The Citizen Candidate

When an egghead runs for political office, his backers ordinarily try to build up his image as a regular guy. If, for example, he once went to a baseball game, he now gets billed as a devoted fan. But H. Stuart Hughes, running as an independent for Senator from Massachusetts, departs from this pattern. A Harvard history professor and the author of several scholarly works, Hughes is an egghead who makes no concessions to popular political behavior.

Opting Out. Tall and owlish, Hughes candidly declares that he has "never been a strenuous anti-Communist" and that his "sympathies have mostly been with democratic socialism." He strenuously advocates nuclear disarmament, wants the U.S.

to start on it even if the Russians do not go along step for step. He favors U.S. recognition of Red China and East Germany, a "drastic reduction" of NATO, closing down of U.S. missile bases in NATO countries, and the "nuclear demilitarization" of West Germany (and adjoining Soviet satellites) along lines suggested by Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki in 1957.

In short, Hughes speaks to and for those people who in their horror of nuclear war believe that the U.S. can attain peace simply by opting out of the struggle.

In domestic policy, Hughes urges a 35-hour work week, a $1.50-an-hour minimum wage, subsidized housing, and "medical care for all." Most politicians, on advocating such a program, would at least be inclined to temper it with ritual tributes to free enterprise. But Hughes does not bother with that kind of platform piety--or piety of any sort. "I," he announced at his first campaign press conference, "am an agnostic." Murmured a reporter in the audience: "There goes the ball game." In one striking respect, Hughes does resemble his rivals for John Kennedy's old Senate seat, Democrats Teddy Kennedy and Eddie McCormack, and Republican George Cabot Lodge, son of Richard Nixon's 1960 running mate. Hughes, too, is a scion; his father was once U.S. Solicitor General, and his grandfather was Charles Evans Hughes, onetime Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the U.S.

Candidate Hughes is frankly contemptuous of the political pretensions of his fellow New England scions. At 46, he considers them much too young and inexperienced for the Senate. "The President's brother is patently unqualified," he says, "and none of the other candidates is really up to the job." Speaking Out. Hughes does not seriously expect to win a seat in the Senate, but neither is he running just for fun. To get on the ballot at all, he had to collect at least 72,500 petition signatures. His devoted band of followers, largely made up of pacifists and ban-the-bomb marchers, actually gathered 117,636--a remarkable feat. He has spent $30,000 on his campaign, piled up debts of $12,000. What is he trying to accomplish? He wants to get a serious public hearing for his ideas on disarmament and disengagement. He also wants to prove that a man without much money can run for high public office.

"Increasingly," he says, "only a very small number of people think of running for office at all, unless they are professional politicians or people with large private means. Mine is what I call a citizen candidacy, as opposed to a slick-operation professional candidacy. My effort is to establish a new model in politics. Of all the political careers in history, President Kennedy's has been the most expensive, from the moment he ran for the House. I think it is time for somebody to speak out against this."

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