MCCARTHY AND KENNEDY: A STUDY IN STYLES

...Cries of recognition go up, and then, when the candidate finally comes into view •—shy, waving his hand just slightly, grinning boyishly—there is bedlam...

...McCarthy's volunteer organization is remarkably efficient and effective, considering its inexperience and its lack of access to regular Party channels...

...He can be annoyed, as he was by Kennedy's precipitous entry into the Democratic race...

...When there is illiteracy and starvation among small children in Mississippi, that is indecent...

...His New Hampshire vote, he said, revealed that the people there wanted to test "whether or not the process of American politics had somehow become bogged down and frozen and could not be used for a forum or an instrument within which the judgment of the people of this country could be tested...

...An offer is when you say I'll meet you at a specific place at a specific time," he said...

...Like Kennedy, McCarthy draws best at colleges and universities, and the students frequently inject hoopla into the affair whether it pleases McCarthy or not...

...If some in the throng jump and scream more than others, the audience generally projects an atmosphere of happiness, and little hostility is openly expressed...

...On the campuses, Kennedy seems to evaluate the intellect of his audiences at a more lofty level...

...Which of them might have built a bridge...

...As a successful politician, McCarthy can spot a blunder by his opposition and capitalize on it—as in New Hampshire, when the local Johnson forces launched their "cheering in the streets of Hanoi" smears against him...

...McCarthy's response was to make some perfunctory remarks and then start to move on...

...There are crowds, and then there are Kennedy crowds, and those who minimize the political significance of the phenomenon by suggesting only teenagers come to see him are wrong...

...But the manner and the voice and the words evoke memories of those less trying days in 1960 when John F. Kennedy rode a tiny margin to the Presidency...

...But Kennedy's professional and polished machine has experience, money, and the smell of success about it—always magnets that attract still more competent people and more money...

...Which of them might have played in a World Series...

...There is a spirit of well-being in the faces that light up in anticipation of his presence, and remain aglow after he has passed...

...He declined to answer either at any length, and left at once for the next stop...

...While he is solicitous of the children's safety, he plunges into the mob scene anyway...

...At the University of Washington in Seattle, he threw the matter of student deferments into the teeth of his young listeners...

...He seems to be faintly disquieted by excessive demonstrations of emotion of any kind, and seldom does he attempt to arouse them...

...If he is in the midst of the welcoming throng, a cordon of protectors surrounds him, warding off his enthusiastic admirers...

...I would even be in favor of having Secretary of State Rusk go to Geneva and wait there...

...He told a group at Superior a few days before the Wisconsin primary that "out in the Midwest we feel we don't have to stir them up...

...Kennedy dropped this emotional approach after newsmen wrote critical stories...

...He took two—both general inquiries about his Vietnam position...

...But the response to Kennedy in his early cross-country soundings indicates that the yearning for "Camelot Again"—maybe not the way it was, but the way in retrospect it seemed to be —probably will be too strong even for a full-flowering McCarthy "crusade...

...At San Fernando Valley State College, he told them he understood why some potential draftees refuse to serve in the Vietnam war, but that he personally would go into the Army if drafted...

...who proved to this generation of skeptical student activists that the voting booth, not the streets, is the place to demonstrate most realistically and effectively against things as they are...

...It is hard to believe, for instance, that anti-Vietnam feelings are quite as overwhelming everywhere as the frenzied response to Kennedy might suggest...

...The farthest he is likely to go is to recite poetry to his worshipful college volunteers, or to tell them he expects to "go all the way" and be nominated and elected...

...The crowd gets the message and appears to approve overwhelmingly...

...Those who come to hear him come precisely for that—not to see him, or touch him, or rip off his cuff links...

...George Hamilton called me the other day and asked me for my daughter's telephone number...

...I ask your help...

...How much of it is that, and how much of it is the yearning for "Camelot Again," is difficult to measure, but certainly the extent of the desire to see the New Frontier fairy tale come true cannot be overstated...

...But the tugging of heartstrings goes on...

...After the brief airport talk, there is another crush of bodies and outstretched hands as Kennedy climbs onto the backrest of the rear seat of a convertible and heads for town...

...In city after city, as his chartered jetliner eases onto the runway and taxis up to the terminal building, the crowds line the airport fence and, sometimes, stand on the roof or sit on it with their feet dangling...

...The words are said in his nasal, somewhat strident tone, imparting the same sense of urgency that marked the campaign oratory of his brother, John F. Kennedy, in 1960...

...Kennedy is alert to this danger, and on at least one occasion bodily plucked a youngster from probable disaster...

...What these darker impulses were, he failed to say...

...and California (June 4)—if both survive that long...

...Which of them might have taught a small boy to read...

...They will vote for Kennedy against Richard Nixon, but, they say, they will not work for him...

...Which of them might have cured cancer...

...His unwillingness to change his style may help him hold his ranks in line in the immediate weeks ahead, when the Kennedy challenge gets closer to home...

...Give me your help and your hand and together we can turn this country around...

...I asked my brother Edward to get 10,000 buttons made so I could give them to you, but when he brought them on the plane I looked at them and saw they had his picture on them...

...Johnson's pull-out played not on the reason of the audience, but on its emotions: "Which of these men lost in Vietnam might have written a symphony...

...Later, in Los Angeles, Kennedy accused "the national leadership" of "calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit, not perhaps deliberately, but through its action and the example it sets...

...He rushes ahead over natural applause lines, as if intentionally throttling crowd reaction...

...They listen intently for long periods without interrupting with applause, partly because McCarthy seldom pauses to give them a chance...

...His articles have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, The Reporter, The New Republic, and Columbia Journalism Review.—The Editors...

...McCarthy simply says that he considers the war immoral and the United States the captive of a phony government in Saigon (which he says "is not a dictatorship" but "a public relations job...

...A visiting uncle or two is all right, but when you get them all together they don't look so good...

...another may take hold of his belt at the back so that the eager crowds cannot pull him down into them...

...a young man on a motorcycle may speed up and reach out, threatening to crash into the car or fall off...

...Few of the college students with him say they will enlist in the Kennedy ranks if their hero goes under...

...Kennedy also employs the disarming technique of nearly always preceding any Vietnam criticism with an acknowledgement of responsibility for past mistakes in the Kennedy Administration and adds, effectively: "But I learned a lesson...

...In their eyes, it always will be McCarthy, who offered them a way to move and shake the established political system from within...

...One has the feeling after listening to McCarthy give a dozen speeches that he is concerned above all else that he not insult the intelligence of his audiences...

...The two greatly different appeals for votes will be tested in Indiana (May 7...

...Robert Kennedy speaks of "a time to begin again" and of "putting this country back together...

...After calmly playing a radio tape of the smear in Manchester, McCarthy was asked why he was not acting angry about it...

...As the car drives off, fans run alongside...

...After making the length of the fence or the breadth of the crowd, Kennedy mounts another airport ramp and speaks briefly through a bullhorn...

...Let there be no mistake about it: Decency is at the core of the problem...

...But critical reaction among the traveling press led to a decision, even before President Johnson announced he would not run again, to stop attacking the President so directly...

...If Kennedy draws the larger crowds, McCarthy seems to hold the attention of his audiences at least as well as Kennedy does, even though he drones on with never a gesture for emphasis or hardly ever a rising inflection of tone...

...It's like a family reunion...

...Unlike Kennedy with his traveling troupe of sisters, staffers, and celebrities, McCarthy presents a lonelier figure, often accompanied by a man few seem to know, poet Robert Lowell...

...They're the ones fighting and dying for all of us now, and shouldn't that burden be shared equally...

...He is good-looking and only fifty-two, but he does not inspire the jumping and screaming that Kennedy does...

...That would be a constructive way to use him...

...Again he was at his candid best, and the crowd applauded...

...In either type of place, the turnout is massive by any comparative standard...

...This emotional appeal conveniently ignored two facts: It was the American Government that decided Khesanh was important enough to defend at a high price, and that South Vietnamese Rangers were serving with U.S...

...if it is fenced off, it jumps up and down or starts chanting Kennedy's name, Kennedy moves quickly to the fence and starts working the crowd, reaching out with both hands, crossing one over the other as he moves down the fence, grabbing some outstretched fingers, just touching others...

...One sign in California last month said, Bobby Is Good, and for many, that seems to say it...

...This response, which won heavy applause, is Kennedy at his most attractive, at his most credible...

...A McCarthy trip from airport to town most often is in a closed sedan...

...When the White House began sending Cabinet members into Wisconsin to speak for the Administration in the late stages of the primary there, McCarthy—after seriously challenging the use of Cabinet officials in political activity—observed wryly: "I'd like to see them come in as a group, rather than one by one...

...But there is no frantic surge toward him, and McCarthy for his part is in no hurry to press the flesh...

...And McCarthy knows the effectiveness of practiced disdain, as best seen in his personal brand of humor...

...Many in his army of student volunteers, concerned at first about his low key approach, have come to idolize him for his refusal to employ the commonplace absurdities of politicking...

...The message is simple and straightforward: "I run for President of the United States because I think we can do better...

...If the crowd can, it surges forward...

...The two peace candidates who chased President Johnson out of the running have virtually the same approach to the basic issues—negotiate a realistic settlement in Vietnam and tend to neglected ills at home—but their language and their styles are light years apart...

...More applause...

...But he cannot bring himself to show the kind of righteous indignation that is expected of the victim...

...In contrast to Kennedy's ringing, "I ask your help," McCarthy usually requests only that the voter give "consideration" to his views...

...One may lock an arm around Kennedy's waist...

...Nebraska (May 14) ; Oregon (May 28...

...Kennedy, after nearly four years as an active campaigner in his own right, knows what to do with a crowd...

...There is an earnestness about him that is mirrored by the crowd, and when he speaks, his message is direct and devoid of histrionics or bombast...

...McCarthy often will dwell as much on the nature of the campaign he is conducting, expressing pleasure that it has afforded a forum for serious discussion, as on the issue themelves...

...Some people might think he was ruthless...

...Senator Eugene J. McCarthy opposes the war just as vigorously and eloquently as does Robert Kennedy, but he is not part of Camelot, and the difference is immediately apparent on the campaign trail...

...When the dignity of men in Eastern Kentucky is sapped because they cannot work, that is indecent...

...Kennedy's theme is succinctly, if somewhat cryptically, characterized by a slogan displayed on a banner in the University of Portland cafeteria when he was in Oregon recently...

...As he speaks of the nation's major problems, Kennedy demonstrates a firm grasp of the issues, but often he gives way to an emotionalism and a rhetorical overkill that were not seen in his brother's 1960 campaign style...

...When young men are killed and maimed in the swamps of Vietnam, that also is indecent, and I say that is unsatisfactory for the United States of America...

...When he does discuss Vietnam at length, there are no appeals to emotion, no references to would-be composers and star athletes lost because of the war...

...With President Johnson avowedly out of the running, the Kennedy forces obviously hope to cut down the lead gained by McCarthy in New Hampshire and Wisconsin by winning in Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon, and California, and the odds are in Kennedy's favor...

...McCarthy and Kennedy: A Study In Styles by JULES WITCOVER Jules Witcover, political analyst for the Newhouse National News Service, has traveled extensively throughout the country with Senator Kennedy and has accompanied Senator McCarthy on his New Hampshire and Wisconsin campaigns...

...He has struck a fresh and hopeful note to American politics...

...I think we've made some progress on that count...

...But Kennedy kept repeating the line as a proven crowd-pleaser...

...This is in sharp contrast to Kennedy, who waits in silence when he wants a response until he gets it...

...Marines in the area of the forward outpost...

...When McCarthy's small chartered plane lands at an airport with a few of his college "ballot children" and about thirty newsmen aboard, usually only a hundred or so well-wishers await him...

...Robert Kennedy plays on the mood of the crowd, and in turn sometimes is moved by it to escalate his message with a carelessness for the facts...

...On domestic issues he emphasizes the urgent need for a reversal of national priorities that would permit a major attack on the problems of poverty, racism, urban blight, and rural needs...

...Putting campaign styles aside, Kennedy's and McCarthy's positions on Vietnam, urban unrest, the draft, job and housing needs are strikingly paral-el...

...But the cheers and whistles were so insistent that he went back to the microphone to take a few questions...

...and he can be stubborn too—pressure seems to strengthen his resolve...

...No police escort is needed...

...And there was his quip: "If elected, I will go to the Pentagon...

...The ramp is brought up, and the sixty or more newsmen and photographers aboard debark, followed by the secondary figures—Kennedy's wife, one or more of his sisters, or an astronaut, or a famous athlete, or a face familiar from the New Frontier...

...He minimizes the emotional approach and serves up a heavy dose of candor, even to the point of expressing views he knows are unpopular with students...

...Which of them might have built a university...

...But all of them are close enough to evoke memories, and a nostalgia sweeps over the crowd as he talks on...

...Aides brace themselves in the car and support him...

...It often seems that many people in a Kennedy crowd are so intent on seeing him, hearing his voice, even touching him, that they do not really care what he says...

...All this is commendable in a public speaker and a private citizen, but sometimes his supporters find it maddening in a political campaigner...

...The answer drew some of the only boos heard on his first major campaign tour...

...The 1968 Kennedy candidate adjusts his speech to the critical issues of today—Vietnam, disorders in the cities, the disintegration of a sense of national purpose, the credibility and generation gaps...

...When I suggested a commission to review the war, I wanted General Ridgeway, General Taylor, and Senator Morse, and the President wanted General Westmoreland, John Wayne, and Martha Raye...

...Into the city the motorcade goes, onlookers waving joyfully...

...He grinned sheepishly and said he saw no sense in getting worked up...

...In the crush a child may be in danger of being trampled...

...In response, Kennedy remarked "You say, 'Tell it like it is,' and tell you the truth, and that's what I intend to do...

...Now the audience is properly softened up, and Kennedy proceeds to the message: "We must resist any erosion of national decency...

...The style and the voice are not precisely pure JFK, the figure is shorter and the dress more casual...

...All this is not to say that McCarthy is a gentle soul floating through the political scene like some middle-aged love child...

...At a rally in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, several hundred citizens, mostly school-age boys and girls, whooped it up for him as if he were Bobby Kennedy himself...

...Kennedy's campaign appearances are full of bang and dash...

...There is no casual opening banter, unless something humorous comes to him on the spot, and he seems not to feel the need to say anything substantive in brief airport remarks...

...In the first day of his campaign, in Kansas, he generated a tremendous response by saying that "if the South Vietnamese government thinks Khesanh is so important, let them send South Vietnamese soldiers in there and take the American Marines out...

...Young men too poor to go to college are drafted for Vietnam, he reminded them...

...He chats amiably with his official greeters —seldom anyone well-known—and then in his own good time moves over to shake a few hands...

...It is a frantic, pawing scene that sometimes costs Kennedy his cuff links, buttons off his shirt, hair from his head...

...John Kennedy, outwardly warm and smiling but inwardly cool and reserved, could exhort crowds, yet not seem to be stirred by their reaction...

...Through all the pummeling, he wears a set, determined half-smile, half-grimace...

...In the suddenly wide-open competition for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene J. McCarthy will offer clear-cut contrasts in campaign styles and techniques over the next several weeks in a string of key Presidential primaries, where, unlike New Hampshire and Wisconsin, they meet head-on...

...Not only does McCarthy decline to fan emotionalism...

...I think we have a responsibility to see that all those young men live...

...To start with, he Bob Hopes them—a staccato barrage of short, topical gags that establish him at once as The Cool Bobby: "I know my campaign is making progress...

...There are plenty of voters...

...he seems at times almost intimidated by it...

...I said very early that I didn't know whether I could do very much about making people honest in the campaign," he said on one occasion, "but I thought maybe a number could be more truthful...

...Win or lose, though, McCarthy is far ahead of the game already...

...Although Kennedy on many occasions discusses Vietnam issues in detail, particularly in question-and-answer sessions with students, his standard speech prior to Mr...

...The delivery, choppy and earnest, is punctuated by a jabbing fist, an occasional pounding of the rostrum or a single clap of the hands...

...The momentum McCarthy has generated in New Hampshire and Wisconsin may well keep his improbable dream alive through the critical primaries right up to the August convention...

...I'm even encouraged to think that maybe there's been an increase also in honesty, which was more than I bargained for...

...Asked at Rivier College in New Hampshire whether it was not true the Administration had offered to go "anywhere, anytime" for talks with Hanoi, McCarthy answered that was no offer...

...Still, McCarthy, a winner of Congressional and Senate races for twenty years, cannot be accused of not knowing what he is doing...

...He would rather leave the obvious unsaid than belabor it...

...The rally most often, at least in the opening weeks of the Kennedy campaign, is held at a university or college, because the largest and most enthusiastic crowds can be guaranteed there, or at densely crowded shopping centers...

...He has given new meaning and purpose to a generation that seemed bent on disenfranchising itself...

...I told him it was too late to get into the race...

...Sometimes there is a small band, and cheers go up when the tall, gray-haired Minnesotan comes down the ramp...

...It said, simply, Camelot Again—from Jacqueline Kennedy's memorable summation, inspired by the Broadway musical, of the Kennedy White House years: "For one brief shining moment there was Camelot...

...His program does not differ much from Kennedy's on the war: Stop the bombing and search-and-destroy tactics, talk to the National Liberation Front, crack down on Saigon corruption, and tell the Saigon regime to face acceptance of a coalition government or suffer a withholding of American support...

...Even when it comes to asking for votes, McCarthy's is a subdued appeal to reason...