"1 Shall Go to New Hampshire"

New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller got up one grey morning last week to appear on NBC's Today show at 8:30. It happened to be one time of day that he could get guaranteed, live, national network coverage for his big announcement. Said Rocky: "I am here this morning--and I shall go to New Hampshire immediately following this meeting--formally to announce my candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination and my entry, at the proper time, in the New Hampshire primary election of March 10, 1964."

People might have been more surprised if he had told them the sun had come up on schedule that morning. Rocky has been running hard for a long while. But he injected some fresh drama into the occasion by charging off to New Hampshire, where he planned a slam-bang handshaking tour to kick off his campaign. It was raining buckets that day, but Rocky plodded gamely on, sometimes through ankle-deep mud. Despite the storm, he found hundreds of hands to shake. And he played the grass-roots campaigner to the hilt. In Milford he sipped a chocolate soda in a drugstore. In Nashua he visited a Methodist church, and devoured a steak in a restaurant while a crowd stood outside in the rain and peered at him through the window. In Manchester he bought a pair of overshoes while photographers recorded the purchase.

Others might count him out and declare his remarriage to be a hopeless liability, but Rocky insisted that he was in the race to stay. And though eager to bring down Barry Goldwater, he fired away, as a good Republican should, at the Democrats instead. He had three things against the Kennedy Administration, he said: "Its failure to stimulate the American economy ... its failure to preserve the strength and the unity of the free world and the vitality of its alliances, and its failure to understand and meet the menace of Communism."

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