National Affairs: THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS In 1960 Their Big Year

IN the early politicking toward the 1960 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party’s 35 Governors have been rated more as pawns than potential kingmakers. This campaign, said the pundits, belonged either to twice-defeated Adlai Stevenson or to one of four U.S. Senators: Massachusetts’ Jack Kennedy, Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, Missouri’s Stuart Symington or Texas’ Lyndon Johnson. But as candidates and their hardheaded professionals get down to counting delegates, they will find the Governors in command of most delegations fully aware of their separate and collective bargaining power and—in some cases —firm believers that a Governor belongs somewhere on the ticket.

Still at work in the Governors’ favor is the same old chemistry that has kept either party from nominating a U.S. Senator since Republicans put up Ohio’s Warren Gamaliel Harding for President in 1920. Senators make enemies in their votes on controversial issues, and this year’s crop is no exception (e.g., the Democratic vote against confirmation of Lewis Strauss as Commerce Secretary). Moreover, presidential candidates in the Senate are having a great deal of trouble keeping their luster in the current squabble over Democratic Party policy (see The Congress) and are suffering from overexposure to the voters. Aspiring Governors cannot claim to influence foreign policy, but they have not got onto the national stage enough to be boring; most of them have submitted balanced budgets, and all have tested their executive mettle in dealing with their legislatures.

Those who run big states will be the strong men at Los Angeles, and the better they run them the better they will look:

California’s Edmund Gerald Brown, 54, laid his political prestige on the line with a sheaf of legislative proposals, and came through with banners waving. He pushed through a state FEPC, abolished the oddball cross-filing system for party primaries, organized down-to-smokestack antismog attack, raised taxes enough to trim a threatened $201 million deficit to $5,000,000, launched a long-dreamed-of $2 billion waterway program to deliver Northern California’s water to Southern California’s arid, sunny region (TIME, June 29). He gained effective control of a divided party, has cagily chaperoned visiting would-be nominees, giving none a chance to sneak around his favorite-son “off-limits” sign.

Connecticut’s Abraham A. Ribicoff, 49, onetime police-court judge and Congressman (1949-53), has gained impressive stature in his five years in office, pushed a broad reform program through the now Democratic legislature. He got a balanced budget (but slid from a 1957 surplus of $32.3 million to a deficit this year of $10.5 million), court reform, a tough law on automatic suspension for convicted speeders, a tourist-luring ad campaign, abolition of the 300-year-old county-government system. A Jew, he has since 1956 gone into other states—last week into California—as an all-out backer of Roman Catholic Jack Kennedy.

Michigan’s G. Mennen Williams, at 48 an eleven-year veteran in office, still has a bow-tie manner and a considerable list of achievements (e.g., expanded state universities, reformed mental hospitals) to his credit, but his longstanding political alliance with U.A.W. President Walter Reuther has become an albatross that worries even liberal Democrats. Moreover, Williams’ prestige has been damaged by Michigan’s failure to meet some of its payrolls (TIME, May 4), even though an uncompromising bloc of G.O.P. state senators is just as much to blame as Soapy.

New Jersey’s Robert Meyner, a trim 51, made tight-fisted administration and somewhat bipartisan clean government “his formula for two successful terms. He surprised this year’s legislature with a balanced budget that called for no new taxes, fought to keep it from being unbalanced by a bill on scholarships for students at private colleges, took a damaging defeat when his veto was overridden. He has not abandoned dark-horse presidential hopes, but the hopes all but abandoned him after he failed to get across to audiences on a Midwestern tour last August.

Pennsylvania’s David Leo Lawrence, 70, who as four-term (1946-1958) mayor of Pittsburgh teamed with Republican business leaders on the rebuilding of Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, finds his bipartisan citizens’ commission system failing to work on the state level. His first budget, which asks no new spending programs but proposed special taxes to wipe out a deficit inherited from the preceding Democratic administration, has been blocked in the legislature for four months by shrewd G.O.P. opposition, for once unified on an issue, Lawrence, Pennsylvania’s first Roman Catholic Governor, found so much upstate anti-Catholic opposition during his campaign that he is likely to put the third largest delegation (more than 70) behind a safe Protestant candidate.

Ohio’s Michael Vincent DiSalle, 51, onetime Toledo mayor (1948-50) and later federal price boss (1950-52), moved so decisively in many directions the minute he took the State House last January that he raised howls from utilities, unions, the N.A.M., Catholic leaders (he is Catholic), Cleveland’s powerful Democratic bloc in the state senate, Republicans all around the state. But he got results, by last week had won $206 million of his requested $237 million tax boost, would soon set off on a stump tour across the state to restore his damaged popularity and bolster his stock as a favorite son.

A powerful Governor from a lesser state is a pivot man, who still has the chance to turn a trend or hope for nomination because of some special qualification. The pivot men:

Florida’s LeRoy Collins, 50, six years in office, took his worst blasting—for moderation on race issues—from this year’s angry legislature. But when the smoke cleared, he had won an impressive half of a 73-point program, held the line against racist bills and school-locking laws. Chairman of the National Governors’ Conference, Episcopalian Collins is the Southern Governor who has the most appeal for both Northern moderates and liberals.

Iowa’s Herschel Cellel Loveless, 48, shrewd two-termer (1956, ’58 ) in a G.O.P. state, is a one-room-school graduate, onetime gandy-dancer boss, a tireless campaigner who talks over nobody’s head (“I speak their language. If I want to say ‘ain’t,’ I say ‘ain’t’ “). Touted by admirers as a “tightfisted liberal.” Loveless got elected campaigning against ”high-tax Republicans,” used his veto to trim the sales tax (from 2½% to 2%), lucked into booming revenues from old taxes as recession-free Iowa expanded industrially. He held his own with the G.O.P. legislature, lured Democrats out of 18-year hibernation, proved his control over the state party by effortlessly knocking over Chairman Jake More.

Minnesota’s Orville Freeman, 41, Hubert Humphrey’s partner in building the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party into a vote-making concern, last year piled up a surplus-sized majority for his third two-year term, helped defeat Republican Senator Ed Thye. This year, in the state senate, Old Guard Republican forces retaliated by blocking Freeman’s tax program in the regular session, held out through a special session, finally forced a compromise on their terms ½% boost in income-tax rates, no withholding) last weekend. For President, Freeman naturally has no choice except Hubert Humphrey.

Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson, 43, this year took over an office that was comfortably occupied for 24 years by Republicans, eagerly wrapped into a single, 42-point legislative program the welfare proposals and tax changes he futilely backed for ten years as a minority state senator. He dropped this do-it-now package upon the Senate, which, still G.O.P.-controlled (20-13), let it lie largely unopened and unpassed. Looking to his own future, Nelson would like to avoid a bitter presidential primary fight in Wisconsin between Kennedy and Humphrey.

Some Governors who have neither power nor pivot possibilities can still operate on the basis of personality or freshness:

Kansas’ George Docking, 55, is a budget-watching Lawrence banker. Like Iowa’s Loveless, he won his first term in the Republican heartland (1956) by condemning a halfpenny G.O.P. sales-tax hike (2% to 2½%), won again on the same issue in 1958 to become the state’s first two-term Democratic Governor. Of late he set Republicans guessing whether he will run next year for a third term or go after Andrew Schoeppel’s Senate seat, also genially encouraged rumors that he might get a chance at the ticket’s No. 2 spot.

Oklahoma’s J. Howard Edmonson, at 33 youngest of the 49 Governors, called his biggest-ever state majority last year a “mandate” for reform, repealed state prohibition and set up a state-income-tax withholding system. But old hands in the legislature refused to be reformed out of business, slapped down such notions as reapportionment of the legislature, got mad enough to pose a threat to the Governor’s traditional control over the state’s convention delegation.

Washington’s Albert Dean Rosellini, 49, son of an immigrant Italian grocer, was a freewheeling Seattle criminal lawyer and 18-year state senator, won his four-year term in 1956. His overoptimism on tax estimates, plus the recession, ran up a $48 million deficit in his first biennium, which he dealt with in this year’s legislature—Democratic in both houses by the largest majority since New Deal days—by pushing through tax boosts that set off a short-lived taxpayer revolt. In Protestant-majority Washington, Rosellini shivers at the fear of a Catholic presidential candidate calling attention to the Catholics already holding Washington’s key jobs: Governor, speaker of the house, president of the senate, secretary of state, attorney general.

Colorado’s Stephen L R. McNichols, 45, a cold-eyed, dollarwise, Western type who got most of his program t including model plans for aid to the aged, mental health and state highways) through the Democratic legislature. Although on the Democratic Advisory Council, he plumps mostly for such Western causes as reclamation projects, has much regard for Texan Lyndon Johnson’s ideas. One of the West’s able Catholics, he has upped his vice-presidential lightning rod, demands party attention to his region. Says he: “We have votes as well as political savvy.”

Of all the Governors, California’s Pat Brown now looms as the most important politically—because of his impressive record, his state’s growing importance and the large number of delegates he will control. Once he seemed flattered to be discussed as a favorite son: now he not only takes seriously some talk of a vice-presidential nomination but listens to speculation about a presidential lightning bolt. And like most of the other seven Catholic Democratic Governors, Pat Brown has no interest at all in advancing the candidacy of front-running Catholic Jack Kennedy, since obviously two Catholics do not make a winning ticket.

With New York in Republican hands, it is California’s Brown, Pennsylvania’s Lawrence, New Jersey’s Meyner, Michigan’s Williams and the other big-delegation state leaders who can do much to set the trend at the start of the Los Angeles convention. And in the floor fighting that follows, they and their favorite sons could become the most sought-after Democratic Governors in many a convention year.