THE STRUGGLE FOR MASSACHUSETTS

...The Kennedy corps was a mixed bag of the old and the new among politicians...

...Several White House staff members, operating from both Washington and Boston, are directing the campaign for Ted Kennedy, and there is some evidence that pressure is being exerted from Washington on several convention delegates...

...The other candidates are watching Hughes carefully, not because they are worried about his winning but because they need the votes that he seems likely to get...

...Hughes is a professor of history at Harvard, and director of the interdepartmental program in history and literature...

...He worries about American efforts to pull neutrals into our camp...

...He is running with unusual qualifications, of which the primary one is his relationship to the President, who has powerful influence over many of the convention delegates...

...Taking them alphabetically, the first is Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest brother of the President, and just barely old enough to qualify for the Senate post...

...This, in turn, keeps the citizenry aroused, and the politicians are under increasing pressure to clean up or get out—or both...

...Speaker McCormack is an old, traditional Massachusetts politician, and he has never had anything kind to say about the political New Look as interpreted by Kennedy...

...he wants recognition of existing political states and boundary lines (including Cuba...

...How much of a fight remains uncertain...

...Technically, Hughes is not yet a bona fide candidate...

...Seemingly to his surprise, he has found that Bay State women are ready and eager to vote for him, and he has concluded that "for deep biological reasons, the women are simply more conscious of the questions of peace and war, and the survival of humanity...

...He feels that our enemy today is not Communism but war itself, and he feels that the United States and the Soviet Union, by being mutually committed to avoiding war, have many areas of common interest which ought to be exploited...

...After all," he said in an interview for Harvard's Cambridge 38 magazine, "if we're no longer in existence five or ten years from now, there's no point talking about domestic reform...

...As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he will have some ideas on civil rights, and they will be liberal...

...to maintain the support of influential local politicians, he will have to make sure that they benefit more from his election than they would have from Ted Kennedy's...

...not so many are afraid of John McCormack...

...the women know better...

...Despite the President's statement to the effect that he would not give his brother any active help, the facts are to the contrary...

...But he is running in a Democratic state (about fifty-five per cent of the state's population is Catholic, and Massachusetts Catholics have always voted Democratic en masse), and he will have to be at least as popular as his father used to be if he is going to win...

...after they are removed from office...

...Probably Kennedy and Lodge will follow suit...

...A third reason that the old pols are in trouble is that the composition of the electorate is changing—slowly and with subtlety, but changing nevertheless...

...The predictable net result is that he will go over in November with a resounding thud...

...An irreverent Hughes supporter has been pointing out that "we've got a better slogan than Kennedy or McCormack or Lodge...

...In any case, the old-timers have begun to lose ground recently, for a variety of reasons...

...Since it is a safe bet that most of the delegates have been privately committed for some time, the majority of those who said "no comment" to the Globe are most likely McCormack supporters...

...Speaker McCormack was not simply putting on a good show for his Catholic constituents in insisting that parochial schools should benefit along with public schools, and when President Kennedy stuck to his position that parochial school aid is un-Constitutional he did not do so simply for political reasons...

...If most of them are women, this is no disadvantage to him...

...Furthermore, as a Leftist he will draw fire from every conservative in a state not noted for its liberalism...

...President Kennedy, on the other hand, needs a victory for his brother to demonstrate that he reigns supreme in Massachusetts...

...It is true that there are plenty of the old type politicians around, hanging on grimly in those Boston wards where they can still muster support...

...He thinks he might get one vote out of every ten, and he has said that this proportion would satisfy him...

...This may not be an easy job, although one McCormack delegate thinks he is speaking for , many others when he says, "Two Kennedys are enough...

...Laos wasn't so badly off," he insists, "until we began moving it to the Right...

...He also claims to have plans for improving the country's educational program, but he has not indicated what his proposals will be, beyond siding with President Kennedy on the aid-to-parochial-schools controversy...

...In any case there is no doubt that Ted Kennedy's political views, whether coincidentally or not, will parallel the President's...

...Ted hasn't...

...The Kennedy campaigns, especially in 1952, broke almost all the accepted rules...

...While the state's attention was focused on the early stages of the McCormack-Kennedy rivalry—and as both candidates were touring Ireland, Italy, and Israel—another candidate appeared, unaffiliated with any party and with a campaign plan all his own...

...Yet they do not dismiss him out of hand, the way he feared they would...

...The result is that McCormack and Kennedy are pitted against each other both in Massachusetts and in Washington...

...Another reason for the old-timers' decline is the current spate of scandals which has been rocking Massachusetts on an almost daily basis for three or four years...

...The professionals have no such delusions...

...in his first press conference, he revealed, in response to a question, that he is an agnostic (among the startled reporters who attended the conference, one voice commented audibly, "Well, that's the ball game...

...The only requirement is that he file a petition of 2,500 names, of which not more than 500 can be from one county...

...You've got to admit that 'Lose with Hughes' is' catchy...

...It is only in the areas of foreign policy and disarmament that he has yet begun to deal in specifics...

...He was apparently unconcerned with the rules and regulations of a Massachusetts campaign...

...It is not enough to tell the women that the world is not in danger...

...It will not do to tell them that the subject they are fighting over-corruption—is more important than foreign policy...

...His father was a relaxed, if platitudinous, speaker who left Republican matrons breathing heavily when he flashed his barn-door grin...

...If McCormack is elected, he will go to Washington as a relatively liberal Democratic Senator but not as one inclined to support President Kennedy automatically...

...they all agree that the race between Lodge and the Democratic candidate will be close, and Hughes's votes might make the difference, even "if he gets less than one out of every ten...

...When he was an undergraduate at Harvard, he was expelled for having another student take an exam for him (Harvard has no honor system, but the authorities felt that the young Kennedy was misinterpreting the definition of a liberal education...

...George Lodge has never run in an election before, but he has a good record of service with the government in appointed positions, notably as Assistant Secretary of Labor...

...But there is some doubt that they would still be around if it were not for the state's antiquated constitution and for its myriad laws, still on the books, which permit all sorts of political anomalies—such as the placing of defeated legislators in state jobs which they are entitled to hold for life, and from which they cannot be ousted...

...It was at that time that James Michael Curley, the famous boss of Boston, was imprisoned for mail fraud...

...The film showed Boston policemen placing bets...

...He has a varied background which includes service in the wartime office of Strategic Services, a tour of duty as chief of the State Department's Division of Research for Europe, and a brief fling with the Progressive Party in 1948, when he supported Henry Wallace for President...

...and the man elected to occupy President Kennedy's former Senate seat, which has been filled in the interim by Benjamin Smith, a personal friend of the President who will not be a candidate, will be some indication of just how far the political transition in Massachusetts has advanced...

...Again and again, some woman has called me up or come and talked to me, and said, 'I agree with you...

...he really wants to win, and he would like to believe that he could...

...But that didn't solve the problem...

...and Hughes will lose...

...The candidate who is nominated in June at the convention has a greater chance of ultimate election in November, because the convention delegates generally reflect the voting trends of the areas they represent, but the candidate who does not get the nomination can still make another bid in the September primary...

...Nor will he be free of campaign commitments...

...women vote in greater numbers than men...

...he is not yet a Sam Rayburn...

...And then, loo, he is advocating disarmament in a state whose economy depends largely upon armament...

...So far only McCormack has shown any indication of working out a scheme to get votes away from Hughes...

...Perhaps it is this refreshing freedom from hypocrisy that makes Stuart Hughes's campaign worth watching...

...If he accumulates the required number of names, and if they are not disqualified because of alleged spelling errors or inexact addresses (the normal method of disqualifying a petition), he will be able to wage a full-scale campaign, and he intends to do so...

...Hughes has taken the big step and is talking to the electorate of serious world problems, in articulate, intellectual terms...

...Most of these companies hire only people with technical skills...

...they're mothers of children, and humanity must be saved...

...He seems colorless...

...It is conceivable that he could pull a substantial number of liberals and middle-of-the-roaders over to his camp...

...The women are, in fact, frequently more shrewd politically than their husbands, because they have more free time to spend on the subject...

...in the past, they were covered over by inconsequential grand jury investigators, but Boston's unimaginative press finally discovered that good scandal-reporting means circulation, with the result that the city's papers are outdoing each other in performing their civic functions...

...I back the President, and I back Bobby, but they've worked to get where they are...

...George Lodge is a nervous, serious speaker who rocks back and forth on his toes, rarely smiles, and has yet to learn how to time his jokes and anecdotes...

...It is...

...If Edward McCormack wins the nomination, John McCormack will record it as personal testimony to his strength in Massachusetts as against the President's, and he will be more readily inclined to balk at the Administration's efforts to move bills smoothly through his House, because he will be secure in the knowledge that the boys at home are with him...

...He wants the United States to withdraw support of dictators, and to support unaligned nations...

...The state's economy now rests to a considerable degree with technological industries, many of them created by the arms race...

...Then he announced that he would not spend time campaigning against corruption because a Senator would not have time to deal with local corruption...

...he is being taken seriously...

...The President and the Speaker undoubtedly have a certain respect for each other...

...He is not likely to let his brother be defeated without a fight...

...a McCormack man has cheerfully said of Hughes, "When a candidate has his head in the clouds, it's hard for him to see the grass-roots...

...When he speaks, he is obviously sincere, and obviously naive politically, which women find appealing...

...A friend of the Speaker says that McCormack is still bitter and feels that Kennedy has betrayed his religion...

...As the campaign wears on over the summer, it seems probable that H. Stuart Hughes will have to talk about domestic issues to some extent, but it is not vet clear just what he will say...

...It has long been the bastion of the cigar-smoking Irish politician of the type immortalized in Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, which was inspired largely by the flamboyant James Curley, long-time mayor of Boston...

...It seems significant that, in the home state of the John Birch Society, none of the candidates can be called conservative...

...my husband doesn't.' I really think they have this visceral, gut feeling...

...For all of these reasons, the Senatorial race now under way in Massachusetts is attracting much more than local interest...

...Hughes is a serious individual...

...His political position is not entirely clear, partly because it is in the process of being created for him by his campaign managers, some of whom came from Washington to help out...

...he wants renunciation of plans to put the population underground in fallout shelters...

...but he may go for McCormack in the end, because, like most thoughtful politicians in Massachusetts, he is worried about Ted Kennedy's lack of qualifications...

...He has already made some tentative remarks about disarmament being a good thing, if only because of "the limitation inherent in any policy based solely on military strength...

...They are fast becoming an anachronism, and they know it...

...There are many delegates who are afraid to risk the wrath of the President by making it known that they are not going to support his brother...

...These new voters have no sympathy for the old pols, and the old pols are hard put to win them over...

...George Cabot Lodge is tall, young, and handsome, all good attributes for a candidate, but not necessarily the decisive ones, since in 1952 his father was tall, young enough, and handsome...

...he wants an end to testing...

...there are likely to be skeletons in both family closets that will inhibit the candidates and their relatives from slinging too much mud...

...That seems unlikely...

...It is clear that domestic issues are not of great interest to him, and he is unwilling to compromise his campaign by pretending they are...

...the old politicians scoffed, and they are still in Boston...

...Prior to that, he lived in Virginia, returning in 1958 and 1960 to vote for his brother, but otherwise avoiding Massachusetts as though it didn't exist...

...In many cases those in control are the same long-entrenched politicians who missed the boat when Kennedy set sail...

...Representative Kennedy was alone among his Massachusetts cohorts in refusing to sign...

...A victory would weaken Speaker Mc-Cormack's influence in the House, and it would make it easier for the President to win passage for more of his legislation...

...There are many roots to their rivalry, but the big split took place over the question of Federal aid to education...

...but it is a kindness to say that their relationship somehow lacks warmth...

...Ultimately at the back of my campaign lurks this question: Does the human race go on, or not...

...If only somebody could break through the fog of misunderstanding," he has said wistfully, "maybe we could get somewhere...

...He is firmly entrenched anyway, but he can always use more support...

...subsequently there was a shake-up of the police force...

...Representative McCormack circulated a petition to have him released...

...His ideas are radical, but he presents them articulately...

...and it helps to be colorful in Massachusetts...

...Each has rather interesting connections in Washington...

...Kennedy campaign headquarters on Tremont Street in Boston would neither admit nor deny the charge, but the candidate's press secretary, Ed Moran, a local reporter on leave from the Boston Herald-Traveler, was visibly uncomfortable about it...

...he is planning a series of foreign policy statements which will plant him firmly in the liberal camp...

...When CBS filmed its documentary, "Biography of a Bookie Joint," in Boston, the natives became restless and have stayed that way ever since...

...Yet the President's response has been conspicuous for its absence—perhaps, to use an old Eisenhower expression, because he doesn't want to get down in the gutter with a bunch of rather unsavory legislators, of whom a few used to be bookies themselves...

...they are too close to the Soviet Union to survive a first strike, so they have to be considered as first-strike bases themselves...

...The prediction, however, could be wrong...

...The reformers have lost faith in John F. Kennedy, and this is reflected in their animosity toward his brother...

...The Republican contender will be George Cabot Lodge, the son of Henry Cabot Lodge...

...Route 128 around Boston is known as the Golden Belt because it has attracted many industries producing all sorts of sophisticated missile components...

...as an independent, he must have 72,000 signatures on a petition to qualify...

...it would be an indication of substantial concern among the electorate for the same things he is concerned about...

...The unskilled worker has been going elsewhere, taking his relative political ignorance with him...

...Along this line, he advocates removal of American missile bases in Turkey and Italy, since they "are only there as unnecessary provocation...

...but they are also convinced that time has not yet run out for them...

...Others who still practice law are not at all averse to representing the underworld in court...

...The young generation went on to Washington, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of the professionals left behind...

...they know better...

...One is that the Kennedy machine of 1952, 1958, and 1960 opened the eyes of the local politicians and made them aware of the strategic value of a formal education...

...TJte Boston Globe recently polled the delegates to the convention and found that the two candidates were evenly matched, with most of the delegates uncommitted to either...

...They are under heavy fire, and there is every reason to believe that many of them will not survive—especially if the state constitution is revised to prevent them from being given lifelong positions THOMAS N. BETHELL is assistant editor of the Beacon Press in Boston...

...in Washington, he would be absorbed with national issues, and principally with the issue of survival...

...Replacing him is a college-educated electorate which discriminates more carefully and more intelligently between candidates, and which is getting fed up with the state's desperate economic and political problems...

...genuinely uncommitted leans toward Ted Kennedy because he thinks that the President needs all the support he can get in the Senate...

...The gulf between the two men is wide now and likely to become wider...

...In addition, the young would-be reformers have been clamoring for support from Washington, arguing that it would be in President Kennedy's best interests to use his vast prestige in Massachusetts as a lever with which to expedite change...

...The women supporting Hughes are growing in number, and the other candidates are not sure what to do to win votes away from him...

...But the more campaigning he does, the more obvious it is that he has caught election fever...

...The increasing number of bright young men departing from Washington to help Ted Kennedy testifies to the President's degree of involvement in this election...

...It is a question which the other candidates have not been concerned with...

...Ted Kennedy has been an absentee citizen most of his life, while McCormack has been trying with some success to clean things up...

...He wants a firm commitment from the United States never to use nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis...

...The bookmaking racket in Massachusetts —although illegal since Puritan times —has been estimated to absorb two billion dollars annually...

...Ted Kennedy has not yet managed to win any significant support from the state's younger politicians, who are unhappy about the state's image as portrayed to the nation in "Biography of a Bookie Joint...

...No longer is Massachusetts a state of shoemakers, farmers, fishermen, textile workers, clerks, and largely unskilled factory hands...

...Attorney General McCormack has spent most of his three terms prosecuting the ugly characters who have turned up in one scandal or another, but in his spare time he has managed to make a reputation for himself as much more of a liberal than his uncle...

...There have been many other scandals...

...Some of his ardent supporters even insist that he will win in an explosion of popular reaction against both Democrats and Republicans...

...He spent much of his time abroad during that time and is known as a liberal Republican with international interests...

...Ted Kennedy's entire past public service consists of one year spent as an assistant district attorney in Boston, for which he received a salary of $1, which is a way of saying the post was created for him...

...They join organizations and attend lectures, and when they are exposed to Hughes, they react favorably...

...Ted Kennedy is opposed by Edward J. McCormack, Jr., the state's young attorney general, and the nephew of John McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is not counted among the ranks of Kennedy cronies...

...the old ones did most of the legwork, and the young buttondown thinkers sat behind desks, planning first the capture of Henry Cabot Lodge's Senate seat and then the defeat of Richard Nixon for the Presidency...

...The two Democratic candidates are of greater interest, if only because one of them is almost sure to be the next Senator, and because it is by no means certain which of them will be nominated at the June convention...

...and he is handicapped by running without the party's valuable endorsement...

...Another delegate who is...

...Hughes has tapped a source of support which may not be as readily available to the other candidates: women...

...At least two have reported that they were threatened with income-tax audits if they refused to vote for Kennedy...

...Kennedy was subsequently reinstated and received his degree...

...He relies less on platitudes than any of the other candidates, and he is becoming more effective at handling the hecklers he invariably encounters...

...Curley was released anyway, in due course, but McCormack is not likely to have forgotten the young Kennedy's affront to him...

...That so many of the voters are responding affirmatively is ample indication that Hughes has stumbled on a political trend of great future importance...

...Furthermore it was already in existence before the question of aid to parochial schools ever came up...

...He became disturbed at the number of Communists involved in the Wallace campaign and withdrew active support without making a public statement about it, so it seems likely that his past political affiliations will work to his disadvantage...

...soon it was disclosed that the emergency telephone in the governor's State House elevator was being used to make book—not by the governor, presumably, but by various of the elected officials and civil servants who have access to the elevator...

...He believes that the country is headed toward a nuclear war, and this is why he is putting the emphasis in his campaign on foreign policy...

...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Kennedy-McCormack rivalry lies beneath the surface, and not in Massachusetts but in Washington...

...Nevertheless, his uncle's connections all over the state —and they are legion—will not hurt the attorney general's campaign...

...Much of the trouble stems from the firmly established custom of betting on the horses and dogs...

...The problems of Massachusetts are shared by a number of other states, in varying degree...

...Primarily, however, he will lose because he is several years ahead of his time, not because his political stance is untenable1...

...It may be that the bad blood between them goes back all the way to 1947, when Kennedy was a freshman Representative...

...When the point comes at which he finds himself convinced that victory is remotely possible, he may well become an effective candidate...