POLITICS: Front and Center for George McGovern

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McGovern will need the pros to be a strong national candidate against Nixon, despite the already accumulated assets of a strong staff and an extraordinary network of young volunteers unseen since the kids went "clean for Gene" four years ago. His senior political adviser is the well-connected Frank Mankiewicz, 47, once press secretary to Robert Kennedy, master of fast political one-liners and possessor of what one aide calls "the best black book in the business." Among all the youngsters, Mankiewicz is an elder statesman of the McGovern organization. He spends an average of seven hours a day on the phone, cajoling the press, scraping up funds, masterminding strategy in a dozen different places. In between, he keeps tab on the state delegate hunters and primary organizers and suggests changes in speeches and pamphlets. His quick wit has been of inestimable value to McGovern. During the Wisconsin primary campaign, Mankiewicz fed his boss a line that scored points against

New York's Mayor John Lindsay: "He is the only populist in history who plays squash at the Yale Club."

McGovern's campaign manager is Gary Hart, 34, a young lawyer from Denver with a personality so akin to McGovern's that he is almost his boss's Doppelgdnger. Much of the campaign money has come from Max Palevsky, 47, Los Angeles-based chairman of Xerox's executive committee, and from Henry Kimelman, 50, a businessman with interests in the Caribbean who has been McGovern's conduit to some old-line Democratic financial backing.

And then there are all the kids. Taking a lesson from McGovern's lifelong political passion for collecting the names of his supporters, they move in droves from state to state, classifying prospective voters on 3 in. by 5 in. cards as 1 (committed), 2 (leaning), 3 (uncommitted) or 4 (definitely not). The effect of the army of ants is cumulative, for the young organizers learn in one state and then apply the experience they have gained in the next. McGovern's "flying squad" of 80-odd volunteers, aged 16 to 30, worked New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Massachusetts and then flew off election night to Ohio. Other McGovern workers have been quietly tilling the vineyards in the nonprimary states, sneaking up on the courthouse pros to capture 7 delegates in Vermont, 8 in Idaho, 13 in Iowa, 9 in Arizona.

The capping of all this effort should come early next month in California, where Campaign Manager Hart plans to do what most politicians say is impossible: organize that heterogeneous state from the ground up. California is so big that the conventional political wisdom dictates campaigning it through the media. But McGovern's operatives disagree. By primary time they aim to have at least 1,000 out-of-state volunteers working with 25,000 to 50,000 Californians, organizing the state New Hampshire style—except that in the case of California that means calling in person or by telephone on nearly 2,000,000 Democratic households.