Amateur's Day

Visiting Manhattan last week to boost the National Fund for Medical Education, President Eisenhower took time as well to boost an old friend. Summoned to Ike's Waldorf-Astoria suite for 15 minutes of pleasantries and pictures was Robert Keaton Christenberry, 58, Republican candidate for mayor of New York in next week's election. Christenberry has had rough going battling the entrenched solidity of Incumbent Democrat Robert F. (for Ferdinand) Wagner Jr., who has served one four-year term, wants a second, has a good chance in Democratic New York City of getting what he wants. Candidate Christenberry grabbed onto the presidential endorsement as if it were a life preserver--and for good reason.

Selected last summer as the mayoralty candidate when more likely prospects shied away, Hotelman Christenberry (Astor, Ambassador) soon ran into difficulty finding either 1) a choler-provoking issue or 2) money. So uninspired were New York Republican leaders over mayoralty chances that contributions which should have gone to the city campaign went instead to the G.O.P. state and national committees. Unable to afford TV saturation of New York's 2,400,000 voters, Christenberry has contented himself with strained sidewalk handshakes and alliterative speeches. (Wagner, he said last week, was a "municipal Milquetoast" of "dynamic indecision, vigorous vacillation and intrepid inertia.") He has failed to make an issue out of crime, juvenile delinquency, or any other of the problems that vex New Yorkers: e.g., corruption charges against two Democratic city councilmen, city-choking traffic snarls, worsening public schools and the flight of the Giants and Dodgers to California's greener (and greenbacked) pastures.

Thus virtually unchallenged, Democrat Wagner is campaigning less against Christenberry than against complacency. New York's mayor can be a big fish in national Democratic waters; in addition, New York's Wagner wants desperately to be elected to the U.S. Senate (he lost last year to Republican Jacob Javits by 450,000 votes), where his father, the late Robert F. Wagner Sr., left a record as a promoter of organized labor. For another crack at the Senate, Wagner must roll up a big vote next week; Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio has passed the word that Wagner needs a 1,000,000-vote plurality to go places nationally.

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