Rhode Island: The Colonel & the Senator

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"Senator Pell is a real smoothie, all right," said a Newport matron, "but this colonel is really dragging him up and down over the coals." The colonel in question is Lieut. Colonel Briggs, U.S.A. (ret.), a brisk-mannered, parade-ground-voiced old campaigner who is gunning for the Rhode Island Senate seat of Democrat Claiborne Pell.

Colonel Briggs—who was known to the troops as "Old Poker Face" during the war—is the choice of Republican Governor John Chafee and the G.O.P. state central committee, and is thus the strong favorite to win the Republican primary next month. Confident of this, the colonel last week officially opened the campaign with all sights trained on Claiborne Pell and November.

Steady Blue Eyes. Senator Pell will need every bit of his suavity to answer the challenge—for the colonel is a lady. She is, in fact, Lieut. Colonel Ruth Briggs, 55, a much-bemedaled, widely experienced veteran of 20 years in the WACs, who was enticed out of retirement by Governor Chafee to take a crack at Socialite Pell, 47. Colonel Briggs, her hair swept back from the forehead and braided on top as it has been for the past 20 years, has been lambasting Pell for weeks, touring factories and stores with a firm handshake, steady blue eyes and a brisk "I'm Colonel Briggs running for the U.S. Senate and I hope you will help me in November." A Barrington fisherman summarized the surprise of many who are approached by the colonel: "I heard about this colonel, but I didn't know she was no dame."

Partially because she is not yet widely known, no one gives Colonel Briggs much of a chance to unseat Claiborne Pell. Still, some pretty unusual things have happened to Ruth Briggs in her career—and could happen again. Among the first WACs to be sent overseas, she quickly found herself in charge of a packed lifeboat after her ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean—and the senior British officer in the lifeboat became seasick. "Being a Rhode Islander," she explains, "I've been around small boats all my life."

As a member of General Bedell Smith's staff in North Africa, Colonel Briggs helped arrange the Casablanca conference. She was lent to the State Department for a London assignment after the war, went on to Moscow as part of Ambassador Bedell Smith's staff, and in 1948 was appointed vice consul in Belgrade. After sending her to school for four years to become a Russian specialist, the Army put her in the Pentagon as chief of its Eastern European branch of intelligence; in 1961 she was sent to France as chief of the Armed Forces Soviet intelligence section. She has a chestful of medals and citations, and she insists on being called colonel—the highest rank a woman can reach. Says she: "I've earned it."