New York: How Long Are the Coattails?

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The first days of his campaign were a wild triumphal march. He was swamped on Long Island's beaches by hundreds of thousands of Labor Day weekend bathers. In a three-day swing around "the Southern Tier," he made 51 stops in 21 cities, got such an overwhelming reception that people began to talk about "poor old Ken." In Watertown, he outdrew Keating 45 to 1. In Ogdensburg, where Keating spoke to a lonely knot of 24 listeners, Bobby drew 2,000. In Jamestown, where G.O.P. Vice-Presidential Candidate Bill Miller had a crowd of 250, Bobby lured 4,000. In Glens Falls, Bobby arrived just before 1 a.m., still found 4,000 people, more than one-fifth of the populace, waiting for him, many in nightclothes. "I still have problems in this state," said Bobby, "but at least I'm getting a hearing."

"Outrageous." But was he? People were seeing him, but the crowds did more hollering than listening, and they were young crowds to boot. "If I had my way," Bobby told the teenagers, who thronged him at every stop, "I'd lower the voting age to six-before the election."

While Bobby was making what Keating called a "blatant emotional appeal to the teen-age screamers and jumpers," the G.O.P. was mounting a well-financed campaign with headquarters on the fifth floor of 521 Fifth Avenue-one flight above the Goldwater-Miller operation but totally divorced from it.

Former Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who steered Tom Dewey to prominence and helped catapult Ike into the presidency, emerged from seven years of political retirement to run Keating's campaign. "This thing got me sore," he said. "If Kennedy is elected, it will establish that a rich man can come in, make a deal with bosses, and change our whole constitutional system. H. L. Hunt could go in and run in some Rocky Mountain state. Governor Wallace could run where he pleased. This is outrageous."

Patiently, Keating and his crew worked on the racial and religious minority groups that make a majority of New York's votes. No state has quite the complicated ethnic mix that New York has, and Ken Keating, with 18 years of experience, knows almost instinctively what each of the groups wants. A more adventurous gastronome than Bobby, he sampled kosher hot dogs, pickles, and cheese blintzes during a walking tour of the predominantly Jewish Lower East Side. Keating is a familiar figure there, and one sign that greeted him read: KEATING AND ISRAEL go TOGETHER LIKE BAGELS AND LOX. In that same district, Bobby spurned the ethnic diet, chose melon, split-pea soup and chocolate milk. In lower Manhattan's "Little Italy," he asked for a fork when someone offered him a slice of pizza. "You don't need a fork," he was gently advised.

Winning Formula. To his dismay, Kennedy found himself running poorly among New York's 2,500,000 Jews, who gave nearly 90% of their votes to his brother in 1960, and its 1,500,000 Italians. Keating's managers talk of getting half of the Jewish vote, two-fifths of the Italian vote-and that, combined with normal G.O.P. majorities upstate and in the suburbs, would be a winning formula.