New York

New York's three major Senatorial campaign contenders have spent the last weeks of an acrimonious campaign in a rapid-fire exchange on national defense.

This race could be a rerun of the sixties, with a Goldwater-type hawk facing off again a traditional dove. The third candidate--incumbent Sen. Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.)--accuses both of extremism, attempting to straddle the middle. He may find out--too late--that by splitting the liberal vote, he has contributed to the election of an ultraconservative.

In the campaign's final days, energetic liberal Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman finds her position as frontrunner seriously imperiled by charges that she is "dangerously naive" in opposing almost all military expenditures. One of the leading liberals in Congress, Holtzman has opposed new weapon systems like the MX missile and the B-1 bomber but supports military salary increases to make voluntary forces competitive.

While she is widely acknowledged as an extraordinarily bright and conscientious legislator, some of those who endorse her--and The New York Times--have suggested that her votes against defense imply a degree of pacifism that is hard to square with a realistic foreign policy. Supporters of Israel, a natural constituency for the Jewish congresswoman, are worried that Holtzman's defense posture might dilute her commitment to Israel to rhetoric. Yet, despite the furor over her voting record, the idealistic four-term representative says she will continue to oppose most military expenditures, which she deems "wasteful," and vote to scuttle draft registration. "I was first elected to Congress to put an end to the Vietnam War," she notes.

If some worry about what they perceive to be Holtzman's "doctrinaire naivete on the left," many find the spectre of Republican Al D'Amato far more frightening. The supervisor of a suburban township, D'Amato--who, until now, has had no experience in national politics--recently suggested that he would have bombed Iran in an attempt to gain the hostages' release. A few days later he retracted the statement, but Javits has not retracted his statements that D'Amato is "temperamentally unsuited to be a Senator" and "dangerous." While Javits favors a "harder stance" on military preparation, he claims to be the moderate between two extremists. Many believe that D'Amato--the product of Nassau county's entrenched political machine--defeated Javits only by making the 76-year-old Senator's age a major campaign issue.

D'Amato's campaign has been marked by frequent accounts of his participation in the pattern of legal graft, wasteful patronage and sweetheart deals characteristic of Hempstead Town government. Already implicated in a kick-back scheme that required town employees to contribute 1 per cent of their salaries to the Republican Party to keep their jobs, D'Amato is currently being investigated for having allowed millions of taxpayer dollars to remain in interest-free accounts at a bank that later loaned him $100,000 in campaign funds. A grand jury has also questioned him about his role in transferring a cable-television franchise to a company in which the county's Republican leader had a 16-per-cent interest.

In spite of these revelations, D'Amato has successfully managed to depict himself as the candidate of the overtaxed and under-appreciated middle class, an average guy in contrast to the intellectual Javits and the Harvard-educated Holtzman. The man who once stood next to Howard Jarvis at a rally and promised to lead the-fight for a Proposition 13 in Nassau County is now promising to lead the Senate fight for Reagan's tax-slashing policies. A vehement opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, D'Amato, it seems, would prefer to keep women in the kitchen: he even sent his mother to Buffalo supermarkets with recipes for "the forgotten middle class."

For the first time since September, a New York Daily News straw poll released Thursday shows D'Amato with a seven-point lead over Holtzman. Little more than a week before, a Times-CBS News poll had given Holtzman a ten-point edge. With D'Amato gaining rapidly, pressures should mount for a Javits withdrawal; some analysts believe that most of the estimated 23 per cent of the electorate that favors Javits will vote for Holtzman. Javits acknowledges that his long-shot struggle to recover from defeat in the Republican primary is losing momentum; polls indicate that only half of the voters think the ailing Senator is physically up to the job. "I could stand on my head in Macy's window and it wouldn't help," Javits--who still has the support of 13 important labor leaders in the state--says. Last week there were rumblings that Javits might concede; he did, after all, tell the Times that he hoped his queries about Holtzman's defense record would make her a "better Senator."

If Javits remains to the finish, New Yorkers might see a repeat of the 1970 election in which a split liberal vote meant the election of conservative James Buckley by a slim plurality