REPUBLICANS: Kansas Candidate

(2 of 7)

As the correspondent was leaving an hour and a half later. Governor Landon called to the family's Negro maid: "Call up and tell 'em to saddle Cy, Myrtle.'' Motoring out to Topeka's democratic Hunt Club, the Governor went for a brisk seven-mile canter. At 6:30 p. m. the four Landons sat down to their usual big dinner. Missing was 18-year-old Peggy Anne, the Governor's daughter by his first wife, who is a junior at Kansas University. As usual, Nurse McCue ate with the family. After dinner the Governor retired to his study, spent several hours working over the answers he was going to give Radio Interviewer Kaltenborn. No visitors, no long-distance telephone calls, no radio news flashes had come in when he went to bed at 11:15. In California they had only begun to count the primary votes cast that day which might, more than a month in advance of the Cleveland Convention, make it virtually certain that Alf M. Landon would be the next Republican nominee for President of the U. S.

Boom's Beginning. It had been a curious process which in a few months had raised Alfred Mossman Landon from Kansas obscurity to national prominence as far & away the likeliest GOPossibility. Still honestly dazed by it. Governor Landon explains: "We didn't do anything at first. We just sat back and it all happened."

The first serious suggestion in print of Landon-for-President was in an election follow-up story in the Kansas City Journal-Post on Nov. 7, 1934, day after Alf Landon had become the only Republican Governor in the land to be re-elected in that year's Roosevelt landslide. Throughout the winter and spring of 1935 the Landon (Continued on p. 18) candidacy was kept publicly alive only by professional chitchat and an occasional Sunday feature in the newspapers. Meantime a group of Landon neighbors had begun to take the subject seriously in hand.

They were the bosses of the potent Kansas City Star, a traditionally Republican newspaper which had backed Democratic Governor Harry Woodring for re-election in 1932, made a prompt post-election switch to Winner Landon. Managing Editor Roy Roberts, one of Herbert Hoover's best newspaper friends in his days as the Star's able Washington correspondent, had gone to University of Kansas with Alf Landon. The manager of the Stars Kansas bureau, Lacy Haynes, who, as the shrewdest and best-informed political observer in Kansas, is popularly supposed to have dictated to all but one of its Governors since 1920, was an oldtime Landon friend. They, with the Star's President George Longan and Editor Henry Haskell, nursed the Landon candidacy along with quiet talk and sage advice while talk of New Deal waste and extravagance grew louder & louder in the land.

At the end of fiscal 1935, it was reported that Kansas had again balanced its budget. At least ten other states had done likewise, but Governor Landon promptly got to a radio microphone, called the nation's attention to Kansas. Alert for a man who might put Franklin Roosevelt out of the White House. William Randolph Hearst sent a flying squad of investigators into Kansas to comb Alf Landon's private and public record. Reporting satisfactorily, they were followed by a flock of ace Hearst writers and the great Landon Boom was on.