Nation: Jersey Joust

In the Plymouth Inn at Ocean City, N.J., a political reception was in full swing when a telephone rang in the anteroom. A woman answered it, then returned to the reception. “Who,” she asked, “is Richard J. Hughes?”

As it happened. Richard J. Hughes, 52, was the reception’s guest of honor—and the Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey. The woman’s question was illustrative of his worst handicap in the most significant state election of 1961: hardly anyone knows Dick Hughes, while his Republican opponent, James P. Mitchell, Labor Secretary in the Eisenhower Administration, is one of New Jersey’s most famous citizens.

Hand-Picked. The son of a onetime Burlington mayor, Hughes grew up on a full diet of New Jersey’s truck-garden county politics, but his operations have been mostly behind the scenes. His only other notable attempt at elective office came in 1938, when he ran for Congress and lost. After that, he served in many political jobs around Trenton, including five years as a Superior Court judge, returning in 1957 to a lucrative law practice in order to support his big family (nine children and stepchildren). When Governor Robert Meyner compiled a list of 26 suitable successors, Hughes was not even on the list. He was finally hand-picked by Democratic Boss Thorn Lord and other party leaders only after several better-known possibilities had declined to run.

To make himself known, Hughes has campaigned furiously from Cape May Court House to the Bayonne waterfront. To back Hughes, New Jersey’s Democrats have plenty of money—and they intend to spend it. Hughes’s campaign expenses will come to $1,000,000 or more. From Washington have come Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg to stump for Hughes, and from Massachusetts came Teddy Kennedy to spread the family charm.

Republican Mitchell is in almost total contrast to Hughes. In his seven years in the Cabinet, he established a national reputation as a progressive Republican who got along well with labor. His primary victory over New Jersey’s entrenched G.O.P. county leaders (18 out of 21 opposed him) last spring established him as a vote getter free of all taint of boss control.

Modest Kitty. Far from equaling Hughes’s frenzied pace, Mitchell spent most of the summer in a Sea Girt hotel nursing a leg he fractured when he slipped in a hotel bathroom. His campaign kitty is much more modest than Hughes’s. amounting to less than $500,000. Fearful of getting caught in the national Republican Party divisions, he has waved off Richard Nixon. Barry Goldwater and other prominent Republicans from speaking for him. But he does plan to use the best-known Republican of them all: Dwight Eisenhower has agreed to make two appearances on Mitchell’s behalf next week.

Last week, as the camoaign moved toward its final stages. Dick Hughes was bearing down heavily on the theme that

Mitchell’s years in Washington had left him unfamiliar with New Jersey’s problems. He was also complaining bitterly of Mitchell’s refusal to engage him in face-to-face debate. As for Mitchell, he had no intention of entering into such a debate (in 1960 he urgently advised Nixon against debating Kennedy) and thereby giving Hughes some badly needed publicity. Still on crutches, he emphasized Hughes’s selection by New Jersey’s organization bosses: “The Democratic candidate was selected not by an open primary, not by the rank and file of his party, but in a smoke-filled room in Trenton. I enter this race uncommitted to anyone.” He also called frequent attention to the fact that Hughes was, until his nomination, a lawyer and lobbyist for railroads in New Jersey. “If I am Governor,” said Jim Mitchell to an Atlantic City labor meeting, “I will not march down to the legislature with a paycheck of the Pennsylvania Railroad in my pocket.”

Big or Small? Figuring their chances, New Jersey Democratic leaders admitted that Hughes was far behind, but claimed that he was narrowing the gap. Said Campaign Manager Bob Burkhardt: “They could win big, or we could win small. This could be a sleeper.” There were few in New Jersey to make book on the possibility.