus...
...Its first duty is to provide a climate in which a democratic society can voluntarily improve its quality...
...One other foray Bowles made about that time represents the only phase of his public life of which he is not proud...
...While Bowles professes faith in Kennedy's liberal attitude on domestic problems, it is in the field of foreign policy that he has the most confidence in the Massachusetts candidate...
...As a partisan, Bowles says the American people are going to have to decide whether Richard M. Nixon really wants to put domestic welfare programs and international assistance programs into effect, or is just talking for political profit...
...As a legislator, Bowles has a good liberal record, but his term as a freshman Congressman has provided him with few opportunities for distinguished service...
...I am working energetically for Senator Kennedy," he said, "but I also have a longing admiration for Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson...
...But he clings stubbornly to the doctrine that the surest road to political success is clean, effective, efficient, and liberal government...
...While he believes that the United States must have an adequate stockpile of missiles and nuclear weapons to deter attack, he insists that a tough defense which would do no more than maintain the present cold peace is not enough...
...There is grave danger that out of our frustration with the complex challenge which we face, we Americans will come to accept the present cold peace as the genuine article...
...When I called on Bowles for his own view of this phenomenon, he offered two explanations for the continuing talk about the possibility that he might be the nominee...
...Instead he has thrown himself wholeheartedly behind the candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy, for whom he is acting as foreign policy adviser...
...Senator in 1958...
...For a decade he was too busy becoming wealthy to give his energies to anything but business...
...Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of the loyalty Bowles inspires is the annual reunion of OPA officials held each Memorial Day...
...If that makes him a "do-gooder," he is willing to bear whatever amount of opprobrium and scorn might be involved in the term...
...Those who work for him are fiercely loyal, and Bowles reciprocates by taking a great interest in them...
...Cooper attributes Bowles' success chiefly to the fact that he had an understanding of India's desire to be neutral in the struggle between the great powers and did not insist, as did others like Senator William F. Knowland, that India "stand up and be counted...
...Certainly, if a political convention went about selecting a Presidential candidate the way a great university or a large business enterprise chooses a top executive, its selections committee would be impressed by the arguments put forward in Bowies' behalf...
...Bowles was persuaded not to insist upon one in 1958, chiefly because his friends thought that when the convention showdown came, Benton, who owed his political career to Bowles, would throw his delegates to him...
...As one Democratic colleague expressed it, "Chet has the vision of the larger goal, but he often seems to be impatient in the haggling over specifics...
...But F.D.R...
...Some fifty of those who served under Bowles in that organization come each year from every part of the country to spend a weekend at Bowles' home in Essex, Connecticut...
...Most of them are deeply religious and family-oriented by centuries of custom and upbringing, and consequently deplore our soaring statistics of crime, divorce, and juvenile delinquency...
...Bowles recalls now that it did not take him long to realize he had made a mistake...
...Chester Bowles was born fifty-nine years ago in Springfield, Massachusetts...
...That is why they accept the findings of a Lou Harris poll made in 1958 showing that had Bowles demanded that the Democratic Party hold a Senatorial primary, he would have won the nomination even in a race against Dodd, who is Catholic and who was later elected, or against Benton...
...Some of this uplift urge came to him through heredity...
...He thinks the signs point to the election of 1960 as one "likely to lead to a brilliant new period of political creativeness," and that the Democratic Party, as the traditionally liberal party, stands the better chance of becoming the instrument through which this creative era will be ushered in...
...Lacking this broader perspective, we shall fail to associate our vital long-term objectives with the objectives of our potential friends, even when their security and ours are in fact totally tied together...
...Barring some unexpected development within the Moscow-Peking bloc itself, this means that no settlement of the fundamental issues can be expected for some time...
...It is that optimism that has led him to believe that the United States is on the eve of another "new consensus...
...Bowles makes no secret of the fact that the desire to do good led him into politics and public affairs...
...Like Stevenson, Bowles has been divorced...
...They sleep all over the big Georgian house that looks down upon Essex Harbor just a few miles from the point where the Connecticut River enters Long Island Sound...
...Rather he concentrates on what Madison Avenue calls "the big picture...
...If the selections committee wanted proof that the man being considered had executive ability, its members could look at two different phases of the Bowles record...
...and filial piety extinguished...
...I am convinced that my effectiveness within the party is best served by discouraging attempts to organize in my behalf...
...The chance that lightning might bypass these front runners and strike me seems too remote to consider...
...His second explanation is that the hard core of deeply devoted supporters of Adlai E. Stevenson are convinced the party bosses will never let their idol have the nomination a third time, and they are lining up behind Bowles as a way of showing they would like to go into next fall's campaign behind a candidate espousing the same basic principles as the nominee in 1952 and 1956...
...He favored abolition and he pressed it upon the reluctant Abraham Lincoln and other "moderate" midwives of the new party...
...f Connecticut was one of the first states to eliminate segregation in the national guard and to establish penalties for discrimination in public housing...
...As a consequence of Jefferson's victory, he warned, "the ties of marriage will be severed...
...It was no place for anyone seeking popularity, especially when the shooting war stopped and the regulatory agencies were devoting their efforts to futile attempts to "hold the line" on prices and wages and the distribution of scarce materials...
...Rebuilding our central cities needs the spur of private enterprise," he says, "but there are many areas of action in that field which will require government help—municipal, state, and federal...
...The government has two responsibilities on the economic and social front, Bowles believes...
...It was the ear surgery that caused the Navy to reject him when he volunteered after the attack on Pearl Harbor...
...The present thaw in personal give-and-take at the summit may be extended...
...So many arguments have been offered to prove that none of the leading candidates can capture a majority of the delegates that increasingly Democrats have come to believe the convention will reject all of them and choose someone unscarred by pre-con-vention conflict...
...Sailing has become Bowles' chief hobby...
...Although Bowles was able to get only part of this recommended legislation enacted, much of what he sought has been approved under Governor Ribicoff...
...Hence, they are using the public fear of inflation as a weapon to combat these forward-looking programs...
...In the field of civil rights, Bowles has expressed firm views on how a President should act in the face of continuing crises...
...But Benton held onto his delegates and the nomination went to Dodd...
...It is Bowles' contention that the Administration's concern about inflation is a politically devious attack upon government programs for housing, aid to education, for development of water resources, and projects for urban renewal...
...He holds that it is foolish to believe that we have no control over certain "immutable" economic laws...
...Later he became an advertising copywriter, working under the supervision of William Benton, who joined Bowles in establishing their own agency four years later...
...He had made the mistake of traveling too fast...
...On the question of housing, Bowles finds that what is needed is "more comprehensive and bolder approaches, lower interest rates, lower down payments...
...Bowles insists that the Administration which takes office in 1961 must do more for the cause of peace than merely continue a nuclear stalemate with Russia...
...Bowles claims that, on a per capita basis, this is the largest housing program any state has undertaken...
...Bowles carried enough precincts in the Republican state of Connecticut to be elected governor in 1948...
...For anything less than a comprehensive plan will prove to be inadequate...
...Grandfather Samuel Bowles, in turn, was quite different from another of Chester Bowies' ancestors—the ardent Federalist president of Yale, Timothy Dwight—who moaned in 1801 that the election of Thomas Jefferson meant that the nation would be governed henceforth by "blockheads and knaves...
...He concedes that individual House members from some districts may be able to make some political profit out of the fact that a dam was refused for their area and approved for a country in Asia...
...The convention system prevails in Connecticut, but any candidate who has twenty per cent of the delegates can demand a primary...
...But grandfather Samuel Bowles, famed editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, was one of those founders of the Republican Party who had no patience with the middle-of-the-road approach to the issue of slavery...
...The business in which he made his money was the advertising agency of Benton and Bowles which he organized with William Benton in the year of the historic stock market crash...
...Despite his lack of illusions about winning the nomination, he would like '.o have Connecticut's delegates put nis name forward should the time come that it is clearly futile to continue voting for Kennedy...
...The instincts of an aggressive Madison Avenue huckster and a thoughtful political scientist are strangely mixed in Bowles...
...vetoed that plan, insisting that he remain with OPA...
...In 1958 he unquestionably could have been nominated for the Senate in place of Thomas J. Dodd had his old friend and former business partner, William Benton, not been so sure the prize would fall into his own lap...
...There is need to rebuild the urban transportation systems as well as to coordinate the highway systems which reach the urban centers...
...f The ceiling on old-age assistance was removed and the state's welfare program was broadened to enable it to meet some of the inadequacies of the federal social security program...
...Moreover, Bowles has told friends, he would have handled the Little Rock situation by taking a Negro child by the hand through the howling segregationists...
...There never was a more trying executive post than the one Bowles stepped into during the war as head of the vast empire ruled by the Office of Price Administration...
...But some Washington commentators find food for thought in the fact that he embarked on an extensive program of speeches and radio television appearances during the months before the convention, and that in some of them he developed his concept of the Presidency...
...Representative Chester Bowles of Connecticut shares the convictiop of the politically sophisticated that he doesn't have a chance to win the nomination, but few political commentators fail to note his dark horse image when they consult their crystal balls...
...This has increased Bowles' loyalty to the governor despite the feeling of some of Bowles' friends that Ribicoff should have helped him become U.S...
...Anyone who enjoys public life as much as Bowles does has to have a bouncy optimism not only about his own part in political affairs but also in the inherent good judgment of the people who cast the ballots...
...We must refresh our impulses for public creative action, which, since the days of the Marshall Plan and Point Four, have generally fallen into disuse," Bowles argues...
...He feels he made the error by following, without thinking, what had been for two decades the liberal line about "merchants of death," and "the road to war...
...That was a year in which Democrats fell all over the country, yet Senator Brian MacMahon and Senator Benton won in Connecticut while Governor Bowles was losing by a bare 15,000 votes...
...Bowles is convinced that the American people have accepted so completely what he likes to call the consensus of liberalism on domestic questions and cooperation abroad that they are no longer political issues on a national scale...
...Bowles effectively contended that the preamble should be changed from the merely negative objective of resistance to Communism to an affirmative assertion of America's "abiding interest in assisting the efforts of the people of the world to realize their aspirations for improving living standards, for education, for governments of their own choosing, and for dignity and respect as individual human beings...
...On the eve of the 1960 Presidential campaign, Bowles has warned the Democratic Party that it is flirting with defeat if it makes a record against foreign economic assistance...
...We must, he contends, seek a genuine peace, and in that seeking we must establish economic conditions on a global scale which eventually will free all people from poverty, illiteracy, and ill health...
...Still, he has shown a great capacity for application and for mastering a subject...
...None has ever made such a demand...
...Kennedy's supporters continue to hope that the enthusiasm Bowles has shown for their candidate may yet thaw the Eleanor Roosevelt wing of Stevenson admirers who have been cool to the Kennedy candidacy...
...He broke into the field as a delegate to the 1940 Chicago Democratic convention which gave Roosevelt his thirdjterm nomination...
...Many American leaders, in and out of government, view the cold war as a struggle between the American and Russian ways of life, one of which all nations sooner or later must choose...
...But just as he believes a national referendum in 1945 would have produced a vote of confidence in the much maligned OPA program, he is convinced today that the frequently criticized foreign assistance program has the support of a majority of the American people...
...Connecticut's Governor Robert A. Hurley put him in charge of the state's OPA organization...
...Bowles feels his defeat was brought about in part by his softness toward Republicans during the campaign because he was trying to get the GOP-dominated house of the legislature to help him reorganize the government...
...There was a time when he was proficient in the Presidential sport of golf...
...OPA may not be the ideal take-off point for a Presidential candidacy, but Bowles has had executive experience in a more desirable post—one which many are convinced is the best training ground for the White House...
...The Eisenhower Administration has not hesitated to influence the operation of economic law, Bowles points out, contending that its restrictive policies have kept our national economy from expanding at an adequate rate during the past seven years...
...It was Bowles' intention to stay only briefly in Washington, then go back to Connecticut to run for governor in 1944...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
