Grooming for the Groom

Spurred since his undergraduate days at Princeton by ambitions to become New Jersey's governor. Republican State Senator Malcolm Stevenson Forbes four years ago tried his handshaking best to get the job. He never got past the primary.

But noting that he had lost to the organi zation candidate by only 52,000 votes, Forbes altered his tactics. He continued to nail outstretched hands, and mailed out family-photo Christmas cards to more than 5,000 New Jersey voters. But he also spent the time between elections cultivating the Garden State's G.O.P.

bosses, pollinating them with a potent dust: support Forbes in 1957 or Forbes will fight you in a harmony-smashing primary. Last week, with nearly all Republican factions blooming for him, scrappy Malcolm Forbes, 37, easily walked away with the nomination, immediately set about handshaking and orating his way towards November.

All for Ike. From now until the general election, New Jerseyites are due for a frontal assault from a determined, politically canny young man. In a state where Eisenhower swept through such traditional Democratic strongholds as Hudson County last year, Forbes will lose no chance to remind voters that he was an original Eisenhower man. Although Forbes is a millionaire, and editor and publisher of conservative Forbes' business magazine, founded by his father,* he is an all-out modern Republican on the hustings. He combines a talent for extemporaneous debate with thorough knowledge of political and economic affairs gleaned from heavy reading and annual trips abroad.

Perhaps his strongest political asset is a highly photogenic family of four boys and a girl, who go to St. James Protestant Episcopal Church in Bernardsville in the dark green, blue and white kilts of clan Forbes. Their job: to offset the orange-blossom blush worn by handsome, greying Democratic Governor Robert B. (for Baumle) Meyner, 48, since he married Adlai Stevenson's distant relative by marriage, Helen Stevenson, last January. But Forbes has other ammunition to fire at Meyner. During the primary he sighted over the head of perennial G.O.P. candidate Wayne Dumont Jr., blasted Meyner for the state's rising budget ($342 million in 1958). To Jerseyites, who pay no sales or personal-income taxes, Forbes's specter of reckless New Deal spending may be a big-mileage issue.

But Meyner will not be easy. Constitutionally, the governor of New Jersey has more patronage and power than any other governor in the land; Meyner is generally conceded to have used his to build up a young, effective and shrewd organization. Last week, while Forbes was drubbing Dumont with a vote of 215,565 to 125,602, Meyner, unopposed and running without campaigning, approached 200,000 votes. He intends to fight with everything he has, and in addition, Democratic leaders would be delighted if they could present him as a prospective father by election time (at his press conferences reporters have begun to ask regularly about "developments at home." i.e., family prospects). With new victory to recommend him, and with New Jersey's big delegation behind him. a victorious Bob Meyner would go to the 1960 Democratic Convention as an imposing, successful and moderate dark horse with few handicaps.

As for November: "It really makes no difference to me who's running for governor on the Republican ticket," he said, as he and Helen set off on a Florida vacation. "I think I can win." With active, attractive Candidate Forbes in his future, Meyner will have to run some to prove it.

-No kin. -Highlands-born B.C. (for Bertie Charles) Forbes prided himself on being a friend of tycoons and foe of unions, spent more than 30 years as a Hearst columnist and financial editor, preaching around a single theme: "Business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions."

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