Presidential aide Tim Kraft admits the White House is bollixed by the mushrooming draft-Kennedy sentiment “How,” he asks, “would you go about organizing against a phantom candidate anyway?” . . . Rep. Floyd Fithin (D., Ind.) thinks he knows what’s behind the Kennedy surge. “Two hundred years of living in a cornucopia is over. I think the whole ‘turn to Teddy’ movement is a yearning to ignore that fact, a yearning to go back to Camelot.” . . . Carter lost one when his aides failed to persuade New York Democrats to move the filing day for the N.Y. primary ahead of the New Hampshire primary. This could have embarrassed Teddy. The date is now set for one month after N.H. . . . He lost another when emissaries failed to get a re-election endorsement for him from Rep. Morris Udall, a Carter rival in the ’76 campaign, and that story was leaked. . . . On the plus side, while George Meany and Lane Kirkland remain opposed to SALT II, Lloyd McBride of the Steelworkers—usually a hardliner—says he’s for it, joining more liberal labor leaders Jerry Wurf and William Winpisinger.
Three Mile Island hasn’t turned Americans against nuclear power. Gallup finds that 56 per cent of the people think nuclear plants are less of a risk to the nation than an energy shortage; Roper shows Americans 2 to 1 (57 to 29 per cent) in favor of continued nuclear plant construction. . . . Sen. Gary Hart, whose subcommittee is investigating Three Mile Island, says he thinks the anti-nuclear people “have an obligation to tell us where the energy’s going to come from. Where are we going to take up the slack?” . . . But the anti-nuclear campaign is the hottest issue the aging New Left has found since Vietnam. They were out in strength at the anti-nuke demonstrations June 2 and 3: Pete Seeger (“I think it’s immoral to take risks for people not yet born”), also David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin (Chicago 7). Rubin, who climbed over a fence at the Shoreham, L.I. demonstration, was ecstatic: “I wanted to make a statement and a symbolic act by being arrested.” . . . “Ban the Nukes” bumper stickers are blossoming on college campuses, but so are, here and there, other bumper stickers: “When you’re cold and hungry, eat an environmentalist.”
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