Rocky: Out of the Trance

In Watts the candidate was thumped, patted, jostled, and pushed by the smiling young Negroes who crowded around him, eager for a glimpse and a touch. Perspiring in the crush, he seemed as happy as they, interrupting the handshaking only long enough to brush away a wayward forelock that had tumbled over his eye. If the scene recalled one of Robert Kennedy's last visits to the black ghetto, it was not entirely an accident. Seemingly awakened from a trance by Kennedy's murder. Nelson Rockefeller was at last campaigning for real, openly seeking the support of the poor and the minorities who had made Kennedy such a potent political force.

The first of the candidates to go on the road after the assassination, Rockefeller was, all at once, nearly everywhere. He gave a commencement address at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Governor Raymond Shafer. At the White House, he spent two hours discussing national security problems with President Johnson, Dean Rusk and others.

Prime Time. In California, where he is thinking of second-ballot votes, he missed hardly a stop, skipping from San Francisco's Commonwealth Club to the Town Hall Forum and a private meeting with influential G.O.P. supporters in Los Angeles. "There are some hard-core Nixon people," said Tire Heir Leonard Firestone after the meeting, "but there are lots of open-minded people." At week's end Rocky was at the Republican Governors' Conference in Tulsa, Okla., where he finally won the endorsement of Shafer, who will bring him 40 to 50 of Pennsylvania's 64 convention votes.

The inexhaustible Rockefeller fortune, which has been used scarcely at all this year, was clearly visible. Full-page newspaper ads, the first of a weekly series that will run right up to convention time, appeared in 41 dailies in 33 cities, and, at a cost of $75,000, a half-hour Rockefeller film was shown in prime time on 170 stations of the CBS television network. By Aug. 5, when the delegates meet. Rocky, according to his own estimate, will have spent $1.8 million on advertising.

Yet nothing Rockefeller did could obscure the fact that Richard Nixon is far and away the front runner and that only a minor--perhaps even a major-political miracle could crown the New York Governor at Miami Beach. Nixon backers fumed privately at Rocky's belated combativeness. "He's damaging the party, and it's a contemptible thing to do," said one, "but not unexpected." Nixon himself was mostly silent. He fished briefly in Nassau, held strategy meetings in his Fifth Avenue apartment, gave a talk at his daughter Patricia's graduation from Manhattan's Finch College. So certain is he that he has the nomination in hand that he plans virtually to ignore Rockefeller, reasoning that any response would only give the Governor a bigger target. "We've gotten where we are without using the politics of confrontation," said one Nixonite, "and we see no reason to change our plan now."

Rockefeller believes, however, that Kennedy's death has changed everybody's plans, erasing much of Nixon's lead and returning the country to where it was early in the political season. "I have a feeling," he said last week, "that the political situation today is about what it was in January."

New Leadership, Old Politics. All along, Rockefeller has sought the nomination through the opinion polls, rather than through the party chiefs, who have always distrusted him. Yet he has done little to boost himself in the public standing. Now he is seeking to mobilize a popular thrust that will force the delegates to accept him.

In an attempt to attract Kennedy's followers, many of whom feel uncomfortable with either McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey, New York's Governor is emphasizing his distinguished record on the problems of the cities, and is questioning the war in a more outspoken manner. In an attempt to capitalize on what he feels is a national mood of unease and disquietude, he is calling for a "New Leadership"--his own--to end the "Old Politics."

"Life under the Old Politics," he said in his TV address, "has been a life of events that overwhelm us, of change that outruns us, of headlines that shock us. The men of the Old Politics do not understand change. They do not grasp the new realities of American life. They do not sense the significance of emerging forces." The next ten days to two weeks, Rockefeller believes, will determine whether his unorthodox strategy has any chance of success at all.

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