DEMOCRATS: Bonjour, Mes Amis

After months on the road, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is the most practiced performer in this season’s Democratic road show. Last week in Louisiana, Senator Kennedy gave an impressive demonstration of his growing ability to do the right thing, say the right word, pump the right hand, at just the right time. With warring candidates and wary Negroes, with Congressmen and Cajuns, with segregationists and rice farmers, he showed a highly honed instinct for the correct thing.

At the Baton Rouge airport, the political elite turned out to greet the Kennedy troupe. Senate Colleague Russell Long was there, and so was his aunt, Blanche Revere Long, making her first public appearance since her separation from Governor Earl Long (TIME, July 6). Uncle Earl was too busy campaigning upstate to put in an appearance, but he thoughtfully put his $10,000 Cadillac at Kennedy’s disposal. At a big (800 guests) bouillabaisse in New Orleans, Jack was escorted by four of seven rival candidates in the hotly contested gubernatorial primary (the new Governor will have the last word on selection of Louisiana’s delegates to the Democratic Convention next year).

Of top importance on Kennedy’s itinerary was a handshaking visit to Claver Hall, in the heart of New Orleans’ Negro district (Louisiana’s 140,000 registered Negro voters are credited with swinging the state to Eisenhower in 1956). There he invoked the name of Franklin Roosevelt, promised to broaden the minimum-wage law, improve unemployment compensation and better substandard housing. To an attentive audience he registered as a worried man of peace, reminded listeners that he, too, recently talked with Khrushchev as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (New Orleans, the major port of entry for Latin American trade, is keenly internationalist). Said he: “We are in a long-range struggle that will take sacrifice and dedication.”

Kennedy not once overdid it or stepped out of character. After crowning a honey-haired Rice Queen in Crowley, he smilingly declined to kiss her. And when—at a big Kiwanis lunch in Baton Rouge—the inevitable hot question was tossed at him, he caught it. A Kiwanian demanded Kennedy’s views on segregation, got an answer that offended no one: “All this was decided in 1954 by the Supreme Court. There is no question about it, nor should there be.”

To top it off, Kennedy brought on his pretty, 29-year-old wife Jacqueline (nee Bouvier), who stopped the show before 95,000 French-speaking Cajuns in Crowley with a graceful speech in her best Parisian accent: “Bonjour, mes amis . . . Je suis d’origine Fran^aise.” (Many politicians believe Adlai Stevenson saved the day for the Democrats in 1952 with a speech in fractured French in New Orleans’ Beauregard Square.) As the Kennedys boarded their chartered Convair and headed north, one supporter confidently counted some chickens: “This state will go for Kennedy now. There’s no doubt of it.”