DEMOCRATS: Unsolid South

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The 1960 race for the Democratic presidential nomination had already earned its place in the history books because a self-propelled candidate had recruited his own team and beaten his way through the primaries to within arm's length of the title. Last week history clicked again when Jack Kennedy's strongest competitor, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, recessed the U.S. Congress in what was generally read as the last-minute start of a stop-Kennedy movement.

Johnson, and his campaign manager. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, argued that Congress could not possibly complete its legislative program before next week's Democratic Convention. "Anyone who thinks we can finish up the business now before the House and Senate by the middle of next week," grumped Mr. Sam, "is a legislative idiot." Any legislative idiot who believed the same thing, chimed in Lyndon Johnson, was either a "phony or a hypocrite." Yet scores of Congressmen, Senators and other politicos thought that fellow Texans Johnson and Rayburn had just possibly planned it that way. Looming congressional action on such key party-line bills as medical aid to the aged, federal aid for schools, housing and minimum wages was bound to give Johnson special leverage at the convention, bound to give him special influence on the campaign itself, whoever the nominee might be.

Revolt. Whether the speculation was true or not, the immediate fact of life for Lyndon Johnson was that he does not have much time left for decisive action.

And rumbles from Southern delegations hinted that, contrary to long-held assumptions, the Solid South was not heading all the way for L.B.J. any longer. The biggest sign that the South was flying apart came at the Governors' conference in Glacier National Park, when Texas Governor Price Daniel tried to call a meeting of Southern Governors at which, presumably, the Southerners would declare their eternal support for Johnson. In a canvass of the Governors, Daniel got a couple of shockers: Mississippi's diehard segregationist Ross Barnett refused to guarantee his delegation for Johnson, because Johnson had pushed through the 1960 civil rights bill. Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins advised Daniel that his state was not solid for Lyndon; North Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana, among others, registered the same point. Finally, Daniel called off the breakfast meeting, lest Johnson be embarrassed at the outcome.

Though Johnson's determination was startlingly real, Kennedy was still making yardage. California's Governor Pat Brown, whose delegation might well be the team that pushes Kennedy over the top, hinted last week that he might drop his favorite-son role at the end of the first ballot, or even sooner, and swing the majority of his 81 votes to Kennedy. Minnesota's Governor Orville Freeman, keeper of Hubert Humphrey's strength, admitted that his squad was rooting for Kennedy. Iowa Governor Herschel Loveless has already made up his mind to forgo a nomination as favorite son and to announce for Kennedy, and Kansas' Governor George Docking was ready to throw his delegation behind Kennedy before the end of the first ballot. With such freshening support, it was hard even for some Johnson followers to see how Kennedy could be stopped.