Rocky's Running Start

As the only avowed Republican alternative to Goldwater, New York's Rockefeller figures that his fortunes can only go up during the next few months, and he certainly means to take advantage of his situation. Last week, just a few days after his formal announcement of candidacy, he was sprinting down that presidential track as though he already had the nomination in hand and the general election would be held tomorrow.

He chartered a couple of airliners to bring 42 Maryland Republicans to Manhattan for lunch, won a barely hedged endorsement from Baltimore's Mayor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin: "Until I find a better qualified man, I'm for Governor Rockefeller!" After that, Rocky jet-sped to Miami for a six-hour stay, rocketed back to New York for a speech before the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention, shot out to St. Louis for a speech to the city's press club.

Rocky struck out at Democrat Jack Kennedy and Republican Rival Goldwater with equal vigah. Cried he in St. Louis: "The foundations of our safety are being sapped. Our position is gradually being eroded in squabbles with allies, potentially explosive situations in Latin America and Asia and Africa and, above all, through a lack of understanding of the Communist challenge. Three years after the coming into office with grandiloquent promises about 'getting America moving again,' we find the Administration bewildered, floundering in a sea of expedients. And each expedient magnifies the next crisis . . . Blinded by the illusion that a change of tone indicates a change of policy, the Administration has vacillated in the face of alternating Soviet aggressiveness and Soviet peace offensives. The result is that the West is bewildered and in many allied countries leftist tendencies with neutralist overtones are gaining ground." The Administration, said Candidate Rockefeller, is "always the prisoner, never the master of events."

And what about the ideas of Conservative Republican Goldwater? Said Nelson Rockefeller in Miami: "Can you imagine the prospect of the policies being presented to the American people next year? There's advocacy of such proposals as having the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations, of field commanders having the right to decide on the use of nuclear weapons, of selling TVA, of ending immediately support prices for farmers, of leaving the protection of human rights up to the states --including Mississippi and Alabama. These ideas are not within the mainstream of American thinking."

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