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Nixon Rockefeller
A Double Portrait
Stewart Alsop
Contents
FOREWORD
BLOVIATION
WHAT EVERYBODY KNOWS
WHAT ARE THEY LIKE?
NIXON IN CRISIS
THE TWO ROCKEFELLERS
HOW THEY GOT THAT WAY: ROCKEFELLER
HOW THEY GOT THAT WAY: NIXON
THE CASE AGAINST
WHAT KIND OF PRESIDENT?
APPENDIX
i A Talk with Nixon
ii Rockefeller: Dartmouth
iii Nixon: Whittier High School
iv Nixon: Whittier College
v Nixon: Duke University Law School
About the Author
Foreword
It is generally accepted that there ought to be a reason, beyond a wish to eat, for writing a book. The most obvious reason for writing a book about Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and Richard Milhous Nixon is also the best reason. One or the other might be the next President of the United States. The strengths and weaknesses of the next President of the United States will determine the kind of world our children and our children s children live in-perhaps even whether they have any world to live in at all. The kind of human beings these men are is therefore surely a subject worth writing about.
There is another good reason for writing about them-the simple fact that they are both, each in his own way, quite remarkable and unusual and interesting men. I am not, I ought perhaps to state at the outset, a hero worshiper of either man. I admire both Nixon and Rockefeller in some ways, but I do not admire them in all ways, and I am not even sure that I shall vote for one or the other of them when given the opportunity. It is not the purpose of this book to write a campaign biography -rather obviously, since you can t write a campaign biography of two men who both want the same job. In fact, it is not the purpose to write biography of any sort.
I have not tried to tell the whole story of the career of either Nixon or Rockefeller. I have chosen instead to describe those episodes in their lives which seem to me to tell something about them, to help in understanding the sort of men they are. Understanding them, within the limits imposed by the mysteries of the human personality, is the purpose of this book.
Given such a purpose, the book is necessarily in part subjective. It is a portrait of Nixon and Rockefeller, and any portrait is in the nature of things partly subjective-Stuart s Washington and Peale s Washington are not easily recognizable as the same man. What seems to me a wen may seem to another a beauty mark. For example, Nixon s famous rhetorical question- And incidentally, in mentioning Secretary Dulles, isn t it wonderful finally to have a Secretary of State who isn t taken in by the Communists? -seems to me to sum up perfectly, in its speciousness and indirection, the case against Nixon. But I know by experience that to many Nixon admirers it was a profound and statesmanlike remark. By the same token, what seems to me to prove an inner toughness of fiber in Nixon, which would be a major asset in a President, seems to others to prove that Nixon is unscrupulous or downright evil. Although the contrasts are less sharp, Rockefeller evokes similarly disparate reactions.
I have done a lot of reporting for this book, ranging from southern California to northern New England to get my facts, interviewing scores of people, and taking vast reams of notes. I have tried to report the facts not only accurately but in a reasonably balanced proportion. All the same, this is not what is known as objective reporting. It is Nixon and Rockefeller as seen through my eyes, and I make no bones about it.
Aside from the fact that each is an interesting man who might be President, there seems to me to be a third reason why it is worth writing a book about Rockefeller and Nixon. As both my brother Joseph Alsop and Walter Lippmann have pointed out, the current vast crop of presidential candidates represents a genuinely new political generation and a sharp break with the past.
There is not a serious Democratic candidate who still parrots the old slogans of the New Deal, as so many Democrats continued to do for a long time after the conditions which had produced the New Deal had wholly changed. Neither Nixon nor Rockefeller evinces the slightest inclination to row back up the river of time, to return somehow to the old days of splendid isolation and low income taxes, as the older generation of Republicans, like Robert A. Taft, longed in their hearts to do. Nixon and Rockefeller, like their Democratic opposite numbers, are men who accept the present, as Margaret Fuller accepted the universe, not because they like it but because there is nothing else to do. Both are ready to go on from here, and both know that it is not only useless but positively dangerous to cast longing glances backward, like Lot s wife.
One thing is certain. Neither a Nixon administration nor a Rockefeller administration would be, even at the outset, a carbon copy of the second Eisenhower administration. Nobody can now safely predict whether history will rate the Eisenhower presidency with a good, or a fair, or a failure. By this writer s lights, the Eisenhower regime has dismally failed to maintain a genuine balance of power with the Communist bloc. But there is another way in which the two Eisenhower administrations seem to me to have played a good and needful historical role. Despite all the alarms and excursions, the summit conferences, the war scares, and all the rest of it, the Eisenhower years have been a settling-down period, a time of adjustment and stabilization after an era of enormous change-the era of the New Deal, the second world war, and the revolution in American foreign policy of the early Truman years.
A settling-down period was badly needed, if only to help us throw off the neurotic symptoms, like the incredible McCarthy phenomenon, which heavy pressures had generated, and to make us sensible people again. But there are plenty of signs that the settling-down period has gone on quite long enough and may have gone on far too long. The time is coming, and is indeed already here, when the fertility and inventiveness and willingness to experiment of the thirties and forties will be very badly needed if we are to survive the sixties.
Perhaps, in some mysterious way, that need explains the proliferation of able candidates. For it is worth noting not only that there are far more serious presidential candidates this year than in any previous presidential election year-they are also of a very high average level of ability. We need not despair of a political system which, in time of need, can produce a Johnson and a Kennedy, for example, as well as a Nixon and a Rockefeller for the people to choose among.
It is clear, at any rate, that 1960 will be a watershed, a time from which major change will be measured, as 1952 was not. The settling-down period of the last years has been bought with a price, for we have been living on borrowed time. The Republican recapture of the White House in 1952 was supposed to usher in all sorts of radical policy shifts, from a solution of the farm problem to liberation of the satellites. In fact, the old policies were simply continued at cut rates, under cover of much brouhaha and oratory. After 1960 the old policies will not be continued at cut rates because, in our now drastically altered circumstances, they cannot be.
It is in this context also that it is worth having a good look at Nixon and Rockefeller. They represent the new Republican generation. Because the Republican party is predominantly the conservative party, they also represent the response of the conservative interest in the United States to the challenge of the times. The conservative interest is not monolithic, of course, and the Republican party is a coalition. Nixon and Rockefeller represent the responses to the challenge of what are called, for lack of better words, the conservative and the liberal wings of the party.
There are in fact, it should be noted, no sharp ideological differences between Rockefeller and Nixon, as there were between Dewey and Taft and Eisenhower and Taft. When Rockefeller worked in Washington for the first Eisenhower administration, he often found an ally in Nixon on such issues as foreign aid. The difference is really a difference of style and background and approach to politics-above all, the difference between a professional, partisan politician, a regular, and a seeming amateur with an air of being above partisanship. It is a choice which has confronted the Republican party before, although in different form.
The choice may already have been made, for all practical purposes, by the time this book is published. That is something the writer cannot foresee. But even if the Rockefeller boom collapses prematurely, Rockefeller will remain an interesting figure, politically and personally. He represents the Republican alternative to Nixon, the likely Republican candidate in 1964 if Nixon wins the nomination and loses the election this year.
For such reasons, at any rate, a book-length look at Nixon and Rockefeller has seemed to me worth the effort to write, and I hope will prove worth the time to read. It is customary in a foreword to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to those who assisted at the literary accouchement. I certainly owe such a debt to that ancient and honorable periodical, the Saturday Evening Post.
The editors of the Post give a writer all the time he wants to prepare an article, and there is never the faintest suggestion of pressure to conform to any editorial line. They simply give a writer his head, which is why I enjoy writing for the magazine. The only dra