REPUBLICANS: Fighting Bob

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"The Most Fascinated." South Dakota was almost the last lap in the marathon Robert Alphonso Taft has been doggedly running for at least 14 and possibly for 43 years. In 1909, when President William Howard Taft was inaugurated, his eldest son Bob, then 19, rode down Pennsylvania Avenue in a chugging auto with his sister Helen and his little brother Charles, 11. Charles (now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio) had brought along a copy of Treasure Island to read, because he suspected that the ceremony would be "pretty dry." But Helen (now Mrs. Helen Taft Manning, a professor of history at Bryn Mawr College) remembers that Bob's attitude was quite different. Said she: "Bob was the most fascinated of all of us . . . To this day, Bob can relate step by step and almost word for word every detail of the ceremony. Perhaps, unconsciously, it was there that he acquired his first ambition to become President."*

Bob Taft's faint but conscious thoughts about being President came in 1936. That year, as a successful Cincinnati corporation lawyer who had served four terms in the state legislature, he was Ohio's favorite son. After he was elected to the U.S. Senate two years later, the thoughts became less faint. "A Senator has only one one-hundredth of the affirmative power of the President," he said, "and I suppose, like any Senator, I began to think about the presidency."

In 1939 he went after it. He set out across the country to campaign for the nomination. Before the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia, Taft had one of the smoothest Republican organizations ever formed. But it was not good enough. Although Taft was confident that he would win, the historic blitz carried Willkie in on the sixth ballot. Trudging out of the Philadelphia convention hall, the defeated Taft vowed: ''Never again."

He sat the next one out. In 1944 he was the chief architect of the Republican platform while his fellow Ohioan, John Bricker, took a run for President and wound up as the vice-presidential candidate. Not long after the election returns were in, Taft had forgotten his "never again." He traveled 30,000 miles and made 500 speeches before the 1948 convention, but then the high-powered Dewey machine ran him down.

Third Try. Now Taft is making his third and hardest try. The core of his 1948 organization never really disbanded, and it went to work in earnest not long after he walloped the Ohio labor leaders to win re-election as Senator in 1950.

And Taft went to work in earnest himself. He traveled 46,000 miles by plane, bus, train and auto, made 524 speeches, campaigned in 41 of the 48 states,* crossed the country three times. Compared to his present team, 1940's was "amateur," says Taft. The chain of command runs down through a top staff to Republican national committeemen, state chairmen, county chairmen, precinct workers. There is a Taft organization in every state, a Taft man on the job in almost every county.