Gouges from Goodie

For two weeks California's Governor Goodwin Knight watched in fuming silence while U.S. Senator William Fife Knowland rushed around the state running hard for governor without even declaring for the job (TIME, Sept. 16). This week Goodie Knight broke his silence and fired point-blank at Knowland on the issue of labor policy.

Before a California Federation of Labor convention at Oakland (Knowland's home town), Knight boomed: "The intelligent, fair-minded men and women of the Republican Party in California are not going to abdicate and permit the Grand Old Party to become an antilabor party. No man with a reputation for belligerence either in international affairs or domestic affairs, no matter how high-principled he may be, is safe for executive office in the Federal Government today. And he is equally unsafe to be entrusted with the governorship of California."

Knight's round was the second half of a double barrel. Earlier, two pro-Knight officers of the G.O.P. State Central Committee sent California Republicans a letter bemoaning "impending Republican Party suicide," suggesting that Bill Knowland remove himself as a gubernatorial possibility. Knowland "cannot possibly muster the broad popular support which is necessary to win the governorship," the letter said, and if he insists on a knockdown, drag-out primary with Knight, "the resultant Democratic swing well might take not only the governorship but the other major constitutional posts, the U.S. Senatorship, the majority of the Congressional delegation and the Legislature."

If the Knight blasts bothered Knowland he did not show it. He was moving through Southern California, drawing big crowds (a congregation of 1,000 at St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles' Negro section gave him a scroll for his work on the civil rights bill). Openly tapping the well of conservatism in California, he continued to call for restrictive labor legislation. Did he think he was driving California Republicanism to suicide to further his own ambitions? Why, said Bill Knowland with his frozen grin, a brisk primary might inject new life into the California G.O.P.

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