ARCHIVES

NEWPORTER PELL positioned himself for the Senate seat by defeating former Gov. Dennis J. Roberts and becoming thefirst unendorsed candidate to win a major Rhode Island primary. Pell had been in the foreign service and was working - not very hard, he assured me last week - as a limited partner in a brokerage house. He said retiring Sen. Theodore Francis Green, afriend, had been a role model. "I knew I was lucky enough to be completely independent financially and I knew I always wanted to be in public service," Pell said, and the Senate opening seemed ideal.

Pell remembered a meeting early on in which he used a political argument to interest President Lyndon B. Johnson in the high-speed Northeast Corridor proposal. Pell said he told LBJ that the route ran across a huge collection of electoralvotes. "That stirred up his enthusiasm a great deal," Pell recalled.