Out of Hibernation

The two principal contenders for the Republican presidential nomination emerged last week from nearly a month of political hibernation. Both chose the same forum: the American Society of Newspaper Editors, meeting in Washington's Shoreham Hotel. Nelson Rockefeller, advertising his "availability" in the first of a series of speeches on national problems, addressed himself to the urban crisis in a half-hour weighty but well reasoned address that left the editors slightly comatose. Richard Nixon, by contrast, sparkled in a relaxed format that mixed stand-up wit with graceful repartee before a panel of four editors. The same editorial audience that clapped for Rockefeller only twice--and then none too loudly--interrupted Nixon's speech with applause 15 times.

To be sure, Rockefeller's subject was not the stuff that stirs hurrahs. The New York Governor called for a nationwide, decade-long assault on urban atrophy. To be financed largely by issuance of bonds, his program would allot $30 billion to schools, parks and mass transit, and $60 billion to universities, hospitals and middle-income housing. He also called on industry to invest $60 billion in slum renovation. Unless a major effort of that scope is undertaken, Rocky argued, the U.S. will remain "at one and the same time the affluent society and the afflicted society." When Nixon appeared next day, he warned that such spending would only feed inflation and thus starve the slum dweller. Nixon turned with greater vivacity to the Democrats. "McCarthy has the intellectuals, Hubert has Lyndon and Bobby has the World Bank," he quipped vis-a-vis Robert McNamara's fulsome endorsement of Kennedy. Nixon had just had a haircut, and he noted that R.F.K. had got one too. "I've known Bobby Kennedy for 14 years, and he gets a haircut about this time every year."

With his new penchant for self-deprecation, Nixon recalled how a young girl had stopped him on the street in New York and enthusiastically asked him to autograph his picture. "That's a wonderful picture, Mr. Nixon," the jumping teeny-bopper gushed. "It doesn't look like you at all." Asked to describe the "new" Nixon, he fingered his receding hairline and allowed: "Well, the new Nixon is older, to begin with. Perhaps he has acquired, I should hope, some more wisdom."

Strongest Weapon. In keeping with that new-found restraint, Nixon urged a moratorium on criticism of U.S. foreign policy by all candidates during the period of negotiation before talks on a Viet Nam settlement. Chiding Eugene McCarthy for his demands that Dean Rusk resign, Nixon added: "The one man who can do anything about peace is Lyndon Johnson, and I'm not going to do anything to undercut him." Yet Nixon made it clear that division within the Democratic Party is one of his strongest weapons. Flying on to Michigan, where he conferred with Governor George Romney (but came away without an endorsement), Nixon began a nine-day swing through the Middle West and the Mountain States. En route he hammered away at the message that shapes up as his major campaign theme: "A divided Democratic Party cannot unite a divided country; a united Republican Party can."

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