THE STRANGE CASE OF NELSON ROCKEFELLER

...When the press conference ended he grabbed my arm as I walked by his desk and said: "Dammit, Jack, you know how I feel about that bill...

...In assessing Rockefeller's stature in terms of the Presidency, the probing observer finds the total picture a strange one...

...He was the man who balanced the budget and restored "fiscal integrity" to the Empire State, even if it did require three substantial tax increases and no little juggling of tax collection dates to achieve these goals...

...When he broke that silence of almost three years, his only explanation seemed to be that, as he put it, "a time of renewed hope" would be an appropriate time for him to begin discussing our policy in Southeast Asia...

...By the time the 1966 election results made him a factor in the national political picture again, Rockefeller had endorsed Romney and felt that he must avoid discussing any question of national policy lest he be accused of undercutting the man he was supposed to be promoting...

...At first, he used a series of artificial agencies, arguing that this device really did not represent state borrowing at all...

...There were many professionals, however, who believed the popular response was impressive enough to justify a run against Nixon...

...When you get down to the heart of the matter, Rockefeller is too much an activist to be hamstrung by conventional, or Republican, pressures for financial restraint...

...It is a decision he came to regret...

...In Indiana they used him to draw a crowd to a fund-raising dinner, then earmarked the money for Nixon...

...In the West they made him speak in front of a huge picture of Nixon...

...As Senator Thruston Morton, the Republican Party's premier professional, put it then: "We are all just completely baffled by what he is up to...

...Rockefeller's commitment to equal rights and opportunity for black Americans is both inherited—his family supported Negro education long before it was fashionable—and peculiarly his own...

...Another, his intimates say, was a feeling that he must demonstrate that his second marriage had not crippled him politically forever...

...Thus, New York has bond-financed programs for pure waters, housing, and mass transportation that are bigger than those of the Federal Government...

...His campaign against Barry Gold-water for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964 was doomed from the start by his second marriage in the spring of 1963, although Rockefeller himself seemed to be the last to recognize it...

...He sees far too many things that he considers "of major importance to the people" to be bound to traditional financing...

...O'Connor never said any such thing...

...role in Asia...

...Romney gave up the fight when he withdrew February 28...

...And he has never been troubled by Emerson's "foolish consistency...

...First, the campaign for O'Connor, a charming but essentially diffident president of the New York City Council, was the most inept, divided, and poorly financed state campaign in decades...

...One, of course, was his conviction that he had done a good job...

...The latter guessed that the truest—and simplest—explanation was that he had lost "the compulsion" to be President of the United States...

...It was, in effect, a policy based on the notion that truth will prevail in the free competition of ideas—even in a state legislature...

...He has been quick to innovate...

...And it is this image, of course, that is his greatest asset now in the Republican agonizing of 1968—despite what has seemed almost his deliberate attempt to dissipate it by persistent waffling about his intentions...

...This explanation puts Rockefeller's best foot forward...

...It is this pragmatism that has made him the governor most respected by other state executives, of both parties, for his ability to deal with the baffling complexities of the 1960s...

...His new program for rebuilding the ghettos, for example, gives the state's Urban Development Corporation powers to carry out renewal projects that pay no more than lip service to the tradition of home rule for municipalities, an article of faith with upstate New York Republicans that even Democrats have been reluctant to breach...

...The problem, which Rockefeller did not recognize then as well as he could now, was that conventional news stories are based on what politicians say, not what they feel...

...Whatever the reasons, he went all out in a way that only a Rockefeller could...

...The fact was that he was trying to use the detailed provisions of the bill to bargain over other legislation in the same committee, but of course Rockefeller did not want to say so...

...But Rockefeller chose to believe the regulars and, on December 26, 1959, he announced that he would not be a candidate after all...

...The New Yorker's talk of a draft and Romney's withdrawal brought Rockefeller immediately to the front, whereupon he marched another step up the hill by declaring that he was "ready and willing" to serve if there were a "genuine" demand for him to do so...

...He has been strikingly bold on some occasions and conspicuously timid on others...

...If Rockefeller's performance as governor has been distinguished by a consistent empiricism and a sound social commitment, his performance as a politician has been marked by puzzling contradictions...

...For his part, he came to realize that he had always been the rich boy helping out rather than the principal actor, and it taught him that the way to make things go is to be in charge...

...Rockefeller's political naivete also may have cost him the best chance he had for the Presidency...

...he had worn out his welcome and had failed to impress his constituents with his accomplishments—that is, other than the negative fact that he had increased their taxes...

...The neophyte governor's early dealings with his legislature were consistently awkward...

...Yet it is clear from the record that a Rockefeller Administration would be a bold one—characterized by innovation, spending, hard-headed pragmatism...

...Unsurprisingly, the Republican regulars, who mistrusted the maverick from New York, were less overwhelmed...

...In 1964, for example, he developed a scheme for building middle-income housing in the air rights over tax-exempt public property, such as highways and bridge approaches...

...At this point, Rockefeller went a step further, assuring reporters in October that he not only would not run but did not "want to be President...

...When the Social Security Act of 1965, for instance, opened the door to new programs for the medically indigent, he put through a "medicaid" program that was clearly the most generous and costly in the nation...

...In a state that already had the nation's most advanced civil rights laws when he took office, Rockefeller has managed to make impressive additions, including fair housing legislation that by 1963 covered ninety-five per cent of New York's private housing, prohibitions against discrimination by real estate brokers and mortgage bankers, and a bill to outlaw discrimination in apprenticeship training programs...

...He already had spent much of his adult life in the Federal Government on a variety of assignments for the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Administrations...

...He is, to use the current favorite cliche of moderate Republicanism, "a problem-solver...

...be a candidate," he declared...

...The popular response to Rockefeller was the political sensation of the time—an outpouring of spontaneous enthusiasm comparable to that directed toward Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles or toward Senator Eugene J. McCarthy in Madison...

...His approach on most issues was to appoint a task force—always a "task force," never simply a committee or a commission ¦—of top-flight, non-partisan experts to study a problem and make recommendations...

...And some of those closely involved say that a more accurate figure would have been $6 million-plus...

...He has covered Nelson Rockefeller from bases in Albany, New York City, and Washington since Rockefeller came into politics ten years ago...

...In December, at a Republican meeting in Palm Beach, he allowed that, yes, he would "face" a draft if one came along...

...The final sentence of this candid civics lesson inadvertently but accurately defines the pragmatism that has been the central characteristic of Nelson Rockefeller's ten years in political life...

...The advertising, most of which focused on Rockefeller's accomplishments rather than on the man himself, has since become a model for the political use of television...

...His consummate pragmatism has seldom been fettered by Republican Party dogma—or even the state constitution...

...So, when Rockefeller proposed a program of American aid to help "good neighbors" develop their own economies, Mr...

...This image of vacillation and indecision as a politician, in 1960 and again in 1968, is at complete variance with his forthright performance as a public official...

...The New York Times, in hailing his entry into the race against Nixon, felt obliged to note that "of late his record in foreign affairs has been seriously marred by his refusal to speak his mind on the critical issue of Vietnam...

...A conversation with him over a glass of Dubonnet on the rocks is far more likely to deal with the fascinating complexity of a practical situation that needs attention than with abstractions about the morality of this or that course...

...To the extent that the Presidency requires political leadership as well, Rockefeller would have to guard against the recurrence of the kind of wavering and indecision that has marred his political career up to now...

...Instead, characteristically, it is based on practicality...

...And, tacitly at least, he argues that there is nothing more politically moral than to achieve this goal...

...But Rockefeller is a stubborn man, and he had special reasons to want to vindicate himself...

...The official reports show the spending of some $4.8 million, virtually all of it Rockefeller family money...

...And, in turn, it is this ability that has made him a leading possibility for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination, despite a long history of piling political mistake upon political misjudgment—and despite a long spell of vacillation and indecision this year that he did not break until April 30 when he announced his candidacy...

...And indeed I did...

...Another Rockefeller commercial, used only upstate, argued that O'Connor, a city boy, was plotting free subways in New York that upstaters would have to subsidize...

...There is no doubt that Rockefeller sees many of his proposals and programs as applicable on the national level...

...Beyond this, he approved legislation to allow the enforcement agency, the State Commission on Human Rights, to initiate complaints rather than wait for those from individuals...

...In fact, O'Connor's sin had been that he voted against making it a toll road rather than a free road...

...And, of course, it did not work very well, not half so well as his current policy of passing the word that the governor will be "unable to do personal favors" for those who fail to go along...

...He was in the fight, he said, "down to the last vote" at the convention...

...dominant issue of foreign policy—the war in Vietnam and the U.S...

...Shortly after he took office Rockefeller met with his staff to discuss a minor but vexing problem...

...Rockefeller's 1966 campaign for a third term as governor is instructive, in 1968, as the best indication of how he might carry the Republican banner if he wins the nomination at Miami Beach in August...

...It was, without question, the longest, best-financed, best-staffed, most error-free campaign in recent political history...

...What he did recognize, however, was how disastrous a Gold-water nomination would be for the Republican Party...

...If Rockefeller didn't know very much about politics, he clearly did know a great deal about what he wanted to do as governor of New York, once he had learned how to deal with the legislature...

...One rich man's economy note: Rockefeller, unlike most candidates, paid his bills at the Hilton on a current basis, thereby earning a discount...

...His curious withdrawal from the passionate conflict over Vietnam remains a baffling problem for many Americans who lean toward him...

...In Texas the only person of prominence to greet him was the Democratic Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn...

...What," asked Rockefeller, "is 'take-home pay...

...Then Rockefeller would dispatch one of his bright young men to explain the plan to the legislators, who surely would see its wisdom and quickly vote approval...

...He had made what he considered a commitment to raise the pay of state employes...

...Now I don't like to take this position but I think that one has to use whatever authority one has when something of major importance to the people comes before you...

...He has said as much himself on occasion, and there seems to be some obvious logic in it...

...In his second campaign, against the lackluster Robert M. Morgenthau, he won by a reduced—and disappointing —plurality (530,000) that could be easily traced to his divorce and the tax increases he had promulgated...

...Friends and critics alike, however, have often been less charitable...

...In New York he has been trying for several years, without success, to convince the legislature to approve a program of statewide compulsory health insurance, and this spring he proposed a similar universal compulsory health insurance plan for the nation...

...He thanked Rockefeller for his support, but Mrs...

...Said Wechsler: "More than three long, agonized years have elapsed since the start of the U.S...

...He polled 507,000 votes, which most analysts believed were anti-Rockefeller votes that would have gone to O'Connor in other circumstances...

...The Strange Case of Nelson Rockefeller by JACK W. GERMOND When reporters asked Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller recently if he had promised any favors to New York legislators to persuade them to approve his controversial six-billion-dollar program for rebuilding the state's ghettos, he replied: "No, I put it the other way around—that I would be unable to do personal favors [for those who failed to support the program...

...Beyond this, there is really no reason to believe he would be any more bound to Democratic tradition if he were in that party...

...A bitter, unprecedented debate has fractured the country, dividing families, friends, and communities and setting the stage for President Johnson's abrupt renunciation and at least a halting move toward the peace table...

...I can recall one occasion on which I pressed him at a news conference on why he was not using more pressure on a conservative legislative committee to force action on a fair housing bill...

...In fact, the reasons for his silence were largely practical and political...

...He has surrounded himself with brilliant political advisers but he frequently ignores their advice...

...New York Republican dogma has taken numerous defeats at Rockefeller's hands when he has decided the situation demanded it...

...The new darling of the Republican liberal-moderate bloc, and of Rockefeller himself, was Governor George Romney of Michigan...

...Romney lashed out at the New York governor for failing to give her husband the backing she thought he deserved...

...Rockefeller won the election by 392,000 votes, but it was the consensus of the professionals in New York that he might never have survived if he had not been lucky on two counts...

...In his decade "in charge" in New York he has written a record as an activist and innovator, if not theorist, second to no governor in a state with a long history of capable executives...

...But Rockefeller's dedication to pay-as-you-go began to dissolve in the wash of pressing state needs, and soon he was borrowing money for parks and new subway cars and dormitories...

...Later he had to tone it down because of pressure from the Federal Government and upstate New York conservatives...

...Later the same interest in fostering economic development abroad brought Rockefeller an assignment as chairman of President Truman's International Development Advisory Board, the prime agent in what became the Point Four program...

...escalation...

...The most he had done was muse once that the subway was such an essential public service in New York that he would prefer to see it free rather than prohibitively expensive, if it came to that...

...In his rare, cryptic pronouncements he has alternately endorsed Mr...

...For their pains, they were left with egg on their faces three weeks later when Rockefeller announced he had decided "unequivocally" against becoming a candidate and challenging Nixon in the primaries...

...The decision was "irrevocable...

...In 1965 and 1966 no one really pressed him for his views because he was not considered a significant part of the Presidential picture...

...He took himself out of the picture the first time at the National Governors' Conference at Minneapolis in July, 1965...

...One incident is illustrative...

...In 1960, after his "withdrawal" of 1959, he pointedly withheld his endorsement of Nixon and, at one point, seemed to be inviting a draft...

...JACK W. GERMOND is a political writer in the Washington bureau of the Gannett newspapers...

...Johnson's expansion of the war, taken refuge in the assertion that he lacked adequate information to extend his own remarks, or resorted to the unpersuasive excuse that affairs of New York State were so pressing that he could not dabble in the foreign affairs of the nation...

...The philanthropy of earlier generations of Rockefellers may have originated in a feeling of guilt and smacked of noblesse oblige, but this Rockefeller's concern for the underprivileged has none of that...

...Late in 1959 he made a series of trips around the nation, testing the winds of political sentiment to see if there were enough support to justify challenging Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the Republican nomination...

...After developing the HEW plan, Rockefeller served briefly as Undersecretary and became involved in the policies as well as the mechanics of the new department...

...Whatever the luck involved, however, the election was a significant triumph for Rockefeller, for it gave him a fresh image with the national electorate...

...Rockefeller's clearly non-Republican approach to issues has given rise, of course, to the thought that he really might have been far more comfortable as a Democrat all along...

...It is not clear whether they were wrong, or whether the spectacular political developments of the past two months did indeed rekindle in Rockefeller an ardor that had cooled...

...And, still, Rockefeller was lucky to win...

...It is not the first time Rockefeller has confounded friends and foes alike...

...In Milwaukee, Rockefeller found that the tickets to a luncheon had been artificially limited to keep down the crowd...

...At least $2 million was spent on television advertising alone in an unprecedented assault on the consciousness of the voters that began in June, some three months before the normal time for that kind of campaigning...

...Rockefeller has never had a campaign quite so successful as his first, in 1958, when he defeated the incumbent Harriman by 573,000 votes...

...He sees government as the agent for allowing people to realize their "hopes and aspirations," as he inevitably puts it...

...The subject in which he seems to be most personally involved is civil rights...

...The statement set off a frantic scurrying to produce such a demand, including a Fifth Avenue conference at which several prominent Republicans—among them Governors Raymond P. Shafer of Pennsylvania and John A. Love of Colorado—abandoned their cherished neutrality to urge him to run...

...Ultimately, however, he abandoned all pretense of not operating on borrowed money, and this spring he boasted to the American Society of Newspaper Editors that New York has $17 billion in borrowing authority at hand to meet the crises of the times...

...Rockefeller's early political ignorance can, of course, be traced to the fact that he was insulated by his $200 million personal fortune from the everyday concerns of ordinary voters —and of ordinary politicians...

...He is far more interested in getting things done, and done his way, than he is in debating philosophical fine points, in adhering to party ideology, or even in observing the niceties of gubernatorial behavior...

...Throughout that interval Rockefeller has almost continuously treated this momentous debate as a spectator sport...

...One Rockefeller television spot accused his Democratic opponent, Frank D. O'Connor, of voting as a member of the legislature against the Thruway, New York's major cross-state toll highway...

...President Eisenhower used the millionaire administrator's skills on both the reorganization of the Defense Department and the organization of the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare...

...Then, ten days later, Lyndon Johnson's retirement announcement brought still another change of emphasis and direction as Rockefeller and his agents passed the word that he had been dismayed at being written so completely out of the race and wanted it well established that he was indeed "available" for a draft...

...Rockefeller is used to thinking big...

...Supporting this effort was a staff of more than 300 paid employes, most of them working out of the eighty or more rooms the Rockefeller campaign rented in the New York Hilton...

...Roosevelt brought him to Washington to administer it as Coordinator of Inter-American affairs...

...It was a statement designed to help Romney and stop other Republicans from looking beyond him...

...Moreover, he recognized that discussing national issues would conflict with the image he was trying to build in New York as a hard working, stay-at-home governor who had abandoned his White House dreams...

...separately...

...He went into the 1966 campaign, by the estimate of his own personal pollster, with no more than one-quarter of New York's voters prepared to support him...

...There are no simple explanations for his irresolution, especially this year, even among those who are closest to him...

...President Roosevelt was concerned about the pressures on the economies of South American nations that resulted from the war in Europe and the collapse of normal trade...

...He has tripled state aid to schools, tripled state scholarships, and tripled the size of the state university...

...The fact is that Rockefeller is neither introspective nor, despite his well-known interest in art, an intellectual...

...One result was the emergence of an interest in such proposals as expanded health insurance which he carried with him to Albany...

...The cornerstone of his administration's early years, and of his first abortive pass at the Presidency, was his adherence to "pay-as-you-go" financing in New York...

...From the outset, Rockefeller has approached the 1968 nomination as if it had fenders...

...When the Democratic state comptroller, Arthur Levitt, once boasted about how advantageously he had borrowed $100 million for the state, Rockefeller snorted: "Hell, how much trouble is it to borrow a hundred million dollars...

...And he has been equally quick to squeeze the maximum from Federal programs...

...But then Rockefeller began following one of those puzzling courses of his...

...Rockefeller's formal entry into the race made it mandatory for him to end his long, strange silence on the ". . . his performance as a politician has been marked by puzzling contradictions...

...There was a long list, such as signing bills and appointments...

...He is an excellent shoulder-squeezing personal campaigner but often a dull speaker...

...But the significant thing about Rockefeller is that he does not view his policies as a violation of party principles but as an updating of them to meet "the changing situations" he always recognizes...

...Moreover, Rockefeller was dropping these not very subtle hints at a time when Romney, ostensibly his tiger, was still an active candidate and fighting for political survival...

...The governor himself made, by one count, 380 speeches, stumping the state like a man possessed...

...He would not "at any time...

...An adviser came up with an idea: Why not arrange for the state to pay the employes' contributions to the state retirement system...

...In Washington, Rockefeller earned a reputation for being extremely capable and extremely—some said excessively—determined to have his own way...

...His administrative and program-planning record as governor is formidable enough to lead one to expect he would leave an affirmative mark on the state of the union...

...He reasons that if you are dedicated to helping all Americans realize their "hopes and aspirations," you must be most intensely dedicated to those Americans for whom life is most difficult...

...He could not even pronounce bar mitzvah—an incomprehensible gap in the education of a New York politician...

...At the outset, Rockefeller did make a valiant try at being relentlessly Republican in fiscal matters...

...It was a rough campaign...

...He carried the burden that so many longtime officeholders carry...

...Second, the Liberal Party broke its usual alliance with the Democrats and ran Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr...

...Writing in The New York Post, James A. Wechsler condemned Rockefeller's "long speechlessness" during the fateful debate on Vietnam...

...He entered Federal service originally in 1940 on the strength of a reputation he had acquired for expertise in Latin-American affairs...

...At the moment, it did not seem all that important because no one imagined he was going to be a serious contender anyway...

...Now, however, he was faced with the necessity for recommending a $277 million increase in state taxes, which hardly made it a politically feasible time to raise state salaries...

...He can be remarkably shrewd one moment and incredibly quixotic the next...

...And, later, there was a rough consensus that he probably would have defeated John F. Kennedy if he had managed to win the nomination...

...He was no longer just the spoil-sport who had destroyed Gold-water in 1964 but instead a savvy underdog who, beset by obstacles and calumny, had overcome the odds and proved himself a winner again...

...It would not look to the taxpayers like a pay raise, but it would please the state employes by increasing their take-home pay...

...The question of a Rockefeller candidacy did not come up in any serious way until mid-1967, when Republican doubts about Romney's political capacity began to crystallize...

...Politics has been a traumatic learning process for Rockefeller, for it is impossible to overstate how little he knew about it when he decided to challenge the Democratic governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman, in 1958...

...Then, at the height of the New Hampshire campaign, he added that by "facing" a draft he meant yes, indeed, he would "accept" it...

...Whatever the reason, he tossed his hat in the ring April 30—this time without strings or reservations or wistful talk about a draft...