New York: How Long Are the Coattails?

(7 of 8)

Tarrytown Cigarettes? Ethnics aside, there are few issues between Keating and Kennedy. Each claims to be more liberal than the other; yet both are moderates with similar positions on most issues. The chief difference is that Keating might be more hesitant than Bobby about committing federal funds for a vast array of projects. And when Bobby starts talking grandly about huge transportation and air-pollution-control projects for the whole Eastern seaboard, Opponent Keating chuckles: "I can't figure out whether he thinks he's running for President of the United States or is looking for some kind of new federal job like High Commissioner of the Northeast."

Bobby's big pitch is that he can do more for New York, that Keating has been an uncreative legislator. "Name me a Keating bill," he cries. "What legislation has he introduced?" For his part, Keating hammers ceaselessly at the carpetbagger theme. In mock astonishment, he declares: "Why, there are people who have been standing in line at the World's Fair longer than he has been living in New York." Or: "Why, Bobby thinks the Gowanus Canal is part of the lower intestinal tract." Or: "He thinks Tarrytown is a new brand of cigarette."

When Bobby tries to refute the charge by noting that one of New York's first Senators was a Massachusetts man named Rufus King, Keating beams mischievously. "It was a girl, not politics, that brought Rufus King to New York," he says. "He came here to live with his bride, a resident of New York." And while Bobby has leased a 25-room Dutch colonial house in Glen Cove, L.I., Ethel, who is expecting her ninth child in December, still spends most of her time in Virginia with the eight Kennedy kids.

There is also the lingering suspicion that Bobby hopes to use the New York Senate seat only as a springboard to the White House someday. He denies this, but he certainly doesn't slam the door. "Truthfully, now," he says, "I can't go any place in 1968. We've got President Johnson, and I think he's going to be re-elected in 1968. Now we get to 1972. I'm going to have to be re-elected in six years. I'm going to have to do a tremendous job for the State of New York. If I have done such an outstanding job that people just demand all over the country that I be a presidential candidate, I don't see how New York suffers."

If Ken Keating has anything to say about it, New York will not have to take that chance. And Keating just might have something to say about it-for he is running nip and tuck in a race that will be decided not so much by Bobby's popularity as by the length of Lyndon's coattails.