Democrats: Skater's Waltz

It is a puny crisis indeed that does not redound to some politician's benefit or distress, and while the political flotsam abaft the U.S.S. Pueblo may not surface for some time, it could certainly pollute Lyndon Johnson's election-year waters. Enough to put his renomination in doubt? The possibility, though small, might just be enough to persuade Senator Robert Kennedy to quit his protective thicket of obfuscation and challenge Johnson directly.

Everybody wants to help Kennedy make up his mind—but there is hardly a consensus. Even among aging New Frontiersmen there is disagreement: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wants Bobby to run, though he thinks it risky; Theodore Sorensen says nay. Further afield from the clan, Columnist Joseph Alsop crunched more than his usual dose of pessimism pills and predicted that if Kennedy decides to run, "he will destroy himself. He will destroy his party." This, gloomed Alsop, would be an "irreparable disaster."

About the only pundit keeping calm on the subject last week was Conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who suggested that the country might conceivably survive Bobby's political demise.

If Kennedy really intends to display the courageous profile of his antiwar convictions, he was giving no sign of it last week. And to avoid thin ice, he took Ethel and some aides to the artificial rink in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, where he could travel in circles without divulging where he is headed.