Nation: The Republican Assault on the Senate

Fitfully, Richard Nixon slumbers. In dream review, his White House predecessors flicker past. There is Woodrow Wilson, railing against the Senate’s “little group of willful men.” He dissolves to Andrew Jackson, censured by the Senate for removing deposits from the Bank of the United States without authority. F.D.R., his aplomb punctured by a Senate that thwarted his attempt to pack the Supreme Court, snaps in and out of focus. Finally Lyndon Johnson, hounded from office amid the taunts of Senate doves, looms up.

President Nixon tosses, turns. The pantheon of the past retreats. Now it is 1971. From his Oval Office, Nixon sends to the Senate the nomination of a Mississippi judge for the Supreme Court. Zap! Confirmed. He asks $10 billion for an expanded ABM system. Pow! Appropriated. He proposes cuts in school funds. Chop! Done. In one corner of his dream stands a forlorn J. William Fulbright, talking while no one listens. With other prickly Democratic Sena’e oligarchs, Fulbright has been toppled by a Republican capture of the Senate. In a far recess of the Senate chamber, a vestigial cluster of radic-libs cowers as a troglodytic terrorizer in tailored twill cracks a whip over their heads. At last the President slips into the sleep of serenity and contentment.

IF asleep he may dream his Improbable Dream, the waking Richard Nixon is increasingly unsparing of himself, his Vice President, his Cabinet and the enormous, varied and subtle resources of his office. Coming down the stretch toward Nov. 3 and the 1970 election, the President has taken active as well as strategic command of the campaign he began outlining more than a year ago. Nixon has found the liberal Senate to be his most embarrassing and implacable opponent; on one issue and appointment after another, the Senate has plagued his policies and thwarted his choices. Thus while 33 governorships are up for grabs as well as all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, it is the battle for the 35 Senate seats being contested this year that matters to Nixon.

The White House can exert minimal influence on gubernatorial races. Nor do the Republicans expect to do more than hold their own in the House of Representatives, where they have 188 seats to 243 for the Democrats (there are four vacancies). More than 90% of House incumbents who seek reelection, following recent patterns, can be expected to win; traditionally the President’s party loses seats in the House in off-year elections. So as G.O.P. National Chairman Rogers C.B. Morton says: “This year the name of the game is the Senate.”

It is the costliest senatorial election in the nation’s history (estimated outlay: $65 million), one of the most bitterly fought and from all appearances, likely to be the closest since 1954, when Democrats won control by a single vote.

As of last week, Nixon had already committed himself to go stumping in 21 states. This schedule constitutes the most extensive effort any President has ever undertaken in an off-year election. Flying out of Washington on Air Force One, Nixon hopscotched through Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in just one day. And in a frenetic Saturday-through-Tuesday extended weekend, he also was due at rallies in Ohio, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee and North Carolina.

At every stop, Nixon pushed forward Republican candidates, lifted their hands high for TV and newspaper cameras and insisted that they must be elected to help him achieve “a generation of peace” and rid the nation of violence. He talked of the anticrime bill he had signed earlier in the week, designed to help federal authorities attack racketeers and political terrorists. He turned defensive only on the economy, the issue on which his Administration is most vulnerable. (SEE BUSINESS).

Although the weather for Nixon’s forays turned unexpectedly frigid, his welcomes were warm. The inevitable hecklers sometimes attempted to disrupt the proceedings. A group in Burlington, Vt., chanted “Stop the war,” while someone hurled a few rocks at him, one narrowly missing his head. As elsewhere, Nixon praised the G.O.P. senatorial candidate—Winston Prouty in this case—as a man who had supported him on all the major issues. “A shift of one Senator, sometimes two, will determine whether the President’s program goes through,” he said. “Give us that majority of one.”

The Nixon drive is bold and risky, since he is putting his prestige on the line in states where Republicans seem likely to lose, as well as in states where his presence could make his man a winner. He is plunging into Wisconsin where Democratic Senator William Proxmire seems certain of reelection, and into Minnesota, where his old foe Hubert Humphrey is running far ahead of Congressman Clark MacGregor.

Looking Toward 1972

Along the way Nixon is aiding gubernatorial and congressional candidates in a bid to strengthen his party at its grass roots. It is a tactic that has paid off handsomely for him before. As a private citizen in 1966, he visited 35 states to support 86 G.O.P. candidates—and the party remembered that at its 1968 convention, as it will again in 1972.

Nixon undoubtedly also had 1972 in mind last week when he vetoed a bill that would have lifted equal-time provisions for TV networks, making de bates among presidential candidates more likely, and would have limited campaign expenditures for TV and radio. The G.O.P. has more money to spend on such advertising, and the National Committee for an Effective Congress called the veto a “flagrant example of partisan interests.” Yet most of the crowds that Nixon addressed seemed pleased by his partisanship.

For the first month of the Republican campaign, Agnew led the way, swinging a verbal mace with a ferocity that has not been seen in off-year elections since 1954 when Nixon came out swinging low for Eisenhower. Now, as then, some wondered if the Vice President was perhaps exceeding his mandate. Agnew had a few words to say about that last week: “Now let me just make one thing clear. As the Vice President in the Nixon Administration, I’m not on a frolic. I’m out here doing a job for the Administration, and while everything I say does not receive the express clearance of the President, I have a sense of purpose and definition in what I’m attempting to accomplish.”

Early on, Agnew gave his own definition of the contest: “One issue dominates this election: Will the radical-liberalism that controls the Senate of the United States prevail in the nation? Or will America be led into the future by the moderates, centrists and conservatives who stand behind the President of the United States?”

Agnew’s glib and misleading linkage of liberals with radicals, his equally glib identification of conservatism with the center has a clear meaning. It illustrates the fact that the battle is not only political but ideological. Political control of the Senate goes by party label. If a majority of Senators call themselves Republicans, that party controls the committees and thus the power to dam or release the flow of legislation, to schedule or not to schedule hearings, to act or not to act. With political control, conservatives and liberals of the same party are drawn together in common cause.

Much as he thirsts for political control, the President’s overriding aim is for an ideological majority. Hence the incessant cry that the Senate needs rescue from radic-libs. Southern conservative Democratic Senators are not fired upon; Republican liberals have pointedly been excluded from the Administration’s campaign roles.

By chance, only one fully accredited Republican liberal—New York’s Charles Goodell—is seeking re-election this year. Through Agnew, who has attacked Goodell and raised funds for his Conservative Party opponent, the President has made clear his willingness to sacrifice a card-carrying Republican for someone more ideologically in tune with the Administration. Apart from Goodell, the insistence on ideological purity has greater practical significance for the future. Such Republican liberals as Charles Percy, Mark Hatfield and Edward Brooke, whose terms expire in 1973, undoubtedly perceive the warning signal: if necessary, Nixon is prepared to sacrifice even Republican liberals to alter the character of the Senate. Conservative Robert Dole of Kansas does nothing to allay such apprehensions when he says: “The liberals in the Senate are still important, but they’re not the key votes.” Then Dole muses: “If we get more conservatives, we wouldn’t need them as bad.”

To understand the Senate’s present role, it is necessary to go back to the waning years of the Eisenhower era, when the Senate “class of 1958” was elected on a wave of recession discontent. The class contained a cadre of liberal Democrats, many from conservative states, who tilted the overall ideological cast of the Senate to the liberal side. They were returned in the Goldwater debacle of 1964, and for twelve years they have, in the main, cast their votes for Medicare, civil rights, voting rights, federal aid to education, increased minimum wages, the war on poverty, the nuclear test-ban treaty, the Peace Corps, federal rent subsidies, open housing. They provided the votes that enabled Lyndon Johnson to say, with less hyperbole than he regularly employed, that the Congress of 1964 “met more national needs . . . than any other session of this century or the last.”

Most of the liberals later turned against Johnson for his Viet Nam policies, and they have not let up on Nixon. They were outraged at the invasion of Cambodia, led moves to fix a firm withdrawal date for U.S. troops in Indochina, opposed the anti-ballistic missile system (which survived in the 1969 Senate by only one vote), rejected Nixon Supreme Court Nominees Clement Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell.

The Nature of Combat

The issues this year do not turn on specific legislation, but on the worries and fears that roil the national temper. Viet Nam remains the No. 1 concern of Americans, but so successfully has the President neutralized it as an issue that candidates are seldom even questioned about the war as they move around campaigning. The Republicans have put the emphasis of their attack on the themes most explicitly propounded by Agnew: that the permissive attitudes of radic-libs have led to a youth revolution, slackening moral standards, disrespect for order, rocketing rates of crime and dope use. The radic-libs, says Agnew, have “made the public aware of the deficiencies in America rather than the deficiencies in these [troublemaking] individuals. By rationalizing crime and violence and attributing it to lofty causes, they have contributed to it. These people allow martyrs to be created where in fact criminals are present.” The Democrats have made their central charge the economy, blaming the Republicans for recession and unemployment.

Thus both campaigns seek to make each Senate race part of a national referendum. The labels do not adhere readily: nearly all Senators and many of their challengers are strong figures in their states. To a large extent, they are engaged in man-to-man personality contests. Their jousts are less dependent on national issues and partisan positions than are House elections, where the antagonists are usually less well known, and a voter is more likely to vote party.

Both sides are unsure of how the campaign is going, and both are running scared. A Republican Senator who insists that his party was well on the way to winning the Senate a few months ago now laments: “It’s no longer true.” He believes that the radic-lib theme was overplayed. Democrats, scurrying to the center like frightened rabbits under Agnew’s tongue-lashings, are not so certain. Adlai Stevenson III, running for the Illinois Senate seat of the late Everett Dirksen, now wears an American-flag pin, plumps for increased pay for police (whom he described after the Chicago convention as “storm troopers in blue”) and regularly recounts his own combat service in Korea. Hubert Humphrey and Edward Kennedy berate terrorism. Two major anticrime bills with patently unconstitutional features were whooped through the Senate with hardly a liberal nay.

The Senate this year is vulnerable to Republican designs. Twenty-five Democratic seats, compared to only ten held by Republicans, must be defended. To assume political control, the Republicans must win 17 of the 35 races, for a net gain of seven seats, to offset the current 57-43 Democratic advantage. That would divide the chamber evenly, allowing Spiro Agnew, as presiding officer of the Senate, to cast the tie-breaking vote. But to win ideological control of the Senate, Republicans need make only a net gain of four additional conservative seats. Though Republicans would be unable to organize the Senate with a four-seat gain, they could make common cause with the 19 conservatives in the Democratic Party; thus there would be enough conservatives at hand to fashion victories on most ideological issues.

Not all 25 Democratic incumbents are likely targets. At least a dozen Democrats are presumably invincible, including three presidential prospects: Maine’s Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota, Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts. Also on the untouchable list are Montana’s Mike Mansfield, the Senate Democratic leader. West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, Rhode Island’s John Pastore, Washington’s Henry Jackson, Missouri’s Stuart Symington, Mississippi’s John Stennis, Michigan’s Phil Hart and Virginia’s Harry Byrd Jr., who is running as an “independent Democrat.”

On the other side of the chamber, Republicans consider safe six of the ten seats they are defending: those of Minority Leader Hugh Scott in Pennsylvania, Roman Hruska in Nebraska, Ted Stevens in Alaska, Hiram Fong in Hawaii, Paul Fannin in Arizona, and the Delaware seat of retiring Senator John Williams, which Representative William Roth is expected to win.

Since Democratic victories seem reasonably certain in Maryland and Wyoming, there remain 15 battleground states where the struggle for control of the Senate will be decided. Of that number, from the sheer force of the personalities involved, the intensity of the bloodletting, and the unpredictability of the outcome, the following seven are the races attracting the most interest and the greatest expenditure of energy and cash:

TENNESSEE. If any Senator comes close to being as nettlesome to the Administration as Arkansas’ Fulbright, it is Tennessee’s white-thatched, three-term Democratic Senator Albert Gore. A year ago, Spiro Agnew told gleeful Tennessee Republicans he would be back to help ensure Gore’s defeat. It seemed an easy enough task. Gore was hampered by a very liberal voting record; prolonged absences from the state; a dovish stance on the war; close ties to Fulbright, Ted Kennedy and Indiana’s Birch Bayh, the architect of the Haynsworth and Carswell vetoes. Thus Gore seemed to have set the stage for his own defeat.

To finish him off, Nixon chose a clean-cut, young (39) heir to a candymaking fortune, Bill Brock. A three-term Republican Congressman, Brock won 75% of the G.O.P. primary vote over Country Singer Tex Ritter, while Gore, 62, barely turned back a political novice in his own primary, winning only 51% of the vote. The low-keyed Brock, well-organized and generously financed, needles Gore as “the third Senator from Massachusetts” for raising campaign funds at a Kennedy cocktail party in Virginia, and for a “cut-and-run” policy that would tie Nixon’s hands on the war. In a state that cast 71.8% of its 1968 vote for Nixon and George Wallace, Brock looked like a shoo-in.

He still looks like a winner, but no shoo-in. Gore quickly shucked his stuffed-shirt image by strumming a fiddle at a country store, playing checkers in courthouse squares, emphasizing his record as a populist who had fought for Medicare, tax cuts, Social Security, union security. He rode a white horse to dramatize his political purity. When Agnew fulfilled his promise to return, Gore puckishly turned out to welcome him while Brock was tied up in Washington, to the amusement of statewide TV audiences. Brock, meanwhile, has been lackluster. He lost one of his most effective issues when Florida Republicans themselves turned back Carswell in a Senate primary. With solid backing from Nixon and his own impeccable conservative credentials, Brock still leads the polls. “If we win that one,” observes a high-ranking Democrat, “we’ll win everything.”

OHIO. In half a dozen states, the right surname on a ballot means a leg up toward victory. In Ohio, the name is Taft. The candidate who bears it is Representative Robert Taft Jr., son of a Republican Senator, grandson of a Republican President and a likely addition to President Nixon’s political and ideological body count in the Senate. As in so many states, Ohio presents the classic political confrontation of 1970: conservative, Administration-liner Taft opposing a liberal, decidedly anti-Nixon Democrat in Howard Metzenbaum.

Taft is Ivy League, Metzenbaum Big Ten. Because a Cleveland tennis club would not admit Jews, Metzenbaum built his own tennis court. Where Taft is reticent, Metzenbaum is outgoing. Each won narrow primary victories over opponents who are now giving them only pro forma support.

Both men have suffered during the campaign from matters beyond their control. His own integrity is unquestioned, but Taft must run on a Republican ticket with three candidates who have been tarnished in a state-loan scandal. Though most experts give Taft a slight edge, the candidate himself has wondered privately how many voters, outraged by the Republican scandals, will search out his name—which appears seventh on the ballot—and how many will simply pull the Democratic lever.

Metzenbaum incurred a less serious setback last week when he lost his temper over a question by a radio newsman. The reporter asked Metzenbaum if he had helped to organize a social sciences school in Cleveland in the ’40s that had later been declared Red-tinged. The candidate exploded, shouting, “I don’t owe the citizens of the state any explanation!” and hinting that the newsman had been prompted to ask the question by the Ku Klux Klan. The outburst raised a question not of Metzenbaum’s patriotism but of his control over his emotions.

If Taft, a slight favorite, wins, he will take over the seat of an anti-Nixon liberal Democrat, Stephen Young, retiring at age 81.

ILLINOIS. “If his name was Ralph Smith,” fumed Ralph Smith, “he wouldn’t be the nominee.” His name is not Ralph Smith. It is Adlai Stevenson III and he is the nominee. In Illinois, where his father was Governor before becoming an engaging loser of two presidential campaigns, “Young Adlai” holds a solid lead over Republican Senator Ralph Smith. The shopworn dynast charge did not energize Stevenson’s once listless, now bustling campaign, but other Smith allegations did. On television, Smith commercials featured doomsday music and a sepulchral voice demanding, “What has Adlai got against the Chicago police and the FBI?” Stung, Stevenson counterattacked with un-Stevensonian ferocity: “I would not accuse President Nixon of being soft on crime just because campus violence has risen to a high since he took office.”

Smith, who began using his middle name, Tyler, soon after his appointment to the Senate (few Illinoisans could keep in mind who plain Ralph Smith was) is well-financed, gregarious, a more polished platform performer than Stevenson. Nixon and Agnew and twelve Republican Senators have been to Illinois to scrounge dollars and votes for him. Their money harvest has been bountiful; Smith will outspend Stevenson by an estimated 3 to 1.

But Stevenson, supported by powerful Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a convert to his cause, leads in the polls, running well even in heavily Republican suburbs. Even standing still, a man named Adlai Stevenson is not easy to catch in Illinois. Two weeks before

Election Day, Adlai III was very much on the move.

NEW YORK. “I’m a Senator first and a campaigner second,” cried New York Republican Charles Goodell last week. The political consensus is that by next January, Goodell will be neither. Boxed in by liberal Democrat Richard Ottinger and Conservative Party Candidate James Buckley, Goodell is running third. His seat is one of four that the Republicans are in grave danger of losing, and the Republicans are doing all possible to ensure the loss. Spiro Agnew has proclaimed Goodell a radic-lib, a category otherwise reserved for liberal Democrats. He compared Goodell’s ideological turnabout to a celebrated sex-change operation. Goodell, said Agnew, was the “Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party,” a remark that evoked substantial revulsion and a demand for an apology from Miss Jorgensen—which Agnew refused. Though Agnew’s assault won some sympathy for Goodell, it more significantly dried up Republican money sources, who got Agnew’s message and have turned to Buckley.

Appointed to succeed the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Goodell performed an ideological pirouette—from moderately conservative Congressman to flaming-liberal Senator. The maneuver won little critical acclaim, smacking too much of rank opportunism to appease his broadened constituency.

Goodell fought Nixon on Cambodia, demanded that he fix a deadline for Viet Nam troop withdrawal, voted against Haynsworth and Carswell. When Nixon Aide Murray Chotiner urged New York Republicans to support a candidate who could best work with the Administration, Goodell—and everyone else —knew he did not mean Goodell. Months ago, Nixon reportedly told a Republican Senator: “I hope Ted leaves Charlie alone. He [Goodell] is a disaster, but he’s our disaster. I told him to cool it.” But no one believes that Agnew or Chotiner would act without at least a wink from the President.

Democrats, who outnumber Republicans in New York, have little reason to abandon their own nominee. Ottinger, as liberal as Goodell, shelled out nearly $2 million to win the primary, largely with saturation television commercials.

His family’s fortune (U.S. Plywood) will enable him to do so again—and again. Criticized as a creation of television, Ottinger is countering with 14-hour days of personal appearances to affirm that the flesh and blood are real.

Privately, Ottinger has written off Goodell, turning his campaign artillery instead to his right flank, where Buckley, crew-cut and charming, poses a growing threat.

Buckley’s well-organized campaign is directed by ex-Goldwater Aide F. Clifton White with advice from Brother Bill, U.S. conservatism’s most literate paladin.

Buckley the candidate softly rakes “the voices of doubt and despair,” claims to rap with the Silent Majority, curries the hardhat vote and—essential to his Nixon-Agnew support—promises to vote with Republicans in organizing the Senate.

By continuing to strum themes suggesting that Buckley supports a rollback of the minimum wage and lessened union security, Ottinger is confident of winning back stray workingmen. An Ottinger win over Goodell would reduce Republican political strength in the Senate. Ideologically, it would be a standoff for Nixon-Agnew, but Goodell’s political epitaph would cause liberal Republicans, far less aberrant than he, to wonder how often they can stray from the Administration reservation without being read out of the tribe.

CALIFORNIA. Gray-haired and raspy-voiced from a successful operation for throat cancer, oldtime Hoofer George Murphy, 68, is trying to dance out of the way of a strong challenge to his bid for a second Senate term by a Democrat named Tunney. If the Tunney were Gene, a contemporary, Murphy could worry less. But it is John. 36-year-old son of the former heavyweight champion, a three-term Congressman who looks, talks and acts like a somehow unaccounted-for Kennedy brother.

In Reagan country, Tunney has tried to neutralize the permissiveness tag that is automatically affixed to every liberal Democrat.

Tunney has ridden at night in a police car and he demands that the men in blue be protected from would-be assassins, evoking a “Tunney-come-lately” gibe from Spiro Agnew. He also exploits California’s rising rate of unemployment, as high as 15% in some job categories, tells laboring men who are satisfied with that to vote for George Murphy. He keeps a generous distance between himself and Reagan’s Democratic opponent, Jess Unruh, who now appears certain to lose big on Nov. 3.

Murphy stresses “what is good about America,” criticizes Tunney’s opposition to a bill allowing FBI agents to investigate campus bombings, links his foe to radical-liberal causes and individuals. Still hawkish, Murphy assures his audiences: “The war is going great.” Murphy’s age is a handicap, as is his admission that he was on Technicolor Inc.’s payroll while serving in the Senate. Head to head, Tunney probably would win. Republicans hope Reagan’s ample coattails will drag his old showbiz pal along too.

FLORIDA. With regular infusions of wealthy retirees, Florida has taken on an increasingly conservative political coloration. Republicans four years ago captured the statehouse and two years ago elected a Senator. This year a bitter primary fight split the party. Representative William C. Cramer won the nomination over Harrold Carswell and now must face the most engaging new figure to emerge from Florida Democratic ranks in a decade. Lawton Chiles, 40, overcame a lack of financial support in the primary with a 1,000-mile walk through the state. He recently bugged Cramer by staging a dollar-a-plate dinner on a night when Cramer supporters were paying as much as $1,000 per couple to drink cocktails with him. “Ours is a people’s campaign,” Chiles says mischievously.

In a sense it is. Thousands of voters have seen “Walkin’ Lawton” in the flesh, clad in khaki pants, light blue shirt, scuffed ankle boots. Not easily tarred by the permissiveness brush, Chiles counters Cramer’s tough law-and-order campaign with his own call for a crackdown on bombings.

Cramer, 48 and chubby, argues that “a Republican-controlled Senate is vital to the success of the President’s programs.” Unless a Nixon visit turns the tide. Chiles is expected to win.

TEXAS. “If Bentsen is going to try to go to my right, he’s gonna step off the edge of the earth.” Thus Republican George Bush last week capsuled the philosophical differences between himself and his opponent, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. No matter what, Nixon will gain a simpatico ideologue from Texas next month.

Such an outcome was assured when Bentsen upset liberal Ralph Yarborough in the primary by linking the incumbent to the Democratic convention riots in Chicago and to campus unrest and permissiveness. Now Bentsen and Bush —expecting the Yarborough support to sit this one out—grope for a major share of the Texas conservative vote. Concedes Bentsen: “I’ve got to find an issue that will catch fire.”

Supported by Lyndon Johnson, former Governor John Connally and most of the Texas Democratic Establishment, Bentsen argues that Texas already has one Republican Senator in Washington, and Nixon has “all the Republicans he deserves.” Bush stresses his close relationship with the President, who encouraged him to run, hints that Texas would have a link to White House inner circles if he should win. Neither argument is stirring Texans. Many will be satisfied with whoever wins, and are perfectly content to let it just happen.

Spiro the Imponderable

Of the eight remaining battleground states, Democrats lead the polls, though sometimes marginally, in all but one. Though any or all could be swept aside by the whirlwind of final campaigning, incumbents Frank E. Moss in Utah, Howard Cannon in Nevada, Joseph Montoya in New Mexico, North Dakota’s Quentin Burdick and New Jersey’s Harrison Williams are currently ahead. So are the Rev. Joseph Duffy, chairman of Americans for Democratic Action and the Democratic nominee in Connecticut, and former Governor Philip Hoff in Vermont. Only in Indiana do the Republicans now have the edge, where Representative Richard Roudebush has a slight lead over Democratic Incumbent Vance Hartke.

In these key states, as in others, perhaps the major imponderable of 1970 is Spiro Agnew and the impact of his rock’em, sock-’em style of campaigning. Republicans are as puzzled as Democrats. In conservative Nevada, Governor Paul Laxalt declares Agnew the most popular politician in the land. But in equally conservative Texas’ and Wyoming, G.O.P. leaders fear that the Vice President, while generating Republican enthusiasm and dollars, frightens off independents and moderates. For months, New Jersey Republicans have delayed inviting Agnew into the state and were once rumored”to have considered capitalizing on his unquestioned fund-raising ability by chartering a ship in New York Harbor for his appearance, still keeping him out of the state. Lowell Weicker, running for the Senate in Connecticut, publicly expressed the hope that Agnew will “choose a major issue in the campaign and discuss it positively” when he campaigns for him.

If the President is victorious in the battle for the Senate, the returns to him and his party will be bountiful. New cogency will attach to Administration arguments that a Silent Majority does exist, and that its march is plainly in the direction in which Nixon wants to lead. Republican moderates in the Senate, sensing the changed political winds, will re-evaluate the wisdom of independent stances on issues as crucial to their President as Supreme Court nominees.

Party leadership in the Senate almost certainly will pass from moderate Hugh Scott, who at 69 probably would be unable to make a sufficiently marked —and sufficiently swift—ideological about-face. Democrats, too, will be expected to extend their current scramble for the center to a point somewhat farther to the right. A possible development: a repeat of the 1969 liberal v. conservative fight for the post of Democratic whip. Ted Kennedy, who defeated Russell Long, could easily be toppled by conservative Robert Byrd.

Additionally, Nixon will be strongly catapulted toward a successful re-election bid in 1972. He might then with reason set a new goal of a Republican House of Representatives.

If Republicans gain no ground or even lose some after such a mailed-fist assault on the Senate, Nixon may see in the results a suggestion that while America periodically drifts either right or left, it has rarely moved far or fast in either direction. And he will have to resign himself to at least two more years of coexistence with a liberal Senate, made all the more truculent by his efforts to transform it.