The Third Man:

Shortly after the Hanoi-Haiphong bombings, a corner of the Adams-for-Senate office in Boston debated whether or not their candidate should spearhead a sit-in at the Federal Building to protest the new escalation.

It was an issue that summed up the major policy question of the campaign: Should a peace candidacy be waged in traditional political terms--babies, handshaking, and splashy but meaningless posters--or as a departure from establishment politics, as a campaign of dissent?

The last peace candidacy in Massachusetts, that of H. Stuart Hughes for the Senate in 1962, was assuredly not a traditional one. But for all the attention it received, Hughes polled only three per cent of the vote. Adams must lift the Hughes tally to at least ten per cent for his campaign to be considered even remotely successful.

At the same time Adams has tactical advantages over Hughes. There was no war in 1962; consequently it was harder to convince voters of the importance of the peace issue. Hughes, moreover, had no base from which to build his campaign. Adams has an outfit called Mass Pax, or Political Action for Peace, the outgrowth of the Hughes organization. Unlike Hughes, Adams is running as a Democrat, and his campaign is directed toward the September 13 Democratic Primary when he will oppose Mayor John Collins and former Governor Endicott Peabody. Hughes, an independent, faced stiffer November opposition in the form of Edward Kennedy and George Lodge.

Approached last fall to seek the nomination, Thomas Boylston Adams--a member of the "royal line" that descends from John and John Quincy--agreed to run if $100,000 could be raised. George Somarippa, who had managed the Hughes campaign, set out to meet Adams' requirement, and in February it was made official. But for one reason or another, the campaign didn't really get underway until mid-June, when more than a dozen workers moved into headquarters on Washington St. and began to concentrate on gathering 10,000 valid signatures needed to put Adams on the primary ballot.

It soon became evident that workers from the main office would have to get out and join the signature drive or the campaign would end on July 17, the day the signatures are due. The office launched signature "blitzes" on Fall River, Lawrence, Brockton, Worcester and cities across the state. Veterans of the Hughes campaign--in which over 100,000 signatures were collected with 74,000 required--reported that one person could be counted on to get 200 signatures a day. But a day in Fall River netted only 600 signatures among ten people, and simple arithmetic showed that with three weeks remaining and a validation rate around 60 or 70 per cent, 600 a day simply wouldn't do the trick.

This realization came simultaneously with a general disenchantment among Adams supporters. Area coordinators complained about the publicity, Adams complained about the signature tally, and the Students for a Democratic Society contingent in the main office complained about the moderation of the candidate.

Adams had not started out as an advocate of bringing the Vietnam war to an immediate end. He adopted the enclave policy in its most extreme form, insisting that, if necessary, U.S. soldiers should remain holed up in their enclaves for twenty years. This position alienated Mass Pax, and for a while Pax wasn't even sure it would support Adams. But the candidate gradually became convinced of the necessity of ending the war quickly.

His next difficulty lay in the fact that his volunteers tended to be more radical than he on domestic issues. The first piece of Adams literature identified the candidate as a "liberal Democrat" who would continue the domestic programs of Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. For most of the Hughes veterans this was not enough. Gradually the campaign and the candidate were growing away from each other.

But Adams proved himself far from immutable. He agreed to have his original 55-page platform scrapped, and work was begun on a more radical one. His denunciations of the war became more pointed; he affiliated himself with Reverend Wood in the latter's dispute with Mrs. Hicks; he issued, indirectly, a powerful statement before a meeting of the Mothers for Adequate Welfare in Boston.

In the last two weeks Adams has succeeded in attracting greater support from those who don't see the war as the one overriding issue. Pax has promised a second sizeable contribution to the campaign. The candidate has proven that while he may not be another H. Stuart Hughes, he cannot alternatively be classed in the Arthur Schlesinger mold. Adams has emerged from what William F. Buckley Jr. once described as "the mire of liberalism."

With 11,000 signatures already in the bag, and five days remaining before the deadline, Adams seems assured of a place on the ballot. Probably the major factor affecting how well he does in the primary will be the progress of the war during the next two months. Right now, according to the latest (July 11) Louis Harris poll, the Administration is riding high. But public support for the Hanoi-Haiphong bombings rests on a hope that they will bring peace. Assuming this not to be the case, the current enthusiasm is likely to dampen somewhat by the middle of September.

The effect of a large Adams vote would probably be to boost the chances of Mayor Collins in the primary. Peabody supporters, in fact, have circulated rumors to the effect that the Collins organization is out in force collecting signatures for Adams.

But Adams doesn't aim to secure anyone else's victory. His campaign is based on a win-ethic even if most Adams workers concede a primary victory is unlikely. At Adams headquarters no one thinks in terms of any percentage short of a plurality.

So far the Adams campaign can claim one major accomplishment. It has forced Collins and Peabody to accept Vietnam as the most important issue. Probably Collins's attempts to avoid outright support for the Administration line are traceable to the Adams candidacy. Peabody, however, continues to parrot each morning's White House press release.

One way of looking at the oil dump bombings is to see them as part of an Administration effort to quelch anti-war campaigns. Up until several weeks ago the State Department was daily informing reporters that Hanoi banked on U.S. public opinion to win the war for them. Now through the bombings the situation has reversed. North Vietnamese morale is said to be sagging, and Americans are asked to wait until it collapses.

With peace so close at hand it is difficult to oppose the war, and the polls bear out the effectiveness of the President's move in this regard. But what the escalators ignore is the fact that they may have run their gamut. Public opinion is not likely to support outright bombing of North Vietnam's population centers. And the people will tire of this phase in the war as readily as they did of the last. That is what Thomas Adams is banking on.