Richard Nixon regarded Cabot Lodge as a spent force. Goldwater was still talking about ‘rolling back the Soviet Union’ as if there had been no October War. There was no point doing business with Cabot Lodge, and he had more or less ruled out any kind of meeting of minds with Goldwater. However, the Rockefeller scenario was less straightforward. Rockefeller was, in GOP terms, a moderate, a liberal and in the same way Goldwater united some elements of the right of the Party, Rockefeller was the leading — possibly the only viable — candidate of the progressives.
For Nixon the political calculus was simple; he was a man neither of the left or the right who courtesy of his eight years as Eisenhower’s faithful — and dutifully obedient — Vice President between 1952 and 1960 still retained a public ‘presence’ and an aura of pre-Cuban Missiles catastrophe ‘reliability’. He had put his name forward in several primaries in the spring but not campaigned, held himself aloof from the GOP’s increasingly internecine machinations.
He had been biding his time, awaiting his moment.
And eventually his moment had dawned.
Goldwater 32 %. Rockefeller 28 %. Cabot Lodge 9 %. Nixon 31 %.
His home state of California had wedged open the door; and at last the way to the White House was open again.
In politics as in life timing is everything.
It did not matter that if the 28th Republican Convention — due to be held at the Cow Palace, San Mateo, California between July 13th and 16th — convened tomorrow the contest would be between Goldwater and Rockefeller, who between them owned seventy percent of the delegates. California had injected Nixon into the race and of all the candidates his were the cleanest hands. His ill-advised gubernatorial challenge to Pat Brown in the fall of 1962 excepted, he had stepped back from the rough and tumble of politics since his defeat to JFK in November 1960. He was still a relatively young man, unsullied by the October War and the criminal mishandling of its aftermath. If in this divided Union there was still room for a ‘unity’, or perhaps, a ‘healing’ nominee then it was not inconceivable that he might be just that man.
Not ‘inconceivable’ but problematic.
The problem was that while his highly tuned political antennae told him that the time might not be now; his heart was telling him that it was his duty to do something. His confidence had never really recovered after his narrow defeat to Jack Kennedy back in 1960; and losing out so badly to Pat Brown in the race for the Governorship of California in the febrile days after the October War in 1962 had been a real kick in the guts. After that he had been like a boxer down on the canvass for several months and it was only recently that he had regained his appetite for the fight. Nothing had so reinvigorated him than the things he was seeing and hearing all around him as he travelled the disunited Union.
In retrospect standing against Pat Brown in 1962 had been unforgivable hubris; he had been a two-term Vice President, Ike’s faithful lieutenant for eight years in which the Korean Conflict had been ‘shut down’ and relations with the Soviets managed peacefully. Ike would never have allowed the Cuban ‘situation’ to have got out control; and neither would Richard Milhous Nixon if he had been President in October 1962…
Nixon collected his faculties.
Dipping his toe in the California primary had been no more than testing the waters. Today’s meeting was more of the same; he had a week or two yet before he decided which way to play his cards.
If Nelson Rockefeller imagined he had come to Midtown Manhattan as a supplicant that was fine by Nixon. Politics was politics but the facts on the ground were the facts on the ground. Whoever won the Presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in five weeks time was going to find himself in a three, or perhaps a four-way race — an out and out dog fight — with whatever was left of the Democratic Party, the Deep South’s leading demagogue, George Wallace of Alabama in league with, or set against an unholy Democratic States’ Rights alliance managed by the Byrd Organization and likely headed up by that bastion of reaction Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Anybody who said he knew how that Devil’s brew was likely to pan out was an idiot or a charlatan.
The last time there had been a genuine three or four-way Presidential race had been in 1860, when Lincoln had been elected because John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat), and John Bell of Tennessee had stood on a Constitutional Union ticket. Lincoln had polled less than forty percent of the popular vote in that last anti-bellum General Election, with his two democratic opponents between them polling over three hundred and sixty thousand more votes. That election had not actually caused the Civil War — that conflagration had been brewing for a generation — but it had hastened its onset and arguably, ensured that it went on for a lot longer than any sane man would have thought possible on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration.
Richard Nixon was not one of those men who believed that history repeated itself; but he was a man who saw parallels in the events of 1860–1861 which he did not want to see repeated in 1964–1965.
The Governor of New York was waiting for him in his palatial penthouse conference room at the northern end of the top floor of the giant, slab-sided skyscraper. Nixon had considered bringing his own entourage but decided to come alone; Rockefeller, like a robber baron of old, often surrounded himself with a circus of followers, mainly paid hirelings. Seasoned old stagers like the former Vice President suspected it was an admission of weakness not strength on the part of the handsome, darling of the Republican left. Walking alone into what might be a Lion’s den was the ultimate test of a real player’s fortitude; so he had come alone despite the objections of his Chief of Staff, John Haldeman.
Haldeman had been in advertising since he came out of the military, he was a hard case, the loyalist of the loyal who had been with Nixon in 1960 and 1962. Normally, Nixon took his counsel but today he had had a feeling, a gut feeling, that this was a thing best done alone.
Nelson Rockefeller was, as expected, flanked with a dozen aides, advisors and staffers, predominantly although not exclusively male, crew cut and dressed in expensive suits.
Nixon was pleasantly surprised when the room cleared as soon as the civilities had been concluded, leaving the Governor of New York, the former Vice President and Rockefeller’s long-time adviser, the widely respected Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program sizing each other up.
“It’s good to see you again, Dr Kissinger,” Richard Nixon smiled.
Chapter 17
Newsweek Bureau Chief Ben Bradlee had moved his family to the state capital when he had established the new office in Philadelphia a couple of blocks from City Hall. He lived and worked in the big city five days a week, tried to get back home for the weekends. Things hardly ever worked out that way; but he joked that the next time there was a nuclear war he was going to feel a lot happier about it knowing that Antoinette ‘Tony’ and the kids were not living in a big city. There would have been a time when he would have felt guilty about being a member of a class that could afford to park his family in the country, just in case there was another war. But that was then and this was now.
“I didn’t know if you’d actually turn up, Ben,” the willowy blond smiled as she rose from the bench overlooking the slow flowing Susquehanna River. At this time of year the river was beginning to subside, exposing the muddy flanks of the scrub-topped islands in the stream.