Nixon & Rockefeller by Stewart Alsop

Author:Stewart Alsop [Alsop, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

The Case Against

Politics is the most unfair of callings. In no other vocation do professionalism and experience count for so little. The senior partner of an important law firm is not, after all, in danger of being shouldered aside by some upstart who never got a law degree. A poet or a potato-peeler manufacturer is not likely to be given precedence over an experienced financier for the presidency of a bank. And yet the professional politician always hears at his back the winged chariot of the rank amateur, hurrying near.

Twice in the last twenty years—in 1940 and in 1952—the Republican party has turned down the professional and offered its greatest prize to an amateur of the rankest sort. And now the professional, Nixon, hears at his back the winged chariot of the amateur, Rockefeller—although, as this is written, the Rockefeller chariot has a long way to go.

Not that Nelson Rockefeller is an amateur in the sense that Wendell Willkie was an amateur in 1940, or Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Unlike them, he has been elected to office, and to what is usually regarded as the second most important elective office in the United States. In that office he has handled himself in a decidedly unamateurish manner. Early in his first year as governor of New York, when State Chairman Judson Morhouse reported to Rockefeller the bitter opposition in Republican ranks to his proposed tax increase, Rockefeller remarked with a grin: “Tell them I’m just an amateur in politics, Jud, and maybe they’ll go easy on me.” Morhouse replied: “I’ll tell them that, Nelson, but I don’t know how I can keep my face straight.” All present guffawed knowingly.

There was nothing amateurish about the way Rockefeller went about getting the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1958, nor about his campaign against Averell Harriman, which was calculated in a most professional manner to cut heavily into the normal Democratic majority in New York City. And there is nothing amateurish either about the way in which Rockefeller, as this is written, is preparing to challenge Nixon. It has been cynically remarked that only one episode in Rockefeller’s presidential candidacy was the result of pure chance—his son’s fortuitous marriage to the Norwegian Cinderella, Miss Rasmussen. Everything else was planned in advance with the most consummate attention to detail. If the challenge to Nixon is never issued—on this point the reader is better able to judge than the writer—it will be for one reason only. It will be because a highly professional assessment of the real political situation has led Rockefeller to the conclusion that Nixon cannot be beaten for the nomination.

And yet Rockefeller is not a professional politician, all the same, in the sense that Nixon is a professional politician. He has held elective office only since January 1959—far too briefly to attain the professional aura. Unlike the true professional, he has decidedly never had to depend on politics for his daily bread, nor has politics been, all his adult life, his chief raison d’être, as it has been Nixon’s reason for being.

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