Ohio: What Beat Taft

Hardly had he been declared the win ner in his fight against Robert Taft Jr.

than Ohio’s Democratic Senator Ste phen Young announced that he was retiring from politics -in 1970 when his new term will be up and he will be 81.

There were those in Ohio last week who wished that Young had kept a similar promise made after the 1958 election. Among the disappointed, of course, was Congressman Taft, 47, who had hoped to follow in the Senate foot steps of his illustrious father.

What did Taft in, of course, was Goldwater. While he counted himself a Goldwater man in many respects, he also differed publicly from Barry on such issues as civil rights and the nu clear test ban treaty. But not quite enough Ohioans saw the distinction, and Young helped blur it by constantly tying Taft to Goldwater’s bandwagon.

“I am against Birch, Barry and Bob,” Young would say. “Goldwaterism, Taft Juniorism and extremism are all the same commodity.” There was one other major factor: organized labor’s thirst for revenge against the son of the man who co-sponsored the Taft-Hartley Law in 1947.

Heavily unionized areas, such as Lucas County (Toledo), bludgeoned Taft by giving Young a 33,000-vote plurality out of 179,900 votes; Nixon lost that county by only 8,000 votes. Said young Bob in an election postmortem: “The organized-labor vote was very effective in the Ohio campaign. It was just about the whole campaign organization. I suspect they were effective because they stayed behind the scenes and ran things quietly.”