When convention chairman Morton repairs to a nearby trailer command post to quench his thirst, his place behind the podium is taken by Oregon Gov. Mark Hatfield. Less than 24 hours ago, Hatfield made history as the first keynote speaker ever to be booed by his own party’s delegates. His offense? Lumping the right-wing John Birch Society—whose leader Robert Welch Jr., had linked Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles to the international communist conspiracy—with the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party USA in a denunciation of political extremism.
It is on the extremist issue that Rockefeller has chosen to make his stand, just as soon as those dictating the convention schedule allow him five minutes to address the nation. Asked over the years why he hasn’t simply changed his party registration, something first urged on him by FDR, Rockefeller replies that he would much rather be pushing the GOP elephant forward than holding the Democratic donkey back. Until now, the governor’s need to woo conservatives in the hinterlands has acted as a brake on his free-spending instincts, producing a “pay as you go” liberalism that supplants racially charged talk of states’ rights with a muscular federalism grounded in states’ responsibilities. Fiscal prudence and social conscience: These are the building blocks of Rockefeller Republicanism. To many on the right, the term is an oxymoron. Already they detect in the governor’s creative use of state bonding authority the seed corn of future bankruptcy. They argue that there is no gauging the financial consequences of Rockefeller-style activism untethered to ideology.
It is a few minutes after nine o’clock, midnight in the east, when Rockefeller bounds up to the platform. “They were throwing paper at him,” Joe Boyd, a loyal Rockefeller aide, remembers. An angry Boyd hands Rockefeller’s speech to the governor’s one-man security detail and charges off into the stands. Grabbing one of the ringleaders, the diminutive Boyd lifts him out of his seat. “OK, who’s next?” he shouts. An uneasy quiet is restored.
On the platform, an even nastier confrontation is only narrowly averted as convention Chairman Thruston B. Morton, professing concern for Rockefeller’s safety, urges him to postpone his remarks. To drive his point home, Morton resorts to a little body language.
“You try to push me again,” snaps Rockefeller, “and I’ll deck you right in front of this whole audience.”
His introduction elicits a thin chorus of cheers from the New York delegation, quickly lost in a swelling chant of “We Want Barry.” A tight smile, not extending to his slitted eyes, creases Rockefeller’s handsome face. Impassively, he scans the seething hall until his glance comes to rest upon his wife, occupying a box high above the delegates. Less than six weeks after giving birth to their first child, Happy Rockefeller wears a stricken look.
The new Republican majority is in no mood to be lectured by Nelson Rockefeller. Having cooked his own goose, conservatives reason, Rockefeller is now serving it up stuffed with sour grapes. “Remember he was waging war on a platform they had written,” explains Doug Bailey, then a Rockefeller policy researcher. “They were absolutely convinced that the only reason he was doing what he was doing was to hurt Barry Goldwater in the general election. They knew that. They knew that to the marrow of their bones.”
Taking advantage of a lull in the derisive chorus, Rockefeller begins speaking. “During this past year I have crisscrossed this nation fighting to keep the Republican Party the party of all the people and warning of the extremist threat—” Outraged voices interrupt him. Below and to the left of the podium, Californians in bright orange Mae West jackets jeer their nemesis. Their catcalls are taken up by red-faced Republicans from Texas, Ohio and Washington State. As the decibel count rises, Morton spreads his hands helplessly. The governor should be allowed to speak his piece, the chairman says. “It’s only fair and right.”
The hall begs to differ. Rockefeller’s mention of a speech he’d planned to give at Loyola and its “cancellation by coercion” days before the crucial California primary—a blatant public condemnation of the divorced and remarried governor by the Catholic hierarchy—drives a tall blonde woman on the floor over the edge. “You lousy lover,” she shrieks, “You lousy lover.” A youthful Goldwater runner chimes in “You goddamned Socialist,” before adding, less than eight months since John Kennedy’s assassination, “I wish somebody would get that fink. Maybe it would save this country.”
Rockefeller isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t control the audience, he reminds Morton. It’s up to the chair to impose order. Only then, he mutters into the live microphone, can he finish what he came here to say. A Louisiana alternate delegate points to the explosive galleries and directs his neighbor, “Look at that. It’s America up there.” Glancing around him, Bailey, the policy researcher, observes a deputy of the San Mateo County Police booing Rockefeller. “I looked down at his arm, he has a pistol in an unsheathed holster, and I decided from that point I couldn’t dare take my eyes off that guy, because I had no idea what he was going to do,” recalls Bailey. His colleague John Deardourff is reminded of a German Bund meeting in the 1930s.
Strangely subdued in the pitching sea of noise is Alabama’s solid-for-Goldwater delegation. Their eyes are all on a tall, athletic black man standing in a nearby aisle and shouting, “That’s right, Rocky. Hit ‘em where they live.” Jackie Robinson is a Rockefeller Republican, a baseball legend and a hero to millions of Americans. At one point a ’bama delegate, enraged by Robinson’s chant, leaps to his feet. He is about to commit physical assault on the star athlete until he is restrained by his wife.
“Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” bellows Robinson.
At the podium Rockefeller is openly taunting the crowd. “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” he declares. Here is the incident that Goldwater’s opponents have tried all week to provoke. It comes far too late to prevent the senator’s nomination. But it pins the extremist label on Goldwater and his movement more effectively than Lyndon Johnson ever could. As the minutes crawl by the Cow Palace becomes a political slaughterhouse, wherein any prospects for Republican victory in November are rapidly expiring before a stunned television audience.
Behind the lectern Rockefeller nervously taps his foot like a bull pawing the ground. You don’t have to nominate me is the unspoken message delivered to the bull-baiters. But you’re going to have to listen to me. It is one of those rare moments in history when a page is visibly being turned, a past noisily discarded. The drama of personal confrontation obscures much of what Barry Goldwater’s party is rejecting: the polarizing governor of New York, to be sure, and with him the presumption of regional superiority, the stranglehold of eastern money and the liberal consensus which, for most of the 20th century, has offended fundamentalists of various schools. In politics as in art, it is Rockefeller’s fate to be surrounded by primitives.
The booing escalates as he decries “anonymous midnight and early morning phone calls. That’s right.” A fresh wave of anger swamps the podium, as Rockefeller lashes out at “smear and hate literature, strong-arm tactics, bomb threats and bombings. Infiltration and takeover of established political organizations by Communist and Nazi methods!” His Aldrich jaw protruding like a ship’s prow, Rockefeller half shouts into the din, “Some of you don’t like to hear it, ladies and gentlemen, but it’s the truth.” More boos. Renewed cries of “We Want Barry.” At the lectern a glowering Morton wields his gavel as a weapon. “I’m going to finish this last line,” Rockefeller insists. “I move the adoption of this resolution.”
At last, with a flippant wave, Rockefeller turns to go, appearing “for all the world like he had been given a standing ovation,” marvels Governor Hatfield. “He couldn’t have had a happier look on his face.”
The next morning, hours after all three moderate motions went down in flames, Rockefeller ran into his communications director Hugh Morrow. “You look like the wrath of God,” he told Morrow, who blamed his appearance on the previous night’s fiasco, described by the New York Times as “Bastille Day in Reverse,” and his subsequent quest for alcoholic oblivion.
“I had the time of my life,” said Rockefeller.
This same bleak Wednesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Bill Scranton telephones former President Eisenhower, still a powerful party figure, to inform him of plans to withdraw from the race (something Ike has been urging on him for days). Out of the question, says Rockefeller, when he hears about the call. If Scranton gets out, then Rockefeller will get back in. Someone has to carry the moderate banner. Too much is at stake to allow their actions to be governed by bruised feelings, bogus appeals to party unity or the specter of public humiliation. His pep talk convinces the patrician governor of Pennsylvania, mocked by detractors as the Hamlet of Harrisburg, to let the drama play itself out. And it illustrates the central paradox of Nelson Rockefeller, who is never more appealing than when fighting for his life, even if it is his own conduct that places him in that precarious condition.
Though denounced as a party wrecker, he refused to switch political allegiances, even for the presidency. An emotionally guarded extrovert happiest in the world of artistic contemplation; a scion of the American Establishment who was most comfortable playing the renegade: All his life Rockefeller went against the grain.
"Governor Nelson Rockefeller's 1964 Republican Convention Speech. Grandson of billionaire John D. Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller's 1964 Republican Convention Speech."
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