Showdown for Ev's Chair

Senate Democrats have long been accustomed to the gentlemanly brawling between their factions of Southern conservatives and urban liberals. It is less often that Senate Republicans, so long a minority, have displayed their divisions. Yet the Senate G.O.P. now includes a band of moderates and liberals increasingly disposed to cross party lines to vote with their ideological counterparts on such issues as ABM and civil rights. Last week, as the 43 Republican Senators prepared to select Everett Dirksen's successor as minority leader, the factional lines of stress became clear.

The favorite of the liberals was Pennsylvania's Hugh Scott, 68, an "Eastern Establishment" Republican who has served for the past eight months as minority whip under Dirksen. As the week began, the more conservative members were split between Nebraska's Roman Hruska, 65, and Tennessee's Howard Baker Jr., 43, Dirksen's son-in-law.

Actually, the Republicans preferred, if possible, to avoid an ideological showdown in this week's voting. For one thing, the minority leader under a Republican President acts more as an executive officer taking orders from the White House than as a commander in his own right. Even so, the liberal-moderates and the conservatives, divided more or less evenly, were guarding their interests.

Southern Cog. At week's end, Scott had at least 16 of the 22 votes he needed for victory. With a strong record in favor of civil rights, the Pennsylvanian attracted virtually all of the liberal faction--New York's Jacob Javits and Charles Goodell, Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper, Oregon's Mark Hatfield, Illinois' Charles Percy, Massachusetts' Edward Brooke, and others. Yet Scott's record has not been so liberal as to make him completely unacceptable to conservatives. He passed the Administration's loyalty test, for example, by voting for the ABM. He attracted some support because his victory would leave open the minority whip's job, which a number of Senators in all factions covet.

One of Scott's handicaps was his age. Some Republicans thought that Baker, who is 25 years younger than Scott, would project a more youthful and agreeable image of the Senate G.O.P. But electing the Tennessean, who only came to the Senate in 1967, would violate senatorial traditions of seniority. Some moderates were also fearful that elevating Baker, who has consistently voted with the Administration, would seem to add a cog to the Nixon-Thurmond "Southern strategy."

Baker could count at least twelve firm votes last week, and had a chance of capsizing Scott by picking up half a dozen undecided votes as well as support from Hruska's conservatives. Then Hruska, the third declared candidate, decided to drop out of the race and throw his support behind Baker. That left Baker and Scott in something close to a dead heat.

Should Scott and Baker deadlock, some Senators favored compromising on Delaware's John Williams, a 22-year veteran of the Senate. But Williams, who plans to retire at the end of 1970, refused last week even to consider the idea.

One of the uncommitted upon whom the election may hang was hurriedly schooling himself in Republican senatorial politics and protocol. He is Ralph Smith, 53, a self-styled flexible conservative who was speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives until last week, when Governor Richard Ogilvie appointed him to fill the late Everett Dirksen's Senate post until next year's election.

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