9

What Kind of President?

The men around a President tell a great deal about the sort of President he is. Eisenhower’s conservatism, in some ways more marked than Taft’s ever was, his initial political naïveté, and his military man’s respect for the successful money-maker were characteristics accurately reflected in the first Eisenhower cabinet, described at the time as consisting of “nine millionaires and a plumber.” Truman’s oddly schizophrenic approach to the presidency was reflected with equal accuracy by the men around him. Those who dealt solely with domestic matters were, for the most part, second or third raters, whereas on the foreign and defense-policy fronts Truman recruited, with the single exception of Louis Johnson, as able a group of men as Washington has seen in modern times.

It would be silly, of course, to try to identify in advance the men a President Rockefeller or a President Nixon might appoint to high office. But it is possible to identify the men who are close to Rockefeller and Nixon now, and who will presumably remain close to them. In both cases, the men around them tell a good deal about the kind of President Nixon or Rockefeller might become.

Rockefeller is the sort of man who attracts a vast entourage. Ever since he was in his twenties he has been surrounded by a princely retinue of “Rockefeller men, first, last, and all the time.” The pecking order within the entourage is established by the individual’s personal relations with Rockefeller and access to him. The pecking order is in a constant state of flux, with those on the outer fringes suddenly moving toward the center, and vice versa.

Indeed, working for Rockefeller is an ulcer-generating experience, by all accounts, despite his solicitude for the personal well-being of his dependents. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Rockefeller has a habit of appointing two men to do the same job, or overlapping jobs, and then sitting back, with an air of bland unconcern, to see which of the two fighting cocks he has thrown into the ring comes out on top. Again, one suspects that Rockefeller quite consciously emulates the peculiar administrative methods of Roosevelt, for the instability of the pecking order among the men around him was one of the main sources of Roosevelt’s control of the bureaucracy. In a Rockefeller administration, the executive branch of the government would doubtless present as bloodily exciting a spectacle as in Roosevelt’s day. There are those who maintain that the blood and excitement are essential to achievement and are thus far more valuable than any amount of neat and orderly administration.

Despite the instability of the Rockefeller pecking order, there has been for a good many years a rather stable Inner Circle—as the small group of people who are really close to Rockefeller are called in almost audible capitals by lesser members of the entourage. Wallace Harrison, architect for Rockefeller Center, the man who accompanied Rockefeller on that stormy voyage to Seal Harbor, is perhaps the leading member of the Inner Circle. Most people consider Harrison Rockefeller’s closest personal friend. He is a highly intelligent man, humorous, scholarly, articulate, of a rather philosophical turn of mind, a bit older than Rockefeller, and, on superficial acquaintance at least, rather surprising in the role of Rockefeller’s best friend. Another member of the Inner Circle is John Lockwood, the able Rockefeller lawyer and chief man of business, who is the closest thing to a “no-man” in the Rockefeller entourage. It is unlikely that Rockefeller would appoint either man to high office. But they would be important figures in a Rockefeller administration, all the same, for Rockefeller would continue to consult them privately, as he has done for two decades or more.

The third member of the Inner Circle is Frank Jamieson, a former Democrat who is public relations adviser to the Rockefeller family. Rockefeller has three press agents at the present writing, all three, oddly enough, ex-Democrats. As this multiplicity of public relations experts suggests, Rockefeller has an excessive respect for the dubious arts of press agentry, just as he has for the pseudo science of public-opinion polling.

His excessive respect for press agentry may explain in part why he has had his troubles with the press, both in Washington, where he never got a really good press, and in Albany, where the press staged a brief “revolt” shortly after he became governor. His worst mistakes occurred in August 1959, when he attended the Governors’ Conference in Puerto Rico. He invited a carefully selected group of reporters to talk with him on a “no direct quotation or attribution” basis. This was mistake number one—since he invited only about half the reporters present, the uninvited half were furious. He then committed mistake number two when he told the group that he would make up his mind whether or not to become an active candidate on the basis of his and Nixon’s comparative standing in the polls, probably in November.

This was mistake number two, and a bad one. It invited comparison between his standing in the polls and Nixon’s at a time when Nixon’s Russian triumph would still be fresh in people’s minds and when Nixon might very well stand higher than Rockefeller. Worse, it seemed to imply that Rockefeller was ready to turn over the whole democratic political process to Dr. Gallup and his colleagues. Then, after coming back, and after conferring with Thomas E. Dewey, Rockefeller called another press conference. Instead of saying that he had been misunderstood, the classic formula in such circumstances, he denied saying what he had said, thus making liars out of a powerful group of respected newspapermen. This was his third mistake, and probably his worst.

If Frank Jamieson had not been seriously ill, Rockefeller might not have made these egregious errors. But aside from this unhappy episode, Rockefeller has been learning rather rapidly how to handle the press, both in press conferences, where he has displayed that “facility essential to the politician” which Nixon ascribed to Frol Kozlov, and in the often more important private contacts. He appears to have learned the essential lesson—that a really important political figure can no more delegate responsibility for his relations with the press than a man can delegate responsibility for his relations with his wife.

The job of a press agent is, or ought to be, essentially a technical job, but within those limits it is an important job. Jamieson is easily the ablest of the Rockefeller public relations men, and if he recovers from his illness and if Rockefeller reaches the White House, Jamieson is likely to be as important a figure in a Rockefeller administration as James Hagerty has been in the Eisenhower administration.

The fourth member of the Inner Circle is Louise Boyer, Rockefeller’s coolly capable confidential secretary. In an unobtrusive way, she would also be a key figure in a Rockefeller administration, for Rockefeller depends heavily on her. That completes the list of the true Inner Circle. Worth noting is the fact that three of the four Inner Circle-ites are employed in the vast family suite in Rockefeller Center, and although Wallace Harrison is not an employee of the Rockefellers, they are his most important clients.

About the only discoverable Rockefeller intimate who has no connection with the Rockefeller interests is Deputy Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates (who may be Secretary of Defense when this book is published). The two men were brought together by their wives, who are fellow Philadelphians and close friends and who share an interest in nursing. Gates and Rockefeller jointly own a summer shack on Shingle Island, a spot of land off the Maine coast, for which they paid three hundred dollars before the war. Occasionally the two families spend a rugged weekend together on Shingle Island. But even Gates is by no means as close to Rockefeller as the members of the true Inner Circle.

There are a number of candidate members of the Inner Circle, who would presumably play a significant part in a Rockefeller administration. There is Roswell Perkins, a highly intelligent young lawyer who has worked for Rockefeller both in Washington and Albany. There is William Ronan, Rockefeller’s able appointments secretary and man of all work in Albany. There is the budget director, Norman Hurd, the man who finally persuaded Rockefeller that he had no choice but to raise taxes (and thereby, perhaps, knocked his boss out of the presidential race). But the really important apprentice members of the Inner Circle are Republican National Committeeman George Hinman and State Chairman Judson Morhouse.

The key role played by Morhouse in Rockefeller’s preconvention bid for the New York gubernatorial nomination has already been mentioned. As the supposedly neutral state chairman he bet his political shirt on Rockefeller. His chief role was to persuade the upstate leaders to hold off, while the Rockefeller candidacy was gaining steam. He would show the upstate delegate-owners Rockefeller-subsidized polls showing Rockefeller running ahead of Leonard Hall and the other potential candidates. “You’ve got nothing to lose by waiting,” Morhouse told them all. “Wait till you see this Rockefeller before you commit yourself.” Rockefeller would duly appear, turn on the famous charm, and “the guys would swoon.”

If Rockefeller had lost either the nomination or the election, Morhouse would have been a very dead politician. But his long-shot bet paid off, and if the long-shot bet he is now making on Rockefeller for President also pays off, he will be one of the country’s biggest political movers and shakers. Morhouse is an ebullient redhead with an engaging candor and an amusing turn of speech—the sort of politician you might expect to make a long-shot political bet. George Hinman, an upstater who inherited a Bull Moose political background, and who also bet early on Rockefeller, is a highly intelligent man, and he is, one suspects, a considerably wilier operator than Morhouse. Together, Morhouse and Hinman make up a sort of composite Jim Farley, with Morhouse cast in the role of contact man and front-room boy, and Hinman as the backroom boy and chief political strategist. The combination is a formidable one.

There are others, who are not in Nelson Rockefeller’s retinue, who are not his men, but who will strongly influence his course. There are his brothers, for example, all able men in their way. The Rockefeller family is very close-knit, and the family will certainly be consulted if Nelson ever gets to the White House. There are also the men, a rather amorphous group, mostly with large financial interests and mostly from New York City, who always have a lot to say at Republican conventions. Rockefeller has close contacts in this group. His uncle Winthrop Aldrich, for example, former Ambassador to Britain and former president of the Chase bank, is a member of the group, and he has backed the winning candidate for the nomination at every Republican convention since 1936.

Rockefeller’s personal and financial relationships with what is incorrectly called “the Wall Street crowd” by no means assure him the nomination. He will be backed by the New York group only if it is the consensus of expert opinion that he can win and that Nixon cannot, and on that point much attention will be paid to the views of Thomas E. Dewey. If both appear to have about an equal chance of winning, it will certainly be Nixon. There is no doubt at all on that point. For the New Yorkers do not have the same reasons for opposing Nixon as they had for opposing Taft—Nixon, for example, is no isolationist—and Rockefeller could be nominated only after a bruising party fight which all concerned wish to avoid if the price for avoiding it is not the seemingly certain loss of the White House to the Democrats.

Rockefeller’s New York connections have another meaning, however. Painful as it is for those from other parts to admit it, New York’s financial and legal circles provide incomparably the country’s greatest reservoir of ability. Moreover, there seems to be a well-established rule that whereas such provincial industrial managers as Charles Wilson and George Humphrey find it almost impossible to shake their acquired managerial prejudices and take a truly national view, the products of Wall Street and environs make remarkably effective civil servants. The names of Forrestal, Lovett, Harriman, McCloy, Nitze, Finletter, Dillon come to mind—there are many others. For obvious reasons, if he became President, Rockefeller would certainly not staff the higher reaches of his Administration predominantly with New York financial or legal luminaries. Yet no presidential candidate in American political history has had closer personal and business ties with the ablest of such men, and it seems safe to predict that Rockefeller, as President, would tap to the fullest possible extent New York’s vast reservoir of ability.

One thing is completely safe to predict about a Rockefeller presidency. Rockefeller would dominate the executive branch absolutely. Every important post would be filled with a “Rockefeller man first, last, and all the time.” And although it is true that “Nelson doesn’t expect you to be a yes-man,” it is also true that Rockefeller has no no-men, with the possible exception of John Lockwood, around him. One of those who has worked for him for a long time explains Rockefeller’s attitude toward subordinates as follows:

“Say Nelson had decided there was something that ought to be done, like preserving the state’s timber reserves—he’s always been hot for conservation, like the two Roosevelts. Well, if he asked for your advice on a plan for conserving timber, he wouldn’t mind a bit if you said, ‘I think that’s a lousy way to do it—here’s a better way to do it.’ But if you said you thought his objective was wrong, that the state government had no business preserving timber, and that he ought to give up the whole idea, then you’d be out on your ear. See the difference?”

Rockefeller, in short, would certainly demand, and get, “positive loyalty” from the executive branch. As for the other main branch of the American government, the only way to judge how he would deal with Congress is to examine his way of dealing with the New York State Legislature. As we have seen, as a believer in what his grandfather called “method,” Rockefeller had carefully prepared himself in advance with his 134 “studies,” which dealt, among other things, with every conceivable issue he would face as governor. On the day he was inaugurated he already had a detailed and ambitious legislative program ready, including a rather mild labor-racketeering bill, a middle-income housing bill based on a wholly original formula, a bill for improving the condition of the beleaguered Manhattan commuters, and much else. To many of the upstate Republicans, the Rockefeller program smelled suspiciously of “creeping socialism.” But what really stuck in their gullets was Rockefeller’s request for a big tax increase.

Obviously Rockefeller had no desire to increase taxes—he has remarked that he felt like the man who comes in sober at the end of a New Year’s Eve party and is handed the bill. But as Norman Hurd has said: “We fed the data into the IBM machines every which way, and it always came out the same: Raise taxes.” Rockefeller could no doubt have avoided a tax raise somehow, at least until after the Republican convention in 1960, by cutting back on the services he had promised in his campaign and by further borrowing. Instead, he courageously chose to bite the bullet and to ask not only for a tax increase but for a big one.

Politically, the tax increase hurt him badly. It may have hurt him badly enough to kill his presidential chances, at least for 1960—on that point the reader is again in a better position to judge than the writer. His standing in the public-opinion polls, on which he counts heavily—too heavily—nosedived. The opinion of the New York taxi drivers was unanimous: “So this rich character gets elected, and right away he’s got his hand in my pocket.” As Rockefeller has ruefully remarked, raising taxes is bad business for any governor, but it is a lot worse business for a governor named Rockefeller.

A great many Republicans in the legislature felt just as bitterly about Rockefeller’s tax increase as the taxi drivers. The result was a Republican revolt, which made it seem likely for a time that Rockefeller’s whole legislative program would ingloriously disintegrate. But all observers in Albany agree that the amateur Rockefeller’s way of dealing with the revolt was remarkably deft, with a nice feeling for the carrot and the stick.

During the height of the revolt he invited all the key Republican legislators to visit him, in relays, and he treated them to a compelling mixture of charm and sweet reason. “Why, he was a perfect gentleman,” one legislator gasped, on emerging from the gubernatorial lair, doubtless recalling Tom Dewey’s habit of holding his fellow Republicans’ feet to the fire. But Morhouse, Rockefeller’s political man Friday, would take over at that point, gently reminding the solons that there was a fire for their feet to be held to. The system worked. Rockefeller got his whole program through without essential change, including the hated tax increase, and even the cynical members of the Albany press corps agree that the first Rockefeller legislative session was a lively and fruitful affair.

Whether it was also a politically suicidal affair remains to be seen. Rockefeller himself did not realize how badly he had been hurt until he was loudly booed, for the first time in his life, at a Manhattan rally. It may be that the hurt is not mortal, and that Rockefeller, like the knight in the Scottish ballad, can lay him doon and bleed awhile, then rise to fight again. There is a built-in reduction of twenty-five per cent in the tax increase, and the revenue provided should give Rockefeller a chance, in this presidential year, to point with pride at a balanced budget and a really striking improvement in the state’s services. In any case, Rockefeller’s way of dealing with the Republican tax revolt strongly indicates that he has a born politician’s instinct for handling other politicians, an instinct which will prove useful if Rockefeller ever becomes President.

Both as regards the executive branch and the Congress, in short, one can confidently predict that Rockefeller would be a “strong President.” He would run the show without question in his own branch of the government, and he would use every means at his disposal—not only charm and sweet reason but more practical methods as well—to influence the legislative branch. But to what political end would Rockefeller, as President, use his great power?

At this point, predictions become far less confident. In the 1958 gubernatorial campaign, Tammany boss Carmine De Sapio said that Rockefeller was “to the left of Franklin Roosevelt.” As far as the Republican nomination is concerned, his central weakness, as this is written, is the simple fact that too many regular Republicans agree with De Sapio—to them, Rockefeller does not qualify as a “real Republican.”

And it appears to be true that Rockefeller is a good deal to the left of his party. If he had run for the Senate instead of for governor in 1958, New York’s balance-of-power Liberal party, to which his wife Tod once belonged, might well have endorsed him. He is personally close to such leaders of the New York Liberals as David Dubinsky and Adolf Berle, and the New York Post, which is the bible of the Liberal party and of lower-case liberals as well, endorsed Rockefeller at the last moment in the 1958 campaign.

By any sensible definition, Rockefeller is a lower-case liberal himself. If the word “liberal” means anything these days, it means an internationalist and a big-government man, and Rockefeller is both. He believes, he says, in an “activist” government, by which he means a government which will provide active leadership abroad and which will actively promote the general welfare at home. “Government these days is bigger and more influential than many people realize or like to admit,” he told me during the 1958 campaign. “But let’s face it—the government is involved in almost every phase of our lives. You’ve got to recognize that fact first, and accept it, in order to control government, and protect the role of the individual.”

Rockefeller believes, in short, that all Americans should have, if not the good things of life he has had, at least the minimum essentials, and that, if need be, it is the government’s business to see that they get them. He is a convinced internationalist, as his long losing fight with George Humphrey and company for a more effective foreign-aid program proved, and he gives the national security a higher priority than the budget, as the Rockefeller defense report also proved. In these and other ways, he fits the current definition of a “liberal.”

But there is one way in which he is a genuine conservative. His faith in the capitalist system is unfashionably fervent—he is convinced that it is the best system in the long run, not only for Rockefellers but for everyone. It is this conviction, he has told friends, which has kept him in the Republican party, despite the greener pastures which the Democratic party offers to politically ambitious rich men.

There are other ways, more difficult to define, in which Rockefeller, like most extroverts, is essentially a conservative. Like Nixon, he is in no sense a rebel—he accepts the generally accepted values without seriously questioning them. Conservatives are cautious men, almost by definition, and despite his seeming ebullience and impulsiveness, Rockefeller is a cautious man at heart. It is a special kind of cautiousness, to be sure. “Exciting” and “imaginative” are two of Rockefeller’s favorite words, and he likes to do “exciting” and “imaginative” things, like his big investment in IBEC and his decision to run for governor. But before he does one of his exciting and imaginative things, he examines it from every conceivable angle, and he insists on having the best available professional help in the process.

Like his grandfather, in short, Rockefeller is a born looker-before-leaper, a strong believer in “method,” who wants to leave “nothing unguessed at, nothing uncounted or unmeasured.” One suspects that, in a Rockefeller administration, the headlines would be crowded with “bold, new” proposals and policies, all very “exciting and imaginative,” but that these proposals and measures would have been examined minutely and professionally before being permitted to see the light of day.

Otherwise, aside from his faith in capitalism, Rockefeller is not really much interested in ideologies—he is a born pragmatist. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the political historian and chief spokesman of the liberal intellectuals, has warned his fellow Democrats that Rockefeller might turn out to be another Theodore Roosevelt, and that he might transform the Republican party into the progressive party, leaving the Democrats with nothing to talk about, as Theodore Roosevelt almost succeeded in doing. If he ever became President, it would certainly be Rockefeller’s central political aim to make the Republican party again the normal majority party, as it was before the New Deal. He would use to that end whatever means came to hand, without regard for doctrine or ideology, as Franklin Roosevelt did when he built the strange coalition which is still the majority party, despite the accident of Eisenhower’s occupancy of the White House. And he just might succeed.

And although Rockefeller is more frequently compared to Theodore Roosevelt, it is to Franklin Roosevelt, from whom he learned so much, that one returns, in trying to imagine what a Rockefeller presidency might be like. It is hardly a kindness, of course, to compare a man who is suspected, in any case, of not being a “real Republican” to the Republican party’s chief devil. And indeed, Rockefeller would be like Franklin Roosevelt only in the sense that Franklin Roosevelt was like his cousin Theodore. As Schlesinger himself has shown, Franklin Roosevelt imitated his distant cousin in many ways, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. In the same way, Rockefeller’s emulation of Franklin Roosevelt is sometimes deliberate and sometimes the unconscious product of similar backgrounds and natures. The end results might be totally different, as the end results of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency were different from those of the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.

All the same, there are a surprising number of ways in which Rockefeller is like the second Roosevelt. Like Franklin Roosevelt, he is more interested in getting things done than in theories, and in his more cautious way he, too, is an experimentalist. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Rockefeller is possessed of a kind of nineteenth-century optimism, a conviction that, if there is a problem, there is somehow, somewhere, a means of solving it, given an adequate investment of brains and money and effort. And finally, like Franklin Roosevelt, beneath a sunny and smiling surface, Nelson Rockefeller is a most complicated man, at once wily and idealistic, cautious and bold, tough and tender-hearted, conventional and imaginative. He is a man, like the second Roosevelt, who was laughed at in his youth as a rich and amiable fool and who in his maturity is capable of arousing respect, warm admiration and affection, and also fear.

For the rest, no one can possibly predict whether Rockefeller might be a great President, or a good President, or a disastrous President. It is still too early, after all, to put even Franklin Roosevelt into one of those three categories with real assurance. But one can predict that, as President, Rockefeller, like Roosevelt, would be a political focal point even more than most Presidents, a large and vital figure dominating the national and international scene.

Unlike Rockefeller, Nixon is surrounded by no retinue, no vast entourage. In politics, as in other ways, he is the cat that walks by himself. Leonard Hall, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and a shrewd old pro, will play a big part in the Nixon drive for the White House, but he is not Nixon’s Jim Farley. Nixon is, and always has been, his own Jim Farley. Nixon has an able press representative, but he is his own public relations expert. He is even, astonishingly, his own ghost writer. Occasionally an assistant will draft a Nixon speech, but Nixon himself writes the final draft, usually in longhand, on his inevitable lawyer’s lined, yellow scratch pads.

Obviously even Nixon, as Vice-President and as presidential candidate, cannot do all his own work. He gets expert help from the three key people in his office staff, Robert Finch, Herbert Klein, and Rosemary Wood. Finch is Nixon’s political assistant and alter ego. He is a young lawyer, a former Republican chairman of Los Angeles County—a good-looking man with high cheek bones, a dry sense of humor, and something of Nixon’s own watchful self-control. Nixon has said that Finch has the best political brain in his generation, and a conversation with Finch on political matters is almost as enjoyable, to an aficionado of the great game, as a conversation with Nixon. Finch has, in fact, a mind which works almost exactly like Nixon’s where politics is concerned—when he expresses a view on some political question, you can be almost morally certain that it is shared by Nixon.¹

Rosemary Wood, Nixon’s confidential secretary, has been Nixon’s girl Friday since he was a senator. Like Rockefeller’s Louise Boyer, she is much more than a secretary—to use the current gobbledygook of the bureaucracy, she “performs a policy-making function.” (During the working day, major politicians seem to need a trustworthy female about. Almost every leading politician has a Rosemary Wood or Louise Boyer. Lyndon Johnson has three or four.) The third key man in the Nixon office is Herbert Klein, a shrewd quiet-voiced newspaperman from southern California, who has performed brilliantly on such occasions as the Russian trip, which was a press representative’s nightmare.

All three of these people are very able. If Nixon moves to the White House, all three are likely to move with him. In that case they will be powerful people, but their power will not be independent—it will be an extension of Nixon’s power. There is a boss-employee relationship between Nixon and his office triumvirate which is subtly different from the more personal relationship between Rockefeller and his Inner Circle.

Outside his office, those closest to Nixon are probably Attorney General William Rogers, James Bassett, Ted Rogers, a television executive, and Jack Drown, an old poker-playing friend. Of the four the first three were on the Nixon train when the fund crisis broke, and they are members of the Nixon-created Order of the Hound’s Tooth. There is a special relationship between Nixon and those who were with him in the great crisis of his life, rather like the relationship between veterans of the same battle.

In the Eisenhower cabinet the men closest to Nixon, other than his friend Rogers, are Secretary of Labor Mitchell and Secretary of State Herter. Nixon and Mitchell have often been on the same side of the fence in policy debates within the Administration—significantly, since Mitchell is markedly the most liberal Eisenhower administration cabinet member. Mitchell is a Catholic and an easterner, and a Nixon-Mitchell ticket is a distinct possibility, especially if Senator Kennedy is not the Democratic presidential candidate. (The logic here is that the Catholics will vote for Kennedy anyway if he is the Democratic standard-bearer, but if he is turned down, Mitchell will attract Catholic votes to the Republican ticket.) Nixon first knew Herter when he served on the Herter committee, and despite the Stassen farce, they have been friendly ever since.

If Nixon becomes President, Herter and possibly Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton might be asked to stay on. Mitchell and Rogers would be almost certain of some sort of important post. Perhaps Attorney General Summerfield would also get a good job, for Nixon has not forgotten Summerfield’s stubborn championship of his cause during the fund crisis. Otherwise there would probably be no Eisenhower holdovers.

Among others around Nixon, Murray Chotiner is in a special category. Nixon makes no bones about his admiration for Chotiner’s political judgment, and if Chotiner were vindicated by being elected to Congress he would probably have far more access to the White House in a Nixon administration than most freshman congressmen. Also in a special category is Philip Watts, Nixon’s perambulating conscience and occasional golfing companion. That about completes the list.

With the exception of Jack Drown (who will replace the perennial George Allen as official presidential crony if Nixon is elected) and the possible exception of Watts, Nixon’s friendships are what is known on Madison Avenue as “business friendships.” They are associations connected with Nixon’s political career. This is true even of Rogers. Like Finch, Rogers shares Nixon’s passion for politics, and he, too, thinks politically much as Nixon thinks. Politics made Rogers and Nixon friends, and keeps them friends.

But although they are friends, and Nixon listens to his advice, Rogers does not have a decisive influence on Nixon. Nixon is so much his own man that no one, no one at all, has a really decisive influence on him. In a Nixon administration there would be no Colonel House, no Harry Hopkins, no Sherman Adams. As President, Nixon would also demand, and get, “positive loyalty” in the executive branch, but loyalty of a far less personal sort than Rockefeller would demand. Unlike Rockefeller, Nixon does not much care whether his subordinates like him, so long as they do what he wants them to do, and do it well.

Nixon is, in short, more interested in results than affection, which also suggests how a President Nixon would handle his relations with Capitol Hill. Nixon has never been a “Senate man” or a member of what journalist William White has dubbed “The Inner Club.” No cozy groups congregate in the Vice-President’s office late in the afternoon to “strike a blow for liberty,” as they did when Alben Barkley or Jack Garner held the office.

Nixon is no parliamentarian—he has never really learned the great body of rulings and precedents which a true Senate man must master. In this respect, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson can make Nixon, as presiding officer, look like a fool—on one embarrassing occasion, involving a Nixon ruling on Senate Rule 22, Johnson did just that. All the same, Nixon understands Congress. He understands how the system works, why representatives and senators vote as they do—after all, he has been both himself. Indeed, since his political career started in 1946, Nixon has had continuous experience in what makes Congress tick—or fail to tick—and that is an asset which Rockefeller entirely lacks.

On the other hand, Nixon lacks the easy, arm-on-the-shoulder camaraderie of Rockefeller—and charm, as Franklin Roosevelt proved, can be a potent weapon in the ancient running battle between the executive and legislative branches. In any case, Nixon, like Rockefeller, would be a “strong President,” which means that he would fight, like a tigress defending her cubs, against congressional encroachment on the presidential prerogatives, while using every means at his disposal to dominate the Congress.

Would Nixon be a “liberal” or a “conservative” President?

Up to this point we have been on fairly solid ground, but here the ground is soft and boggy. For one thing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to define just what the two words mean in terms of actual legislation. For another, Nixon’s record is not consistent. In his first term in the House he voted like a down-the-line doctrinaire right-wing Republican. Thereafter he began a gentle movement toward the center, which has continued, with some zigs and zags, ever since. In the interview reproduced in the appendix, when I remarked that it seemed to me he was a “conservative, in terms of respect for the status quo,” Nixon betrayed some irritation—naturally enough, no doubt, since it is always irritating to be told what you think by somebody else—and listed such areas as medical care, aid to education, and civil rights, in which he considered his views liberal.

Yet I still believe that Nixon is an instinctive conservative, just as he was the kind of boy who instinctively accepted the conventional standards of the world as he found it. But he lacks the passionate, doctrinaire conservatism of a man like George Humphrey, whose thinking continued to dominate the Eisenhower administration even after he ceased to be Secretary of the Treasury. There is nothing sacred to Nixon about a balanced budget, as he demonstrated when he unsuccessfully advocated a tax cut during the 1958 recession.

In the area of foreign and defense policy, Nixon’s record has been more consistent, and is easier to read, than in any other area. Ever since the Herter committee days, as noted earlier, he has been a strong advocate of foreign aid, with no visible political profit to himself. He is an internationalist, an activist, an interventionist—call it what you will—in foreign policy. As he says, “I would take chances for peace.” His record on defense is also consistent—up to a point. He has voted for a strong defense, and within the Administration, especially in the era immediately after the Sputniks, he argued for an increased defense effort. But in 1959, as we have seen, he reversed himself and strongly supported the Administration against criticism of its inadequate defense program.

His motives were certainly at least in part political—if he had not supported the President on that issue, the President might have intervened against his nomination. And this suggests another prediction which can be made with some assurance about Nixon as President. He would be a thoroughly political President. In Robert Donovan’s revealing book about the Eisenhower administration, Eisenhower: The Inside Story, Nixon always plays the same role. When an issue is up for discussion, Nixon shrewdly sums up the probable political impact of alternative courses of action—he very rarely comments on the inherent merits of the issue in question. As President, Nixon would look beyond politics, but politics would still be very much on his mind.

Politics was rarely absent from the mind of Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman was not precisely non-partisan. A good case can be made for the view that one of Dwight Eisenhower’s gravest weaknesses as President has been his lack of practical political experience. A thoroughly political President, in short, is by no means necessarily a bad President. Nor does it seem to me that the inconsistency of Nixon’s stands on certain issues is as damning as his critics maintain. A doctrinaire consistency like Senator Taft’s can, indeed, be a very dangerous quality in a President. It is fortunate that Lincoln’s later policies were not consistent with his pre-Civil War views on slavery, and that Franklin Roosevelt was not consistently faithful to his 1932 campaign pledges.

For the rest, one can only guess. In one way, at least, it seems a fair guess that Nixon would be a less conservative President than Rockefeller—for he is at heart a less cautious man. “I’m always willing to take a chance,” he says. “I think that has been the mark of my political career.” Nixon, to be sure, like Rockefeller, always weighs the risks carefully in advance. But he relies far more on his own intuition than on “studies” or expert analyses. The next four years are certain to be a time of continuing crisis, whoever may be President. One can imagine Nixon, far more easily than Rockefeller, deliberately deciding “to take a chance” at a time of great international crisis in order to turn the crisis to the West’s advantage, as he turned the fund crisis, for example, to his own advantage.

It is true that there are still intelligent people, who are not partisan or doctrinaire Democrats and who have in their minds a small pea of doubt about Nixon, who fear that, in his fierce ambition and his total absorption in politics, he might pervert the enormous powers of the presidency to his own political ends. And it is obviously impossible to predict what effect the office of the presidency would have on Nixon, or what effect Nixon would have on that office.

But Nixon has grown already, since the days when he saw winning elections by whatever means as the chief function of a politician, and surely the chances are that if he became President he would grow further in office, as almost all Presidents have grown. And certain of the qualities which Nixon has displayed in his political career—the boldness and decisiveness, the instinct for “moving quickly to shape events,” the sure feel for the realities of power, the strong intelligence, the cool toughness and simple guts in time of crisis—would also be markedly useful in a President.

And so the portraits of these two men are as complete as I know how to make them. I realize that they are incomplete, that there are areas which are dim and fuzzy, or almost blank, because I have not explored them, or because I have not understood. I realize also that, although I have tried to write fairly about Rockefeller and Nixon, without special pleading or prejudice, I have not entirely succeeded. Perhaps it is not possible to be entirely fair about living politicians—no one who is not a political eunuch is without political prejudice. Some readers will certainly feel strongly that I have been too kind to one or the other or both, and others will feel just as strongly that I have not been kind enough. As I noted at the beginning, what looks to me like a wen or pimple may look to someone else like a beauty mark, and vice versa.

In any case, it is not up to the Writer to decide whether Rockefeller or Nixon is better suited to the presidency, or whether the Democrats have a candidate who is better suited to that office than either of them. The curious, cumbersome, unique American political process will make those choices, and the chances are really very good that the choices will be well and truly made. For odd as it seems to foreigners, our political process works, on balance, remarkably well. It not only works well in making the ultimate choice for the presidential office but also in producing unusual and interesting men from among whom to choose. And surely those adjectives fit Richard Milhous Nixon and Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.

¹ This phenomenon of the political alter ego is not unusual; Senator Johnson has an alter ego in Bobby Baker, secretary of the Senate Majority Leader, and Senator Kennedy has another in his administrative assistant, Ted Thorenson.