"I only shook Coolidge's hand once, but I can still feel it," Norman Thomas remarked over breakfast last week.

Actually, Norman Thomas got his first introduction to politics at the unlikely knee of Warren Gamaliel Harding, for whose newspaper he worked as a boy in Marion, Ohio. It wasn't long before Thomas fled to the fringe of the political spectrum of Harding's day; and at eighty years of age--wise and somewhat weary--he has seen the political consensus meet him halfway. In the process he has both learned and taught as much as one man can ever hope to.

Graduating from Princeton in 1905, Thomas was ordained in the Presbyterian Ministry from Union Seminary in 1911. While serving as the pastor of a church in East Harlem, he gradually became a socialist, until his political views forced him out of the clergy. But like most other things, he now concedes, "the church has improved since I got out". Yet he remains to this day a profoundly religious man, and admits to grave doubts about ecumenism. "I'm troubled about how far we can go and still call it Christianity. What we really need is more honest conformity between what people believe and do."

Six Presidential candidacies and six great-grandchildren behind, Norman Thomas is an exciting man who has lived hard and wants badly to share his life. Though he is conscious of the effects of age, few of his listeners ever are, and a second-grade teacher probably seldom gets the adoring attention he manages to command. Pointing a finger accusingly or tenderly, staring with his soul, he speaks with a voice that could develop only from the harried heckled experience of Socialist Party campaigns from 1928 through 1948. Chuckling he reminisces about the exploits of one after another of his "old friends" in politics--from Eugene V. Debs to Hucy Long to Hubert Humphrey.

If Norman Thomas is no longer the radical on the street corner, because of the distinct progress with which he credits the United States or because of a new relationship he has found with the two-party system, he has remained an idealist of the first order. Severely critical of American action in South Vietnam, Thomas calls upon President Johnson to "say to the world: We've got to have peace." If the President would turn his displayed eloquence in this direction, according to Thomas, it would be tremendously effective. Once having rid the world of war, the nation could lead in the solution of other problems.

His idealism explains the fact that he is about to withdraw his account from the Chase Manhattan Bank, on the basis of recent protests against the Bank's connection with business activity and apartheid in South Africa. "It's convenient to bank there, but wrong."

As an original patron of the civil rights movement, Thomas speaks with a special sophistication and sensitivity about the plight of the American Negro. He pleads that "whites should not be Olympian" in assigning value to various civil rights organizations, and he has divided his contributions among almost all major existing groups. He is confident about the nation's progress in race relations, which has inclined him to favor less extreme actions; he was opposed, for example, to the recent situation in the White House. Thomas states that "there is no commandment 'thou shalt demonstrate,'" and he counsels against universal adoption of civil disobedience.

It is no doubt difficult for any rebel who has become an American institution to part with his old battle cries, but Thomas has done it with a certain nostalgic confidence. He delights in recalling that his first political nomination, for governor of New York, was achieved without his knowledge. Quick to admit there is an all-new role for the Socialist Party of today, he prefers to see it as an intellectual order which "keeps alive conscious socialism," and he points to Michael Harrington and other social reformers as its potential leaders. The fact that "the working class has become part of the establishment in the United States," Thomas cautions, should not prelude a challenge to the "outrageous distribution of wealth that still exists."

A Thomas prescription for the future would be a curious amalgam of proposals by Lyndon Johnson, Mahatma Gandhi, and Milton Friedman, among others, with the single general rule that "I would make it very hard for anyone to live without working."

After eighty years in a "hostile environment," Norman Thomas knows better than most what's going on; "I will retire," he confides, "when I can no longer lift the Sunday Times."