THE QUIET CAMPAIGN

...Briefing newsmen on his concept of the campaign, he said his two greatest difficulties are that the Republicans are a minority party and that Kennedy is more of a glamor boy than he is...

...every other Democrat I know is a little uneasy about Kennedy...

...Wherever in the world peoples are bent on independence and a better life, the Soviets appear with their technicians, educators, and administrators...

...While...

...Averell Harriman came out calling for the earmarking of a couple of billion more for specific military purposes as a way of "jarring" Khrushchev...

...His greatest need, Nixon confided to the correspondents, "is a real live issue that has not yet been developed...

...The State Department, shooting from the hip, dismissed the idea as "specious, cynical, and frivolous...

...Why...

...A study of the two platforms reveals that the Republican document is somewhat shriller than the Democratic planks and more deeply rooted in military emphasis, but not greatly different on most fundamentals...

...During the month following the conventions the Soviet bloc came forward with two proposals: One—Russia's Premier Khrushchev suggested turning the next session of the United Nations Assembly, this fall, into a summit meeting on disarmament and other major issues...

...The statesmanlike approach, it seems to us, would have been to agree to examine and discuss both proposals to determine if they offered genuine hope for relaxation of tensions...

...Wandering through the wheat and corn country of the Middle West, Rowland Evans, Jr., reported back to the New York Herald Tribune that he found "significant signs in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin that many voters are not happy with either of the two Presidential candidates...

...They find themselves waking fretfully to the clamor of the now not so distant drums of a world in revolution...

...Both parties have solemnly affirmed that the problems of foreign policy overshadow all others, but neither has articulated anything that resembles a basic break with the inflexible pattern of cold war strategy that has dominated our approach to world affairs in recent years...

...But we couldn't be sure...

...Finally, the prevalence of a feeling of non-involvement among so many voters stems in part from the absence, thus far, of sharp, easily identifiable issues that dramatically divide the candidates and their parties...

...That is why he has sought skillfully, and not without some success, to blur the differences between the two parties by dipping some of the Republican platform planks in the language of liberalism...

...Just about every politician who called on Kennedy at Hyannis Port emerged demanding greater arms expenditures...

...In the fields of national economic growth, aid to education, and social welfare, the Republicans edged ever so slightly toward a more liberal stance, but the overall result was the adoption of planks which lack both the progressive content and the militant approach of the Democratic platform...

...Chester Bowles appeared on the Kennedy doorstep announcing that "the overriding problem" was what could be done immediately to fill the military gap...

...Where differences do exist, the Democratic version, in our judgment, is invariably superior to the Republican concept...

...The Vice President's silence is understandable...

...Although both agree that the quest for peace is the greatest challenge that confronts the next Administration, neither Kennedy nor Nixon had a word to say when the State Department summarily rejected both proposals...

...The State Department's response again was automatic: "A meaningless propaganda gesture...

...The clearest and timeliest expression of the basic Soviet approach turned up recently in a series of articles from Cuba written by Tad Szulc for the New York Times...

...It is in this area that the voters will have the most clear-cut choice on November 8. The division, however, is far less apparent on the great issues of foreign policy...

...Another piece of the answer, we think, is to be found in the mood of America...

...No bombs, no rockets, not even an old-fashioned blockbuster...

...Elsewhere on the domestic front, however, Nixon and his party emerged from the Chicago convention with little or nothing to attract the independent liberal...

...They had been deporting themselves much like spectators who had come to appraise the style and skill of two crack tennis professionals rather than like the cheering fans who shout themselves hoarse at high school and college football games...

...Responding to a massive shove forward from New York's Governor Rockefeller, the Vice President succeeded in wringing a plank from the platform committee that was respectable enough to earn an approving response from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and give him a fighting chance in the sometimes decisive Negro precincts of New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles...

...Nixon's most significant success in this venture came in the field of civil rights...

...How can adding a couple of billion dollars of firepower unsnarl the mess in Cuban-American relations, or cope with the crisis in the Congo, or regain our stature in Japan, or bring Laos back to the fold...

...Eric Sevareid, the distinguished radio and television commentator now turned newspaper columnist, found much the same mood in the East...

...It is not true, as Nixon sought to suggest, that there are no significant differences between his record and Kennedy's or that there are no major issues dividing Democrats and Republicans...

...The coming of a Presidential campaign without Papa and his euphoric platitudes symbolizes for many Americans the end of a long vacation from reality...

...The crude insults hurled at us by the Kremlin divert the Kennedys and the Nixons from the main show, which is the silken response of the Soviets to the hunger and hopes of the underprivileged peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...Two—Communist China's Premier Chou En-lai departed from the pattern of harsh intransigence which has characterized his country's approach to the West for so long by proposing a peace treaty with the United States and other nations that would create a zone free of nuclear weapons in Asia and the Western Pacific...

...I do not think there is any doubt that the vigor which Mr...

...This impression is not unique with us...

...Most people we know, including those whose minds are made up, were watching the contest with considerable interest but without a compelling sense of identification with either candidate...

...We earnestly hope he chooses the former road...

...They work with native nationalists, encouraging them in their quest for freedom and a higher standard of living...

...They leave their missiles at home, and for the time being, their Communist ideology as well...

...But Senator Kennedy is now the leader of the opposition...

...The Social Popular Party, the Communist party in Cuba, has made no effort to preach Communist doctrine among Cubans, preferring to gain quiet acceptance and respectability while moving its members and sympathizers into important positions...

...Given the record of recent utterances in Moscow and Peking, there were ample grounds to doubt the sin-* cerity of the new overtures from the Soviet bloc and to suspect that either or both were mined with booby-traps...

...The absurdity of the question is its answer, but Kennedy and Nixon, while paying lip-service to the need to appreciate and respond to the revolutionary aspirations of most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, pour most of their fervor, such as it is, into the quarrel over which of the two candidates would most appreciate and respond to the insatiable demands of the Pentagon...

...Khrushchev has displayed around the world," he said, "is due to his conviction that the balance of power is shifting to the Sino-Soviet bloc...

...Khrushchev has displayed around the world," but both fail to realize that it is his vigor in responding to worldwide revolutionary thrust and not the violence of military power that shifts the balance to the Soviet bloc, if shift it has...

...Will "a couple of billion more" for the Pentagon close this "weapons gap...

...Kennedy—and Nixon, too—is rattled by "the vigor which Mr...

...What accounts for this wave of massive non-enthusiasm...

...Both parties again reject recognition of Communist China and her admission to the United Nations, but the Democrats "welcome evidence of a genuine desire of the Chinese Communists for a new relationship," while the Republicans do not seem to consider this within the realm of reason...

...just something called "identification with social revolution"—which baffles the boys in the Pentagon because they can't find it in their catalogue of weapons...

...The country has been flooded with statements by politicians in both camps bidding up the budget for ¦ armaments...

...Whatever else they may think of Vice President .Nixon and Senator Kennedy, most Americans see both as men who are cool and calculating...

...So far," he wrote, "all that Nixon and Kennedy have received from the American people is what Damon Runyon used to call the 'medium hello.' Members of both parties have clapped on command, but in his heart every other Republican I know is a little uneasy aout Nixon...

...Nixon is painfully aware that his cause is hopeless unless he can attract a respectable proportion of the independent vote...

...And their host, Senator Kennedy, called for an expanded military establishment...

...Our principal quarrel with the position of both parties is their obsessive reliance on an ever greater accumulation of military power at a time when the dominant issues are political, economic, social, and moral...

...How do you cope with this sort of thing...

...On the return flight from his campaign tour of Hawaii, Nixon returned to the same theme...

...That is why, in his campaigning thus far, he has been on his good behavior, eschewing the low road which was his beat for so long...

...In a report that was bitterly anti-Castro and anti-Communist, Szulc made this revealing observation: "Communism has achieved its success in Cuba because it identified itself with the social revolution rather than expecting the revolution to become identified with it...

...The platforms of both parties include solemn commitments to negotiate with the Soviet bloc...

...The answer is not easy to come by...

...Nixon & Company were assuring the nation of a military budget "second to none," Kennedy and his camp were raising the ante by two to three billion dollars...

...In 1952, for example, 52 per cent of those polled said they had given "much thought to the election for President" as contrasted with 40 per cent at the same time in 1960...

...Quite a large percentage of voters, while expressing a preference between Nixon and Kennedy, seemed cool toward both...

...his silence raises the grave question whether he is prepared to challenge the Republicans on the basic essentials of foreign policy and present affirmative alternatives to the rigidly negative course currently being pursued, or whether he will content himself with merely out-bidding his opponent in the realm of military spending...

...We suspect that part of it lies in the character of the candidates themselves—most of all absence of the kind of contagious passion and deep commitment that kindle fervor and endow a crusade with the indispensable ingredient of flaming purpose...

...nothing was expected of him, for he is part of the team that made the decisions to rebuff the Communist overtures...

...I have gone over Senator Kennedy's record and my own," said Nixon in Los Angeles recently, "and I find a great deal of similarity...

...We shall seek to shift the emphasis of our cooperation from military aid to economic cooperation...

...Thus, both parties promise to adhere to existing treaty obligations, but the Republicans cling stubbornly to the status quo while the Democrats promise to "review our system of pacts and alliances in a world of change...

...Men of measured merriment, Sevareid quoted Thomas Wolfe, and of measured tears...

...It is true, however, that the significant differences—for example, "The Big Issue" analyzed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., on Page 9 of this issue of The Progressive—have not been presented to the country in terms that are forceful and graphic enough to provide the electorate with the conviction that it is being offered a meaningful choice...

...That choice might do much to lift the cloud of disengagement that hangs over the campaign...

...Senator Stuart Symington gravely urged the need of at least "a couple of billions more...

...How can the expenditure of a couple of billion dollars more for military hardware redress the balance when the Kremlin achieves its most spectacular gains by the skillful use of men, money, and propaganda in the underdeveloped countries...

...Instead, we slammed the door, and the noise could be heard around the world...

...The Gallup Poll summed it up for the whole country when it reported in mid-August that "interest in this year's political contest is below that recorded at a comparable point in 1952 and 1956...

...Both parties support the continuance of foreign aid, but the Democrats place much greater emphasis on economic aid...

...As a nation, we have spent much of the last seven and a half years dozing by the barbecue grill in the backyard while Papa Eisenhower waved reassuringly from the golf course...

...They play for the long-run dividend that they will be remembered and rewarded in strategic ways when the newly independent nation struggles to its feet...