CAMPAIGN: Demolition of McNutt?

Eight short months ago, Paul Vories McNutt was a Democratic hotshot. He placed well up on Pollster Gallup’s popularity indexes, was known to one & all as a potent Presidential possibility. Last week, a Washington mob of political lynchers and character assassins, breathing heavily, stepped back from Mr. McNutt’s mangled remains. There on the ground, they hoped, lay all that was Presidential of handsome Paul McNutt.

In those eight months the white-crested Hoosier has endured much. Like a movie-serial heroine, he has been politically shot, stabbed, poisoned, garroted, sawed into short lengths, burned, decimated, smothered, bumped off, rubbed out. He has been “given the business.”

Week after week columnists gave loud hushes, hinted that the next crashing sound would come from the Treasury’s income-tax investigation of Indiana’s famed Two-Per-Cent Club. One U. S. magazine after another searingly profiled Mr. McNutt, as with blowtorches. Dry-tongued Alva Johnston smilingly cut Mr. McNutt’s throat from ear to ear in last week’s Saturday Evening Post.

Forthright Columnist Raymond Clapper lifted a lonely voice against Mr. McNutt’s taking off: “Underground scandal of Washington . . . slow-motion assassination . . . major campaign atrocity . . . torture . . . poison-gas rumors . . . [Treasury] investigation about as secret as Mr. Roosevelt’s celebrated cigaret-holder . . . crucifying. . . .”

During the week an Indianapolis Federal grand jury was dismissed without acting on Mr. McNutt’s income taxes. Still Treasury snoops prowled on.

Public sympathy for much-enduring Mr. McNutt seemed curiously apathetic. Possible explanation: plain citizens may feel that a man who has trained as publicly for the Presidency as Mr. McNutt has done all his life is fair game.