The American Vice Presidency (72 page)

Back in New York on the eve of the primary, Happy Rockefeller was awaiting the birth of their first child. Against the pleas of his political advisers, the anxious father-to-be hastily flew back East to be with her, arriving in time to welcome Nelson Junior to the family. As the candidate’s strategists feared, his decision rekindled the whole saga of his divorce and remarriage. He won liberal Northern California but lost the heavily conservative south and thus the state. An eleventh-hour effort to advance the moderate governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania as a stop-Goldwater candidate fizzled, and at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, Rockefeller was roundly booed by the raucous Goldwater crowd.

Once nominated, Arizona’s favorite conservative went down to a landslide defeat at the hands of President Lyndon B. Johnson in November. Rockefeller went back to the governorship of New York, licking his wounds and contemplating whether he could pick up the pieces of his shattered party in the next presidential election.

After winning a third term in Albany in 1966, Rockefeller professed he was finished with being a divisive figure in the national party. Concerning 1968 he declared, “I am not a candidate for president. I am determined not to be used as an instrument to split the unity of progressive Republicans behind a candidate who can win in 1968.”
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Instead, he decided to back Governor George Romney of Michigan, also just reelected, and pledged a reported two hundred thousand dollars for Romney’s campaign. But from the start Romney, although leading in the early polls, had trouble adjusting to the national stage. He couldn’t articulate well his position on the Vietnam War, and in a Detroit television interview in August 1967, he made a soon-infamous characterization about a recently completed fact-finding tour: “I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the generals, but also by the diplomatic corps.”
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When reporters learned what he had said, they pounced on it as evidence of his gullibility and unpreparedness for the presidency, and the Romney stock began to fall.

In mid-October, Rockefeller, Romney, and also Governors Ronald
Reagan of California and Spiro Agnew of Maryland were passengers on a National Governors Conference cruise on the SS
Independence
from New York to the Virgin Islands and back, labeled by the political press corps the “Ship of Fools.” On deck one afternoon Rockefeller was asked about a
Time
magazine cover depicting Reagan and himself as the Republican “dream ticket” for 1968. Rockefeller said he appreciated the notion but repeated he was not a candidate, adding for the first time, “And I don’t want to be president.”
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Romney took heart, but as the cruise ship plied the Atlantic waves, his own political ship continued to take on water. Before the first Republican primary voting in New Hampshire, Romney dropped out, handing Nixon an easy first victory.

Rockefeller was now reassessing. His first notion was to avoid the next primaries and go back to liberal Oregon, where he had won the 1964 GOP primary, and take on Nixon there. Instead, he announced, as he had in 1960, that inquiries within the party indicated there was no desire for another challenge to Nixon and that he would not run after all, while leaving himself available for a call he did not expect to come.

Subsequent developments, however, persuaded Rockefeller to reconsider yet again. Rockefeller could not abide the notion of a Nixon presidency, which appeared more likely after Lyndon Johnson’s sudden withdrawal from contention for reelection, followed by the jolting assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert Kennedy. He mounted another personal and late television advertising effort to dissuade the Republican National Convention from anointing Nixon and instead switch to him, but it got him nowhere. For all his obvious personal dislike of Nixon, Rockefeller campaigned for the nominee’s successful election in 1968, after which he went back to New York and in 1970 won a fourth term as governor.

In September 1971, he encountered his greatest challenge in office with a takeover of the state prison in Attica by twelve hundred inmates, who held thirty-nine correctional officers and guards hostage. The prison was ultimately recaptured in an armed and lethal assault, in which thirty-nine inmates and hostages were killed, in the worst mark against Rockefeller’s long tenure in Albany.

In 1972 Rockefeller campaigned for Nixon for reelection, with little thought of being further engaged in Washington politics. In November
1973, when Rockefeller’s former cheerleader, Vice President Ted Agnew, was forced to resign, Nixon bypassed Rockefeller and filled the vacancy with Gerald Ford. The next month, Rockefeller resigned as governor after fourteen years to enable his loyal lieutenant governor, Malcolm Wilson, to take over and run as the incumbent in the next election. Rockefeller thereupon established the new Commission on Critical Choices for America and seemed resigned to private life.

But when Nixon’s Watergate woes drove him from the presidency in 1974, making Ford president and leaving another vice presidential vacancy, the man who had once insisted that he was “not built to be stand-by equipment” agreed to fill it. Unspoken by him was the possibility of moving closer to his unfulfilled presidential ambition.

Through several weeks in November and December 1974, House and Senate committees, in considering Rockefeller’s nomination, asked him about many loans and gifts he had given to officials in his state with no evidence of how or when the loans were repaid. But there was little penetrating inquiry into possible quid pro quos in such arrangements. A Senate committee report acknowledged there had been no probing of the huge wealth of the Rockefeller family or “how this wealth in combination serves to enhance the economic influence” of the mighty brood.
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It seemed that Nelson Rockefeller’s willingness to serve as vice president was seen as a generous public service in itself. The confirmation got through both houses of Congress as required by the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, but only after four months in which the nominee declined to take part in the administration, a delay that impeded his or his highly touted staff’s immersion in its policy setting and implementation.

Rockefeller’s constitutional role as the presiding officer of the Senate soon conveyed to him that he would be dealing with tougher adversaries than those who customarily faced him in the state legislature in Albany. In a sensitive fight over a motion to liberalize the Senate’s anti-filibuster rule, he tried to ignore a call for recognition by the conservative senator James Allen of Alabama and proceeded with a roll call, only to be rebuked by Goldwater. When he insisted there was Senate precedent for him to decline to recognize a parliamentary inquiry, the blunt Arizonan told him, “That is what it says, but I never thought I would see the day when the chair would take advantage of it.”
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Rockefeller finally apologized to Allen and
the Senate, but the political harm was done as far as the conservatives were concerned.
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They took Rockefeller’s action on the cloture rule as confirmation that, despite his efforts to appear more moderate than he had been as a governor, he remained a leader of the party’s diminishing liberal wing.
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In offering the vice presidency, Ford had promised to put Rockefeller in charge of domestic policy. But almost at once Rockefeller ran into resistance from Ford’s new White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, who coveted that portfolio himself as head of the Domestic Council. Rockefeller appealed to Ford and finally won out, but Rumsfeld, in keeping with a Ford no-new-spending rule, managed to achieve deep cuts in its budget, thwarting much of Rockefeller’s grandiose plans. Also, in taking on a specific line assignment and trying to run it as he would have as a governor, Rockefeller tied himself down to a bureaucratic responsibility that inhibited his ability to function as a general adviser to Ford.
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Rockefeller pressed on, however, with ideas for a hundred-billion-dollar energy independence authority with a mind to relieve the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Its design was a major achievement for him in the Ford administration, but he made the mistake of being its very visible chief advocate, drawing fire from conservatives who eventually shot it down in Congress. When Rumsfeld managed to saddle Rockefeller with the oversight of an administration investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency, it was another burdensome diversion, which in time was derided by critics as a whitewash compared with a more aggressive congressional inquiry.
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On top of all that, Rockefeller remained committed to family and interests in New York, commuting there weekends, often leaving himself out of touch.

Meanwhile, in early 1975, conservative Republicans began to consolidate behind Reagan as the obvious candidate to dethrone Ford, the accidental president, with standby Rockefeller as added baggage. In May the former secretary of defense Melvin Laird, a key Ford political lieutenant, floated the idea of throwing the vice presidential nomination open to the 1976 national convention. Goldwater chimed in that Rockefeller “might make a fine secretary of state” in the next Ford administration. In early June a group of conservative Senate Republicans called for an open convention to choose both the presidential and vice presidential nominees, since neither of the incumbents had been elected by the people.
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In an unwise gesture to keep peace with the party’s right wing in the South, Ford selected his secretary of the army, Howard (Bo) Callaway, a former Georgia conservative congressman, to be his campaign manager. After Ford had formally announced his candidacy, Callaway held a free-wheeling press conference at the campaign headquarters in which he pointedly made clear this was an effort to elect Ford only, not Rockefeller. A few weeks earlier Ford had said his personal preference was to run with Rockefeller, but it was up to the party convention. “I am confident both of us can convince delegates individually and as a team we should both be nominated,” he said.
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But in an abundance of candor, Callaway observed, “A lot of Reagan people are not supporters of Rockefeller, and I want it clear to them that we want their support [for Ford] whether they support Rockefeller or not.”
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Despite denials from the White House that Ford wanted his vice president off the ticket and was using Callaway as his hit man, Callaway only fed that impression by volunteering to reporters that Rocky was his “Number One problem.” Rockefeller, furious, called Callaway and Ford, but the damage was done.
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Rockefeller himself hit the campaign trail in the South to, as he put it, “prove to them I don’t have horns,” and Ford seemed determined to stick with him, saying, “He has done a superb job. He has been a good teammate. I don’t dump good teammates.” But through most of 1975, the complaints about Rockefeller by Republican conservatives continued, and according to Ford in late October his vice president told him, “Mr. President, I’ll do anything you want me to do. I’ll be on the ticket or off the ticket. You just say the word.” Ford replied, “There are serious problems, and to be brutally frank, some of these difficulties might be eliminated if you were to indicate that you didn’t want to be on the ticket in 1976. I’m not
asking
you to do that, I’m just stating the facts.”
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A close Ford aide, James Cannon, later quoted Ford on the episode: “It was the biggest political mistake of my life. And it was one of the few cowardly things I did in my life.”
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And so, a year before the election, Rocky got off the ticket; he had had enough. Hitting back at Callaway, he told a press conference that his presence on the ticket was “just not worth it,” adding, “I came down here to help [Ford] in connection with solving problems, not dealing with party
squabbles. Therefore I eliminated myself.”
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So were his presidential ambitions over at last? “Listen, I wouldn’t have accepted the vice presidency if I hadn’t been willing to take the presidency should, God forbid, something happen to the President,” he said. “So I am not going to kid you that I came down here with no thought of the presidency in mind.”
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With that, Nelson Rockefeller committed himself to Ford’s election and to campaign for him in 1976. After the election, Rockefeller finished out the less than three months left in his term as vice president and retired from politics. He spent the last two years of his life focused on his interest in the arts and died in New York on January 26, 1979. Nelson Rockefeller was a man particularly well qualified by energy, imagination, and experience to be the president of the United States and to serve well and with distinction as vice president. But he never had the opportunity regarding the first and was frustrated by underutilization and then abandoned in the second role. And with his departure, the New York brand of ambitious liberalism known as Rockefeller Republicanism also vanished.