REPUBLICANS: New Floor Leader?

Bob Taft’s death raised the question: Who will be the Republicans’ new Senate floor leader?

California’s William Fife Knowland, hand-picked for acting majority leader by Taft, was the leading prospect to succeed him. Last week he convinced Senate Republican leaders that a successor to Taft should be elected quickly to quash talk about party disunity.

This week New Hampshire’s Senator Styles Bridges, the senior Republican in the Senate, tried to slow Knowland’s march, although most of Bridges’ friends believe that he does not want the job for himself. In a letter to Eugene Millikin, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, Bridges said: “It does not seem to me that there is a pressing need for haste …” Other Republican leaders dis. agreed with Bridges, decided to go ahead with the election of a floor leader.

A Young Old Hand. This kind of political maneuvering was not new to Bill Knowland. He is young (45) as Senate majority leaders go, but he is an old hand at politics. His father. J. R. (for Joseph Russell) Knowland. was a conservative Republican U.S. Representative in 1904-15. Young Billy made his first political speech (for the Harding-Coolidge ticket) when he was twelve, and at 16 occasionally sat in for his father as chairman of Republican committees in California. At 25 he was elected to the California assembly; at 27 he moved up to the state seriate.

Drafted into the Army as a private in 1942, Knowland had risen to major and was serving in France when California’s Governor Earl Warren appointed him to the U.S. Senate vacancy created by the death of Hiram Johnson. California politicians generally regarded this as payment of a political debt to Knowland’s millionaire father, who had started Warren on his career and whose daily Oakland Tribune had long supported the governor. In 1946 Knowland trounced Democrat Will Rogers Jr. Last year he won both the Republican and Democratic nominations with a total of 2,308,051 votes, far more than any candidate for any office ever got in California primaries.

The Fullback. In the Senate corridors, the big (6 ft., 200 Ibs.) Senator from California lunges from one meeting to another with the air of a fullback heading for the goal line. He is not much of a rough & tumble debater, but his set speeches are well written, forcefully delivered. Because of his consistent bathe for more U.S. aid to Chiang Kaishek, his detractors have fitted him with a label: “The Senator from Formosa.”

Knowland’s voting record marks him as a middle-of-the-road Republican, e.g.,-he voted for the Taft-Hartley Act, supported NATO. As acting majority leader, Bill Knowland stumbled at the start but then took a firm hold. Bob Taft started the major bills through the Senate, but Knowland was the man in charge when the final push was needed.