The Thirty-One Days

Only 31 days after inaugurating Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New Yorkers who had sown the wind by defeating Democrat Averell Harriman last November got the giddy feeling that they had reaped the political whirlwind. Rockefeller, the broad-shouldered millionaire who started things off by wearing a double-breasted business suit to the traditionally top-hat inauguration (TIME, Jan. 12) continued to blow down precedent.

He ignored recommendations from G.O.P. district leaders, selected mostly nonpolitical educators and businessmen for 45 administrative posts, even kept Averell Harriman's Democratic speechwriter on the state payroll as assistant press secretary. He rammed through the legislature a two-cent gasoline tax hike before he presented a budget to explain what he was going to do with the money. Trudging from the gubernatorial second floor of the grey granite Capitol to the legislative third, he blew in on Albany's legislative leaders for conferences. One evening he even took a gallery seat to watch senate debate, a sight no Senator had ever seen.

This week, still smiling and sure of himself, "Rocky" got ready to smash another tradition, appear in person to explain his new budget to the legislature. In the month-old Rockefeller manner, the budget was a bigger-than-ever precedent-stomper. Its $2 billion Republican total topped Democrat Harriman's biggest by $240 million, and Republican Rockefeller called for the sharpest tax increases any New York Governor ever dared suggest, a withholding tax to plug $45 million worth of tax loopholes, a broad down-scaling of exemptions that would mean an average individual income tax jump of 25%.

Rocky's budget proposals brought the first big dustup. Democrats called his exemption changes a "soak the poor" approach. Even some staunch November supporters turned into February fair-weather friends. Growled the New York World-Telegram and Sun: "In retrospect, [Averell Harriman] was a piker." The New York Daily News reported its letters running 100-1 against the tax increases. Critics declared that Rocky's sugar-coating offer of 1958 income tax forgiveness was a pious nothing: 1958 was a recession year; 1959's receipts would be far fatter. Moreover, the withholding tax had a presidential hopeful's built-in gimmick: since 1959 taxes would be collected over only a nine-month period, 1960's twelve-month collections would have the appearance of a tax reduction.

Undismayed by the criticism, Rockefeller carried his explanations to the people in an unprecedented, chart-packed radio-TV chat, told them: "We have got to watch the horizon and not our feet." Few New Yorkers doubted that Rocky would get the tax increases he wanted. The man who has shattered precedent since inauguration day was in firm control of the state, had a hard grip on his Republican legislature.

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