Primaries: Long Lost

When 1967 stories linked Missouri Senator Edward V. Long with unsavory labor leaders, reporters asked Long what the exposés might mean to his career. Long replied: "I see the implications. Don't think I was born yesterday." Long was born July 18, 1908, and last week Missouri Democrats took his Senate seat away.

Until his reputation eroded, he had been considered a cinch for reelection. A lawyer who combined business and political acumen, Long was lieutenant governor when he became the Democrats' 1960 compromise choice to succeed the late Senator Thomas Hennings. Lapsing into Washington obscurity, he emerged in 1965 to launch an assault on federal wiretapping at the time that Teamsters Boss Jimmy Hoffa was trying to escape prison, charging that the Government bugged his telephone. For a while, Long was the civil libertarians' darling. Then came an exposé in LIFE revealing his connections.

Last week Missourians thronged to the polls to nominate Lieutenant Governor Thomas F. Eagleton, 38, an attractive, Kennedyesque Democrat who campaigned against the Viet Nam war. Long carried the inner cities, but Eagleton captured the populous suburbs, getting 211,269 votes to 192,163 for Long and 169,312 for Conservative W. True Davis, with all but 33 precincts counted. Long bitterly called his defeat a victory for "snoopers," adding: "The man who builds a house on public service builds it of straw and on sand." Eagleton faces able Republican Congressman Thomas B. Curtis, 57, in November. If elected, Curtis would be the first G.O.P. candidate to win a statewide race in Missouri since 1946.

In other primaries last week:

> Kansas Republicans chose four-term Congressman Robert Dole, 45, while Democrats picked William I. Robinson, 57, Wichita lawyer, to contest the seat of veteran Republican Senator Frank Carlson, 75, who is retiring.

> A predominantly black St. Louis Congressional district will have an all-Negro general election in November. William L. Clay, a Democrat, will face Curtis C. Crawford, a onetime assistant city prosecutor who switched parties to run as a Republican.