New Man's First Week

Egged on by an enterprising photographer, a slim blonde airlines clerk walked hesitantly toward New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, holding up a small toy elephant for his autograph. In the midst of a smile and a wave as he left his Convair at Chicago's Midway Airport, Rocky suddenly froze when he saw her. Throwing up a defensive hand and moving away, he brusquely set the tone of an uncertain week: "I'd not like to stress anything political. I'm sorry."

Officially, Rockefeller was in Chicago to attend a Governors' Conference committee meeting on a serious subject that he takes seriously: the urgent need for civil defense fallout shelters (TIME, July 20). But a glance at his two-day schedule was ample evidence that he was also embarked on his first major political foray outside New York, a fact that made his tenseness all the more noticeable. At a first-day press conference in the Shoreland Hotel ballroom he irritated reporters by parrying the political questions. Finally a newsman asked if he was trying to duck questions about his presidential ambitions. Said a withdrawn, tight-lipped Rocky: "No, but it's tiresome."

Grin Returns. Next morning Politico Rockefeller rose like a new day. Into his hotel suite for breakfast came a Wisconsin delegation which left enthusiastically with the word that Rocky probably would be speaking "somewhere" in their state on his return from California and Oregon next month. Several Illinois Republican bigwigs dropped in for a chat, and National Committeeman Morton Hollingsworth observed: "I would have no fears as a Republican if he should be elected

President. That doesn't mean I would support him." Indiana's lone-wolf Republican Senator Homer Capehart, a Rocky fan in a Nixon state, came by to predict big things in Hoosierland.

In an effectively delivered speech to the Inland Daily Press Association, Rockefeller pinpointed six areas of main concern (foreign policy, defense, education, economic growth, labor and civil rights), promised that he would speak "at length on these problems in the times ahead."

Asked the same old presidential question after lunch, he grinned engagingly and gave quite a different answer: "I am not a candidate for the presidency, but I appreciate your asking. I get to feel neglected."

Rocky's problem of staking out issues, without appearing to be at odds with the Eisenhower Administration, began to show itself in Chicago. Implicit in his invocation of "a spirit that rises above the cliches and controversies of crude partisanship" was his reach for a position that might reveal him as a friend to Democrats as well as Republicans. For his pains the Chicago Tribune called him a "crypto-New Dealer," warned that his economic and social philosophy is "far closer to 'liberal' Democratic than to traditionally Republican doctrine." Less harsh, yet frankly skeptical, was the judgment of Cook County Republican Chairman Francis X. Connell: "I don't think he's changed anybody's mind on the question of the nominee for President." While he found Governor Rockefeller "completely disarming," said Connell, the organization is behind Nixon.

Spark Supplied. Back in New York, Rockefeller's inexperience in presidential campaigning tripped him at the glittering annual dinner of the Alfred E. Smith

Memorial Foundation, hosted by Francis Cardinal ' Spellman in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. Talking over the nodding heads of the 2,500 before him, Rocky added to a long evening with a high-minded, deadly serious speech on the need for the U.S. to match its principles with deeds. He was interrupted only once by applause. And the performance looked worse than it actually was in contrast with the subsequent showmanship of Senator John F. Kennedy, a seasoned campaigner who sensed his audience's aching desire for brevity and a spark of humanity. Democrat Kennedy supplied it by throwing away most of his text, giving Republican Rockefeller a string of verbal hotfoots, then swiftly wrapping up Rocky's own point: the U.S. needs leadership to "tell the people the hard facts of existence that face us." All told, the deceptively boyish Kennedy drew ten rounds of applause in nine minutes, a rout which lent poignant irony to Rocky's smiling remark, made to a friend as he surveyed the influential crowd before dinner: "I'm just a sand-lot player."

Granted a quiet spell this week in which to mull his runs, hits and errors, Rookie Rockefeller would certainly draw on his staff and savvy to sharpen his game before next week's Western swing--which may well determine whether he sticks in the big league.

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