The Road Ahead

New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller seemed ready to hit the national political road. During the next six months, he announced at a press conference late last week, he will appear in seven states, participating in Republican Party meetings in Hartford, Minneapolis and Des Moines, delivering the prestigious Godkin Lectures at Harvard, addressing Detroit's Economic Club, and speaking at Atlanta's Spelman College (a Negro women's school named for his great-grandmother, Mrs. Harvey Spelman).

But despite Rockefeller's appearance of confidence, his road may be rocky. In mid-November he announced that he and his wife of 31 years were separating and would be divorced. This, he insisted, would in no way change his plans for his political future. But many New York Republicans, attempting to measure the impact of a Rockefeller divorce, were fearful that Rocky had hurt himself, his party and its candidates. Indeed, ever since Rockefeller's November announcement, speculation has increased about the possibility that Rocky not only might remove himself from 1964 presidential consideration, but might even withdraw as a candidate for gubernatorial re-election next year. Last week the New York Daily News put that speculation into print.

"Governor Rockefeller," wrote the Daily News in a copyrighted story, "probably will not be a candidate for re-election next year and may resign before completing his present term, top state Republican leaders have been advised." The News listed three reasons for "Rockefeller's virtually hardened decision to bow out of the governorship, a post long regarded as a strategic necessity to his expected try for the next Republican presidential nomination." The reasons :

sb "Problems of his personal life, bared by the Nov. 17 announcement that he and his wife, the former Mary Todhunter Clark, have separated and plan a divorce."

sb "Rocky's reported personal belief that the impending divorce will make it all but impossible, even if he gains the Republican nomination, to defeat an entrenched John F. Kennedy in 1964."

sb "In addition, Rockefeller is described as still deeply shaken by the tragic loss of his adventurous 23-year-old son, Michael, last month in Dutch New Guinea."

Denials of the Daily News story were swift. Cried Rockefeller's press secretary, Robert McManus: "Completely untrue!"

Said another Rockefeller aide:

"It is 100% invention." Next day, at an impromptu press conference in an Albany airport hangar, Rocky himself implied that the whole story had been planted with the Daily News by New York's Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner. He called it "absurd and wishful thinking on the part of the Democratic boss." Then reporters asked him if he thought that his divorce would hurt him politically. "I don't think so," he said. Question: "Do you consider the divorce question nonpolitical?" The heated reply: "I certainly consider it a personal matter."

Rocky's subsequent news conference, at which he announced his seven-state speaking plans for the next half-year, was meant to dramatize his denials about retirement. But, setting down the ground rules for the session.

Rockefeller said that he would only answer questions "in the public domain" and would bar all queries "relating to my personal life."

For an eminently successful political figure, this was dreamful thinking, a fact well recognized by the New York legislature's Republican Assembly Speaker, Joseph Carlino, a Rockefeller political associate, who said last week: "Rockefeller is definitely and firmly committed to running again in '62. He's in this with both feet. But nobody can tell what's coming. You never know what's going to happen until it does. Two months ago, Rockefeller was unbeatable; there wasn't a cloud on the horizon. Then the picture changed drastically. It's the fortunes of war."

Where Nelson Rockefeller was on shaky ground was in assuming that he could, just by saying so, divorce his personal and public lives. His marital breakup need not necessarily ruin his political future. But if he were to remarry, the circumstances of that decision would certainly affect his public prospects. For, rightly or wrongly, elections in the U.S. often turn as much on an assessment of the candidate--his personality, character, behavior--as upon the causes he espouses.

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