Travels With Bobby

Kennedy's immediate task is to give the Democratic Party shock treatment of sufficient voltage to deny Lyndon Johnson a preconvention lock on the nomination. To this end, he double-timed through ten states last week, from Oregon to Indiana to Arizona, for a total of 15 in his first fortnight of candidacy. Bobby's travels were a smash.

His appearances in Los Angeles tied up traffic on the Hollywood Freeway for hours. He drew an overflow crowd of 12,000 at Brigham Young University in conservative Utah, even though campus authorities declined to cancel classes for the occasion. In Lincoln, Neb., he attracted the biggest political audience (12,000) since Dwight Eisenhower stopped there 16 years ago.

Early in the week he occasionally played the demagogue. Not only did he continue his practice of blaming Johnson for virtually every social evil from crime to narcotics; at one point he even accused the President of "appealing to the darker impulses of the American spirit." This was a bit too much for some of Kennedy's close advisers. "You won't hear any more of that," said one, and Bobby himself later commented: "I'm afraid I didn't handle it very well."

Quiet Moonlighting. The Senator did manage to cushion his abrasiveness, and everything else was go, go, go. He added Indiana to the list of primaries he will enter. He talked so much that he exhausted his voice, needed the ministrations of a throat specialist. When not engaged in dead-serious attack, he scored points with quick quips. During a speech at California's San Fernando Valley State College, when chimes drowned him out for a moment, he ad-libbed: "I'll get even with you, Ronald Reagan."

While Bobby blurred across the landscape, the back-room segment of his campaign streaked with equal determination. A battalion of speechwriters and strategists, secretaries and file clerks established headquarters on three floors of a new building at 2000 L Street in Washington, attempting, as one staffer put it, to do in a few weeks "what it took John Kennedy 16 months to do."

Well-financed and professional as always, the Kennedy clipper was sailing smartly, despite its late start. His aides reported that some Johnson Administration officials and their wives were quietly moonlighting for the New York Senator. Even some Washington newsmen's wives were being approached with the line: "How would you like to get involved in an honest-to-gosh presidential campaign?" In 1960, the Kennedys got to almost every convention delegate as early as possible, recorded their preferences in a card catalogue that proved accurate to within a few votes by convention time. The 1968 dossier has already been started.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.