National Affairs: Kentucky Earthquake

In last week’s election of top state officers, Kentucky Democrats crushed the Republicans under a mountain-sized landslide that shot tremors through the remaining GOProvinces in the farm belt.

Elected Kentucky’s Governor by an alltime-record majority (515,299 to 335,404): Bert Thomas Combs, 48, wiry (5 ft. 10 in.), handsome ex-judge from the mountain-valley town of Prestonsburg (pop. 3,585, altitude 645 ft). Combs exploited a year of falling farm income by attacking his opponent, G.O.P. ex-Congressman (1952-58) John M. Robsion Jr., for pro-Benson votes while in the House—and never missed a chance to mispronounce Robsion’s name “Ro-Ben-son.” Combs’s running mate for Lieutenant Governor, onetime Louisville Mayor Wilson Watkins Wyatt, 53, one of the founders of the left-wing Americans for Democratic Action, and Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 campaign manager, piled an even bigger majority (498,278 to 308,622) upon Ballad Singer Pleaz Mobley, a G.O.P. candidate with songs aplenty but little political appeal.

Another noise drowned in the landslide’s rumble: two-time Democratic Governor Albert Benjamin Chandler, 61, sometime U.S. Senator and unlamented baseball high commissioner (1945-51). Barred by law from succeeding himself as Governor, “Happy” Chandler tried in the May primary to win the nomination for a hand-picked successor. He failed against a Combs campaign expertly engineered by ex-Senator (1950-56) Earle C. Clements, 63, bitter factional foe of Chandler for a quarter-century (TIME, May 25). Only a Republican victory in the election could have restored Democrat Chandler’s slipping grip on state political power, perhaps let him pick delegates to the 1960 Democratic National Convention and thus renew his one-man 1956 campaign for the presidential nomination. So Chandler did his bombastic best to defeat his own party, blasted Combs only a few days before election day as “the biggest liar I’ve seen in 30 years in politics . . . a poor little dunce who will have to let Clements run him.”

Cold-eyed Earle Clements, again the strongman in Kentucky politics and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson’s handyman on the national scene, won the power to pick Johnson-for-President delegates for most of the state’s 31 convention votes. If Texan Johnson’s bandwagon bogs down, Clements’ men are convinced that they will be swung over to Missouri’s Stuart Symington. But such plans may run into intraparty fire from Lieutenant Governor Wilson Wyatt, who may wind up fighting for a chance to split off some of the votes for Old Friend Stevenson.

As the Johnson-chosen director of the Democrats’ senatorial campaign committee, Clements moved fast last week to label the party victory in Kentucky “the beginning of what is going to happen in the United States in 1960.”