Politics: Who's Ahead in the Sixth Arrondissement?

Munich last week was going all the way with L.B.J. A Bavarian brass band clad in lederhosen oompahed California, Here I Come while lusty stein clankers wearing campaign hats and Johnson buttons roared out "Prosit!" But in Paris they were shouting for "Goldwater in '64" as Republicans gathered in a mirrored conference room at the Ritz and collected $1,000 in campaign funds at the first passage of the hat.

Across the Continent, Democratic and Republican enthusiasts were hard at work to garner the votes of more than half a million U.S. citizens, either civilian residents abroad or members of the armed forces. Despite the red tape of obtaining absentee ballots, English-born, American-educated (Yale '29) Democrat Anthony Hyde in London believes that Europe might cast 100,000 votes, adding, "Just think, almost as many as the state of Alaska."

Service Ears. Since no electioneering is permitted inside U.S. bases, both sides prowl around outside. In Italy, where there are an estimated 35,000 eligible voters, Goldwater subcommittees are in operation in Vicenza, Verona, Leghorn and Naples, near U.S. military sites. At British market towns outside U.S. bases, the Democrats have parked decorated carts equipped with loud speakers playing Hello, Lyndon, hoping to catch the ear of U.S. servicemen and their wives on shopping tours.

Pier Talenti, the top Goldwater man in Italy, began organizing seven months ago, but he keeps colliding with Italian regulations, which require that any public gathering of more than five persons must be approved by a long list of officials ranging from the Interior Ministry down to the local fire department.

So the unofficial Goldwater headquarters are in an unmarked room at a Rome Y.M.C.A. Talenti, a onetime banker who now owns a cattle ranch ten miles outside Rome, grumbles, "If we made it the official headquarters without getting all the bureaucratic authorization we need, we might all be deported."

Heckling Colonel. The top Democrat in Germany, Businessman John Ryan, last week invaded Munich's annual Oktoberfest and, surrounded by eight U.S. students brandishing Johnson's picture, delivered a rousing get-out-the-vote speech in front of a tent advertising Löwenbräu beer. He was repeatedly interrupted by a Goldwater heckler in the front row who, Ryan snorts, "must have been a colonel." The Johnson organization in Britain is the largest in Europe, and, with such guest speakers as Actors Anthony Quinn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Comedian Victor Borge and Novelist Eugene Burdick, has raised nearly $10,000, which is spent on direct mail and ads in service newspapers. Mail often comes from Americans uncertain of their electoral rights. Inquiries about voting eligibility have been received from a Marymount nun who has lived in Britain since 1932, and from a U.S. citizen currently doing three years in a British prison for a felony.