POLITICAL NOTES: Upset in Nevada

POLITICAL NOTES Upset in Nevada

Seven months ago, former Newsman Tom Mechling, 31, and his pretty brunette wife Margaret set out on a campaign tour that outdid the Fuller Brush man. Taking turns at the wheel of an auto trailer, they toured Nevada 18 hours a day, seven days a week, ringing doorbells and chatting with registered voters—Mechling estimated a total of 60,000 of them. Last week, at trip's end, Tom Mechling won Nevada's Democratic nomination for Senator in one of the year's most startling political upsets. His defeated opponent: popular, former State Attorney General Alan Bible, 42, the hand-picked candidate of powerful Senator Pat McCarran.

Tall (6 ft. 2-| in.) Tom Mechling decided to make the race a year ago while covering Washington newsheets for the Kiplinger Washington Letter. A veteran (Air Intelligence), he became a Nevadan in 1945, married the daughter of a wealthy Wells (Nev.) rancher. In Washington, Tom was a hard-digging reporter with an unquenchable idealism. Said a fellow Kiplinger staffer: "Tom's the slow burn type. But when he gets mad. he'll pop." Tom Mechling's slow burn began with the stories Margaret carried home evenings from her patronage job as a stenographer on Pat McCarran's Immigration subcommittee. Angered by the highhanded tactics of Nevada's silver-thatched Senator, Tom began to question his friends: Do you think people vote for politicians (i.e., hacks) just because they have no choice? Later, his friends realized that the question had a purpose: Mechling was making up his mind.

With savings of $7,600 for campaign expenses, Tom went back to Nevada last February and began to lash out at McCarran's "machine rule" of the state. At street-corner meetings he came out for FEPC, federal power and the Administration's foreign policy; he denounced Bible as a member of McCarran's machine. Bible ran as a "states' rights Democrat" and native son, called Mechling a "brash young upstart." Irked by Tom's hard-hitting campaign, Pat McCarran himself went on the air, issued an eight-page statement urging Bible's election.

When Mechling won (15,915 to 15,251), Bible pledged his support, but vindictive

Pat McCarran angrily refused to comment. McCarran, 76, was expected to swing his Democratic machine behind the Republican incumbent, Senator George ("Molly") Malone.