Up & Down Hill

Last week U.S. politicians were marching up and down hill. Items:

P:On his way to New Hampshire, Tennessee's Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver stopped over in Boston, ran into ugly weather, donned a slicker and sou'wester that made it a hard choice as to whether he most resembled Captain Ahab or the Uneeda Biscuit boy. In New Hampshire, Kefauver cried: "I'm here to win." Later he explained: "I want to be President of the U.S. because I have great ambitions for our country." In the same spirit, he refused to pose for photographers in his familiar coonskin cap, saying that he has reluctantly scrapped it as his political symbol because "some people think it's a little undignified." Thrown behind schedule by handshakers at Portsmouth, Estes glowed, "Now I know why it's so pleasant to campaign in New Hampshire." Not so pleasant was his situation in home-state Tennessee, where Governor Frank Clement was making plans to go to Chicago as a favorite-son candidate, thereby leaving Kefauver out in the cold.

P:Adlai Stevenson asked New Hampshire supporters not to enter him in the state's presidential primary. Stevenson said he is running in the Minnesota primary, which comes a week after New Hampshire's, and "to enter both would mean that I could not do in either what I think ought to be done to make a primary election really meaningful." Dartmouth College Professor Herbert W. Hill, the man to whom Stevenson wrote, said that a slate of delegate candidates favorable to Stevenson would be entered anyway.

P:Chicago Daily Newsman Ed Lahey reported that he had wired Thomas E. Dewey, seeking an interview about the possibility that Dewey might again be a presidential candidate. By wire Dewey replied: "Don't pay any attention to any political talk about me. It is nonsense. My only interest is in the renomination and election of the President."

P:Onetime (1940-45) Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the Indiana seat in the U.S. Senate now held by Republican Homer Capehart.

P:The way was opened for Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins, now filling out an unexpired term, to run for reelection. A circuit judge ruled that the Florida law prohibiting a governor from succeeding himself does not apply in Collins' case.

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