■ Gerald Ford campaign manager Howard “Bo” Callaway really started something when he said Nelson Rockefeller was Ford’s “Number One” problem in getting the nomination. . . . Enraged by this the 14 liberal GOP senators demanded and got an appointment with the President as soon as he returns from Helsinki. They want him to tell Bo to cool it on Nelse. . . . Hugh Scott has privately been very critical of Callaway handling of the Rockefeller hot potato. . . . Melvin Laird thinks Callaway will drop the anti-Rockefeller drive (“Bo got carried away a little bit”). . . . Clarke Reed, the Mississippi GOP state chairman, and a big wheel in the Southern party, thinks Callaway is trying to pull a fast one on Southern conservatives. “The President has said [of Rockefeller] ‘this is my philosophical brother,’ ” Reed told Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and I don’t see any way of separating them. I’ll bet even money, if it’s Ford, it will be Rockefeller. All the rest is hokum.” . . . Even Ronald Reagan has dumped on Callaway. He told reporters in North Carolina that Rockefeller had been subjected to “shoddy treatment” by Ford’s campaign manager. Reagan went on to say that a) he wasn’t interested in the Number Two spot himself, b) if he runs it will be within the Republican Party, and c) if Ford gets the nomination he, Reagan, cannot “foresee something that would drive me away [from supporting him].”
■ On the Democratic side, Georgia legislator Julian Bond now says he won’t run for President and he thinks none of the bunch presently in the race —Jackson, Bentsen, Carter, Wallace, Harris, or Udall—will get the nomination either. Ford, says Bond, “gets tougher and tougher every day. If the economy gets better . . . he’s going to be nearly unbeatable in ’76.” . . . Wallace was the only Democrat anywhere, incidentally, to say that the Senate should let the people of New Hampshire decide who their senator should be in the seven-month-old dispute. (Last week, the Democratic contender, John Durkin, finally threw in the towel. When it became clear that the Senate Democrats could not force his election, he urged the Senate to declare the seat vacant and clear the way for a runoff election with Louis Wyman, which the Senate promptly did.)
Comments