National Affairs: The Word from Pat

One week after the Governor of the most populous state bowed out of the Republican presidential race, the Governor of the second abandoned any pretense that he was seriously running for the Democratic nomination. Said California’s Edmund (“Pat”) Brown in a West Coast paraphrase of Nelson Rockefeller’s withdrawal (TIME, Jan. 4) : “To be a candidate for the presidency of the U.S. takes aggressive, active work, and they’re not going to take a freshman Governor of California who has been in office a year, unless he does do some of the things that Rockefeller did. All I want to do is to take care of, to the best of my ability, the 15 million-plus people that we have here in this state.”

But Democrat Brown did not echo Republican Rockefeller’s refusal of a vice-presidential nomination. If the Democratic Convention should select virtually anybody except Roman Catholic Jack Kennedy, then Catholic Californian Brown, with his 81 convention blue chips, might become attractive as the second man on the ticket. And if any of the presidential candidates had ideas of taking those 81 votes away from him in California’s June primary, Favorite Son Pat Brown issued a fair warning: “Then I might to some extent change my position . . . But that’s the only possible chance there’d be.”