Nation: Shuffling the Planks

Most of the Platform Committee hoopla came over the appearances of the presidential candidates and their top supporters. But during its preconvention week the committee, chaired by Wisconsin’s Representative Melvin Laird, also took testimony from spokesmen for some 170 organizations, ranging from Americans for Democratic Action to the Izaak Walton League and the American Committee for the Independence of Armenia.

There was, for example, a full afternoon devoted to hearing the representatives of civil rights organizations. The N.A.A.C.P.’s Roy Wilkins, a Democrat, praised Republicans in Congress for their part in passage of the Civil Rights Act, but, in a plain dig at Goldwater, deplored the doubts about the measure’s constitutionality as expressed “by aspirants to public office.”

“A Cruel Jest.” Martin Luther King Jr. pleaded for a “G.I. Bill” for Negroes, explaining: “Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public, but they must also be absorbed into our eco nomic system so they can afford to exercise that right. Giving a pair of shoes to a man who has not learned to walk is a cruel jest.” King also urged that the Federal Government take stronger steps toward stopping civil rights violence in the South before it happens. Said he: “If our Government is capable of gathering intelligence information in a matter of hours from all parts of the world and has been able to maintain a constant surveillance of the U.S. Communist Party, is it not also capable of maintaining a surveillance of terroristic groups and persons subverting the Constitution of the United States by arson, bombings and murder of civil rights workers?”

A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany sharply attacked U.S. trade with Communist countries. “A generation ago we were bitterly opposed to doing business as usual with Hitler,” he said. “Half a generation ago we were bitterly opposed to doing business as usual with Stalin. Today we are equally opposed to doing business as usual with Stalin’s de-Stalinized successors.” W. P. Gullander, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, urged another tax cut. Said he: “A further tax reduction during the 1960s is not only feasible, but it is also well within the bounds of responsible fiscal policy.”

“White-Sneakered Amateurs.” But even as the torrent of testimony continued to flow in public, the real shaping and shuffling of the platform planks took place in the nighttime privacy of hotel rooms, where drafting subcommittees worked till dawn. Frustrated by the Goldwater forces’ kill-’em-with-kindness strategy, anti-Goldwater leaders fell to squabbling among themselves. Scranton-supporting committee members, led by Pennsylvania’s Senator Hugh Scott, wrote 31 different drafts of a proposed civil rights plank before they could agree on one.

After one such session in a ninth-floor suite of the St. Francis Hotel, Massachusetts’ fiery Congressman Silvio Conte fumed at the ineffectiveness of his fellow Scrantonites. They were, he cried, a bunch of “white-sneakered amateurs,” and he added: “I’m ready to pack up and go home.”

With the Scranton platform advisers so disorganized, the Platform Committee heavily pro-Goldwater and a majority of the key Drafting Committee also for Barry, the final product obviously would be a platform upon which Goldwater could run. So, for that matter, could most any other Republican.