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"Teddy has plenty of time," his sister Jean Smith says firmly, with an echo of the family's apprehensions. Eunice Shriver, who relishes politics as much as any Kennedy, is similarly negative about 1972. "Some day I'd like to see him in the White House." she says, "but only when he's ready." Ted himself, for all his campaigning, says reflectively, "I feel in my gut that it's the wrong time, that it's too early." And yet, when a friend recently asked Kennedy why he did not take himself out of the running with a Sherman statement, the Senator replied, "Why should I? I'd lose all my influence. I'd just be a Senator from Massachusetts."
Possible Scenario
The Democratic scenario for the next eight months contains mazes of possibilities. It is all but certain that Kennedy will not run in any of the primaries, even the late ones in New York and California, both of which could be prime Kennedy territories. But if the primaries prove inconclusive, with Muskie, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and perhaps others dividing those preliminary spoils, it is more than possible that a convention might turn to Kennedy as the one man who, with his constituencies spanning the left, center and even some of the right, might unite the party to defeat Nixon.
But the Democrats, with their party reforms designed to prevent back-room convention brokering, might be reluctant to award the nomination to a man who had not taken his case to the people in the primaries. The speculations are fairly heady nonetheless. Some Democrats say that Kennedy would make a strong move for the nomination if he believed that it was about to go to Humphrey or Jackson, on the theory that either man would ensure a breakaway fourth-party movement on the left, thereby guaranteeing Nixon's reelection. Others maintain that Kennedy would have to try for the nomination if he saw New York's John Lindsay descending on the prize; better for Ted to head Lindsay off in 1972 than risk the New Yorker's becoming the party's glamorous leader in 1976.
The Nixon Factor
At the moment the Democratic campaign is only in the casting process, with candidates moving on and off the stage. Last week, in a triumph of fantasy over realism, Los Angeles' Mayor Sam Yorty announced his candidacy, hoping for the party's rightward constituency. More persuasively, Washington's Scoop Jackson also entered. "The No. 1 priority in this country," said Jackson, "must be to put people back to work." Then he drew the distance between himself and the party's left: "Most Americans are fed up with people who are fed up with America . . . This society is not a guilty, imperialist, oppressive society."