Out of the Doldrums

"Hallelujah!" sang the New York Herald Tribune. "The reluctant candidate not only came out of his Harrisburg shelter, but he came out swinging." Short days before, convinced that Barry Goldwater was about to be nominated, the Trib had despaired for the Republican Party. But now that Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton had put himself in the ring at last, there was cause for rejoicing. Scranton, said the Trib, "has just the qualities needed to halt the party from its headlong gal lop toward doom." In the general press sigh of relief at the emergence of an honest-to-goodness Goldwater competitor, similar sentiment resounded all over the nation's newspapers. "A new and refreshing voice is calling the G.O.P. from the land of make-believe," said the Washington Post. RALLY ROUND SCRANTON--commanded the Chicago Sun-Times. Said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "His cause is right, and he can do his nation and his party a historic service by waging unreserved battle for it."

Glamour. In Topeka, Kans., which produced an obscure Republican figure named Alf Landon who got all the way to his party's nomination in 1936, the Capital welcomed Scranton as an antidote to "convention boredom." The Kansas City Star was reassured by the hope that Scranton's candidacy "will add a bit of glamour." The New York Times took heart from the fact that "the long sleep has ended for the Republican chiefs who feared Senator Goldwater would lead the party to disaster but feared even more doing anything to stop him."

But the press euphoria was laced with the anxiety of papers that feared Scranton had arrived too late with too little--a judgment passed, in just about those words, on scores of editorial pages. "The shattered moderate leadership of the party," gloomed the Milwaukee Journal, "may be unable to pick itself up off the floor and do serious battle." The Nashville Tennessean cast Scranton in the role of "boy at the dike," and predicted that "it will take a miracle to make his effort more than a sad exercise in futility." Said the Detroit Free Press: "Wishful Willie Scranton closed his eyes, screwed up his courage and dived. The only trouble is that Barry Goldwater might have pulled the plug."

Nor did the Republicans' new contender lack for forthright press critics. WATCH THE LIP, GOVERNOR, warned the New York Daily News, which has expressed steady editorial satisfaction with Goldwater. The News took exception to a Scranton remark that Senator Goldwater, having voted against the civil rights bill, might give the cause of racial equality less than his all: "This is smear talk of a pretty debased kind, if you ask us." In Omaha, the World-Herald classified Scranton's candidacy as "a" platter of cold fish, garnished with cliches." The Manchester, N.H., Union Leader, which stands leagues to the right of Goldwater, predicted that Scranton's nomination "would be an insult to the intelligence of the American public and a disaster from which our nation would be long in recovering."

One a Day. However the nation's newspapers felt about Bill Scranton, though, they also had to deal with him as a news story. In New York, the Times, which had hollered the loudest against Goldwater, played Scranton on Page One for six days, and then consigned him deep inside; in one issue, the first Scranton story ran on page 70.

By contrast, the New York Herald Tribune, which is as thin as the Times is bulky, kept the Scranton story on Page One ten out of twelve days running--and during this period gave him 1,000 column inches to the Times's 600. The Los Angeles Times reprinted Scranton's announcement speech in its entirety, a labor of love that demanded two full pages in the execution. In South Carolina, the Charlotte Observer seemed to go out of its way to keep Scranton in a favorable light: BARRY

HEAVILY FAVORED, STILL, BUT SCRANTON

COULD WIN (June 13); HOPE BUOYED,

SCRANTON SAYS BARRY'S SLIPPING

(June 17); SCRANTON: NICE YOUNG RICH MAN (June 24).

For the most part, however, the papers seemed to be playing the Scranton candidacy for its news value, no matter where their editorial hearts happened to lie. Their performance was best exemplified, perhaps, by the Houston Post, which apparently trotted out its tape measure to keep things just: one Goldwater story to one Scranton story, both of meticulously equal length. In all, Scranton's press coverage confirmed the heartfelt if nonpartisan observation of the Miami Herald: "There's life left in a political summer which was dying of the doldrums."

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