Straws in the Wind

P:In Detroit, Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa announced ferociously that his huge, racket-riddled union would organize nationally to defeat every one of the 324 Senators and Representatives who voted for the hated Landrum-Griffin labor-reform bill. Singled out on Hoffa's purge list: Massachusetts' Senator John F. Kennedy, top banana of the Democratic presidential hopefuls ("I won't support any spoiled millionaires," huffed Hoffa), and--surprisingly--Michigan's Senator Patrick V. McNamara, longtime (1937-55) president of the Detroit Pipefitters (A.F.L.) and shameless apologist for the Teamsters Union during the Senate investigation of Hoffa and his henchmen. Still a political toddler, Hoffa may regret his hasty ukase against Pat McNamara: he may have unwittingly painted himself into the corner of Congressman Robert P. Griffin, 36, one of the likeliest of Republican candidates for McNamara's Senate seat next year, and one of the sponsors of the labor-reform bill.

P:The Baptist General Convention of Texas, meeting in Corpus Christi, struck a glancing blow at Roman Catholic candidates for high political office, e.g., Jack Kennedy, California's Governor Pat Brown. The convention advised its 1,600,000 fellow Baptists that, since "the Roman Church is both a religion and an ambitious political system aspiring to be a state, we recommend that our people bear these facts in mind when they are asked to vote for a Catholic official."

P:Passing through Denver, the Democrats' presidential anchor man, Hubert Humphrey, paused in a backroom to give some local politicos his current rundown on the situation. Items: Lyndon Johnson and Jack Kennedy are "as good as out of it now"; of his other rivals, only Stuart Symington and Adlai Stevenson are "still possibilities"; Humphrey will take on Kennedy in the Wisconsin and Oregon primaries, will "clobber him in both." And, "if I see I cannot make it, I will sit down and talk with Stevenson."

P:The morning mail brought a noteworthy item to city rooms all over Texas. It was a reprint of an editorial from a Texas paper: "Lyndon Baines Johnson, the senior Senator from Texas, and the Senate majority leader, has become one of our greatest statesmen. And the Paris News wishes to say in plain words that it feels Lyndon Johnson should be the next President of the United States." At the bottom of the release was an arresting editor's note: "This editorial is being mailed to all weekly and daily newspapers in Texas at the request of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson."

P:New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller quivered on his launching pad, preparing to take off this week on a breathtaking, "nonpolitical" swoosh through California and three other Western states, will make 35 public appearances in four days. In Albany, meanwhile, Rocky was assembling a high-octane, presidential-type staff of experts. In as his chief military adviser (officially his executive assistant in Albany) was General (ret.) Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, most recently Chief of Staff to NATO Chief General Lauris Norstad. For his growing platoon of speechwriters, Rockefeller signed on Hugh Morrow, onetime Washington correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, more recently the busy strop behind Senator Kenneth Keating's well-honed speeches (TIME, Oct. 5). And Advertising Executive Tom Losee took a leave of absence from his job as vice president of Manhattan's big McCann-Erickson agency to serve as Rocky's top TV-radio consultant.

P:In Los Angeles two dissimilar traveling candidates announced some similar ambitions. Indiana Congressman Charles Halleek admitted he was available as vice-presidential nominee on a Republican ticket with either Nelson Rockefeller or Richard Nixon. But, he added gloomily, "I don't think it's in the cards." And New York's Mayor Robert Wagner, who had just suffered a blow at home with the defeat of a school-bond proposal, was just as willing to take second place on the Democratic ticket: "Anyone who says he isn't interested would be kidding himself and kidding the public."

P:In New Hampshire, the battle lines were drawn. Last week, one month after Nelson Rockefeller's friends set up a GHQ in Concord from which to wage his fight for next March's keynote presidential primary (TIME, Oct. 5), the advocates of Vice President Richard Nixon also pitched camp in Concord with a similar organization. Nixon's high-powered strategy board includes Senators Styles Bridges and Norris Cotton, and onetime Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks.

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