CALIFORNIA: Coming Attraction

Just like the cowboys in the horse opera, California Republicans buckled on their shooting irons and got set for the biggest gubernatorial gun fight in all California history. The way the good guys and bad guys shaped up, there was no mistaking the real claim to be staked: Washington.

Republican Senator William Fife Knowland, who has announced his retirement from the Senate in 1958, is now clearly out to take California's statehouse away from his fellow Republican, Governor Goodwin J. Knight, next year. If this is done, any reasonable scenario calls for Knowland to head straight for the presidential nomination in 1960—and run head-on into an even bigger battle with another ambitious Californian, Vice President Richard Nixon.

When he rode grimly into Los Angeles territory last week, Big Bill Knowland set about doing away with his transparent pretense that nothing political was on his mind. Nope, he told newsmen, there was nothing new to announce concerning his future plans. Yep, he and the missis were planning to take a vacation. And then he would "tour the state from the Oregon border to the Mexican border." Was this to be all one big vacation trip? Big Bill shifted his gun belt. "You can't," he said without cracking a smile, "combine a vacation with a campaign."

Potshots. Showing up at a $100-a-plate dinner thrown for him at the Hollywood Palladium by 2,200 well-heeled Republicans, Knowland got a raft of solid applause, intoned a rambling speech that was significant only for intimations of his political future. Potshot at Ike: the budget should be cut—by $3 billion, no less. Potshot at Knight (who was avoidably absent from the dinner): "The people of California are entitled to select their own nominees for public office and not to be handed a selected group where the public has no real choice ... in determining the nominees for governor." Big Bill, it was easy to see, was not just riding a rocking horse.

For his part, "Goodie" Knight saddled up, too. He has no intention of giving way to Knowland, for easygoing Goodie likes being governor as much as he dislikes Knowland—and nearly as much as he dislikes Richard Nixon. And he is stone-cold to any deal that might have him running for Knowland's vacant seat in the Senate. Even in a state that already has a Knowland and a Nixon, Goodie thinks about 1960, and that potent weapon, the 70-man state delegation to the G.O.P. Convention. And beyond that, maybe even the big white ranch house down yonder in Washington. But just as he is faced on the one side by Knowland's smoking guns, so is Knight hemmed in on the other by the long-range rifles of Nixon, who might take part of the delegation away from the governor. To sit tight in his saddle, then. Goodie Knight kicked up the dust and ranged up and down the state last week rounding up a posse.