THE NATION: The Thin Edge

Nikita Khrushchev sent a treasure-trove of American goods to his ship and flew home to Moscow. The Pittsburgh Pirates carried the World Series into history.

Even the politically beleaguered islands of Quemoy and Matsu began to float out of the center of U.S. debate and back to their rightful place in ambiguity along the China coast. The pollsters bustled across the U.S. like beaters on an African safari — and found themselves right where they were before the interruptions, staring into that great cliche of the 1960 campaign, the undecided vote.

Who were the undecided? In the key Northern states, they were essentially voters who had flocked in record numbers to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and now for one reason or another were moving toward the Democratic Party.

Somewhere in mid-move they were caught in conflicting currents : Jack Kennedy’s Catholicism pulled them one way or the other; Nixon’s experience in foreign affairs (a Republican plus) vied with the rising apprehension of recession (a Democratic plus) as the dominant issue.

So far, TIME correspondents reported last week, the issue of peace still tops the issue of the economy in most parts of the nation. But a new factor has entered the political equation: in sum total the Nixon-Kennedy television debates have raised Kennedy’s stature as a man of decision.

Yet, according to Pollster Sam Lubell, the Quemoy-Matsu issue, with all its tangled semantics, is one that has dan gers for Kennedy: 47% of the people in the nation agree with Nixon on the issue that “we can’t give in to the Communists anywhere.” and only 29% say that the islands of Quemoy and Matsu are not worth fighting for.

By all the signs last week, the large body of Democrats who have been cool to Kennedy ever since his nomination are coming his way with enthusiasm, largely as a result of seeing him in the debates.

This is true among erstwhile Stevensonians as well as among big-city political bosses and their publics, and even among many conservative Southern Democrats.

This new thrust, and the absence of any new Nixon upsurge, gave pollsters the feeling of a thin edge for Jack Kennedy as Election Day 1960 loomed three weeks away.