New York: The Pollster-Picked Candidate

“We’re not going to be able to eat more hot dogs than Rockefeller,” said a New York Democratic county chairman last week. “We’re going to present a serious, dedicated candidate. It’ll be a campaign of contrasts.” It may at that. To run against ebullient Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, one of the few serious U.S. politicians who can smile handsomely with a mouthful of wieners, Democrats have just about settled on an earnest lawyer with rimless glasses, a furrowed forehead and a rumpled Brooks Brothers suit. The prospect: U.S. Attorney Robert

Morris Morgenthau, 43, son of F.D.R.’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.

Imposing Credentials. Democrat Morgenthau came to the fore in a curious way.

Last year, after New York’s Mayor Robert Wagner won re-election on a beat-the-bosses platform, it was generally assumed that Wagner would take over as the state’s Democratic boss—and be persuaded to run against Rocky. But Wagner hardly has the temperament of a boss; and he soon made it plain that he wanted no part of Rocky this year. The result: a vacuum of leadership within the New York Democratic Party.

Into that vacuum stepped Louis Harris, pet political pollster both to Jack Kennedy and to Wagner. Harris, who considers himself less a vote sampler than a political analyst, soon got to analyzing.

He was much impressed by the fact that Rockefeller in 1958 had been hugely helped by New York City’s normally Democratic Jewish voters. To win back that vote in 1962, Harris argued, the Democrats needed a Jewish candidate to run against Rocky. Up went a trial balloon for respected Appellate Division Justice Bernard Botein; it roused little interest, and down it came. Then Harris, as the acknowledged working head of a Democratic group that includes ex-Senator Herbert Lehman, 84, Tammany Leader Ed Costikyan (successor to Carmine De Sapio) and assorted liberal lawyers and public relations men, began promoting Robert Morgenthau.

Morgenthau has imposing credentials.

If his family name has never yet set the hustings afire, it is at least recognizable.

Bob Morgenthau’s background includes Deerfield. Amherst (magna cum laude) and Yale Law School—and a good war record: he enlisted in the Navy as an apprentice seaman during World War II, emerged a lieutenant commander with several decorations after having two ships torpedoed out from under him. Picked last year by Bobby Kennedy as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he worked up a series of successful narcotics, stock market and income tax fraud prosecutions.

Ironic Issue. By last week, with the help of the Harris group, Morgenthau was far enough in the lead for other candidates to launch a “stop Morgenthau” movement in an effort to block his nomination at the Democratic state convention in Syracuse two weeks hence. Their main charge against him, ironically, is that he is the candidate of the party’s “bosses”—like Pollster Harris.