POLITICAL NOTES: Who’s for Whom, Nov. 5, 1956

¶ Collier’s magazine endorsed Ike (as it did in 1952) and urged its readers to help re-elect him.

¶ Newsday, an Ike supporter last time, followed the lead of the other two big Long Island dailies (the Long Island’ Press and the Long Island Star-Journal), switched to Stevenson because he “offers the hope of potentially greater, more imaginative leadership.”

¶ The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reaffirmed its 1952 pro-Ike stand despite the switch of its brother paper, the Toledo Blade, to Stevenson (TIME, Oct. 29).

¶ The Chicago Sun-Times, for Ike four years ago, endorsed him again. Reason: “He has measured up to our [1952] expectations,” e.g., he has brought “unity to this country and to the free world.”

¶ The Montgomery Advertiser-Journal, which declared for Eisenhower in 1952, did so again because he “commands public trust and confidence in a measure unsurpassed by any other.” The Atlanta Journal, declaring Stevenson “best suited to the immediate and future demands of the presidency,” also stuck by its 1952 choice.

¶ A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, who first opposed the federation’s taking an election stand, then supported an executive council decision to endorse the Democrats, backed away again in a message to 15 million union members: “Naturally, I … hope you will vote for Stevenson and Kefauver, but the final decision is yours and yours alone.”

¶The Harvard Crimson, polling the university for its presidential preference, reported: 1) Harvard undergraduates are split almost evenly between Eisenhower and Stevenson (1,368 to 1,338); 2) the Law School is pro-Stevenson (576 to 473); and 3) the School of Business Administration is pro-Ike (538 to 161).

¶ The Afro-American newspapers, Negro chain (14 weekly and biweekly editions—total circ. 204,000) which supported Stevenson in ’52, switched to Eisenhower.

¶ Some 500 artists, scientists, educators (including six Nobel Prizewinners, eleven Pulitzer Prizewinners, 90 members of the National Academy of Sciences) called for Eisenhower’s re-election in full-page ads in the New York Times and Herald Tribune. Prominent “Eggheads” for Ike: Poets Marianne Moore, Robert Hillyer; Novelists John Marquand, MacKinlay Kantor; Musicians Irving Berlin, Lily Pons; Nuclear Scientists Willard F. Libby, Isidor I. Rabi.

¶ Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of the bestselling (9,000,000 copies) The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, and a co-chairman of the recently formed National Committee of Physicians and Surgeons for Stevenson, declared that a “high proportion” of psychiatrists are also Democrats, but “their hands are tied” in telling the public. Reason: the disclosure would “disturb their Republican patients and interfere with the healing process.”