Republicans: Anchors Aweigh

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Aboard the S.S. Independence this week in Manhattan, a bulwark-bulging guest list checked in for a voyage into 1968. As the Governors of 42 American states—21 Democrats, 21 Republicans—and 700 aides and journalists sailed off on an eight-day cruise to the Virgin Islands, it was not the wide blue Caribbean that absorbed their attention but the political waves back home that may well sweep a Republican President into the White House next year.

With the notable exceptions of Richard Nixon and Illinois’ Senator Charles Percy, the leading contenders for the G.O.P. nomination were all ticketed for the trip—New York’s Nelson Rockefeller, Michigan’s George Romney and California’s Ronald Reagan. And there were enough potential vice-presidential candidates to create a traffic jam on the promenade deck. Among them: Massachusetts’ John Volpe, Rhode Island’s John Chafee, Ohio’s James Rhodes, Wisconsin’s Warren Knowles, Colorado’s John Love, New Mexico’s David Cargo, Washington’s Daniel Evans, even Nelson’s younger brother, Arkansas’ Winthrop Rockefeller.

One of the Fellas. With the G.O.P. convention less than ten months away, the field is more crowded with presidential contenders than at any comparable time in a generation. Not since 1940, when 13 men won votes on the first ballot and Wendell Willkie only managed to nail down the nomination on the sixth, have Republicans been confronted with so wide open a race. Moreover, when the convention comes to order in Miami Beach on Aug. 5, the field may well remain as crowded as it is right now. The likelihood then is for a “brokered” convention—one in which nobody has enough strength to win until after protracted private horse trading. “Nobody is so far ahead that he can’t be beaten,” said a Republican state chairman from New England. Nor is anybody so far behind that he can’t catch up—unless it is George Romney.

“Romney’s dead,” says Indiana’s Republican state treasurer, John Snyder. “The ‘brainwash’ remark didn’t make all that much difference. People were already looking for a reason to turn away.” Most other G.O.P. strategists agree. From a commanding lead in the polls right after his impressive re-election victory in 1966, Michigan’s Governor has reached a nadir; he is unlikely even to control the entire delegation from his own state. But Romney has been counted out before, only to stage a winning campaign. He seems determined to do so again in the primaries, and is already taking steps to soften the stiff, sanctimonious impression that he too often conveys. “He’s sure trying to be one of the fellas,” says an aide. “He’s even using a lot more hells and damns than he used to.” Even so, the newsmen who cover Romney still refer to him as “Super Square.”

Psychological Influence. With Romney in at least partial eclipse, all attention now is focused on the two men who have most insistently denied interest in running—Rockefeller and Reagan. According to the latest Gallup poll, a ticket with Rocky for President and Reagan in the second spot would swamp Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, 57% to 43%. The polls, of course, could change drastically by midsummer. As Psephologist Richard Scammon notes, in early 1964 “the polls were jumping all over the place between Lodge and Rockefeller. It’s the same sort of volatile situation now.”

Nonetheless, there is some question whether the G.O.P.’s conservatives can ever bring themselves to condone Rockefeller’s refusal to back Barry Goldwater in 1964. Unless they do, the G.O.P.’s “dream ticket,” which would bind up the old wounds, give the party strength in the South and the Northeast, and all but certainly capture the two essential states, New York and California, may never materialize.

Nixon, who remains very much in contention, could build up an irresistible momentum by winning all four primaries where he will have serious competition. But New Hampshire is a state where, as a Republican who has campaigned there says, “they vote on whims.” Wisconsin and Nebraska could turn into bloody battlegrounds if Reagan’s supporters make a determined bid. Oregon, the fourth pivotal primary, could see the belated entrance of Rocke feller, and top G.O.P. officials think that he can beat everybody there, as he did in 1964.

The frantic publicity surrounding the primaries often makes them seem disproportionately potent. Actually, the contested primaries will account for no more than 150 of the 1,333 delegate votes, and even if Nixon did win them all, he might still be denied the nomination—as was Democrat Estes Kefauver after winning seven primaries in 1956. Their chief influence, in fact, is psychological, and their major effect on the G.O.P. nomination is likely to be negative.

Of the five principal contenders, says Nixon, “two will probably fall by the wayside in the primaries.” The two men most heavily committed to the primary route, and the likeliest casualties, are Romney and Nixon himself. That would leave Rockefeller, Reagan—and Percy. The Chicagoan professes to be uninterested, but is plainly ready and willing to step right up if his name is called—either for first or second place on the ticket.

Crowded Balcony. Behind Percy is a host of others whose names keep cropping up: Governors Claude Kirk of Florida, Raymond Shafer of Pennsylvania and Tom McCall of Oregon, who were unable to attend the floating convention; Senators Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Clifford Case of New Jersey, Thruston Morton of Kentucky, John Tower of Texas, Peter Dominick of Colorado, Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Thomas Kuchel of California; House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan; and New York’s Mayor John Lindsay, who also lacked the rank to get aboard the Independence but will be conveniently vacationing in the Virgins this week anyway.

Any of them could conceivably wind up on a G.O.P. ticket. “If there’s a convention deadlock,” says Goldwater, “well, it depends on who is sitting in the balcony, as Willkie was.” So crowded is the balcony that one New England politician, asked to suggest a few tickets, rattled off 34 in a matter of seconds. There are so many possible permutations that one Republican Governor declares: “Every time I dream of it, I wake up screaming.” Some pairings are merely whimsical: the Brotherhood Ticket of Rockefeller and Rockefeller, whose slogan could be MAKE MONEY, NOT WAR, or the Sunshine Ticket of Reagan and Kirk. Some are quite serious: Nixon and Percy, for example; indeed, some Democrats have already anticipated that combo and dubbed it MR. MEAN & MR. CLEAN.

The possibilities for button makers and punsters are limitless. Romney? How about DUZ DID IT? Morton? Easy—THE SALT OF THE EARTH. Hatfield? THE REAL MCCOY. The Governor of Colorado? ALL FOR LOVE. Percy? MERCY! Or Ford? LORD! Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, an all-out hawk who has announced his interest in running, could campaign under the banner, BOMBS AWAY WITH CURT LEMAY.

A.B.J. Despite the plethora of potential candidates, one of the five current leading contenders is almost certain to top the ticket. The reason: “We want a winner, and that means a name candidate,” says former Kansas Republican Vice Chairman Mrs. Kathleen Hetcher. Goldwater had to scramble for the nomination in 1964, but the fight might have been far more ferocious had more Republicans felt that victory was possible. Now, Johnson seems highly vulnerable—not necessarily to Mickey Mouse, as Lindsay suggested two weeks ago, but to a skillful, energetic and widely attractive candidate.

Gallup’s most recent sampling shows that only 38% of the nation likes the way L.B.J. is handling the presidency—an alltime low for him and a long way from the 80% approval he enjoyed in January 1964. Viet Nam is his foremost problem, and barring either a spectacular military triumph or successful negotiations with Hanoi, a G.O.P. candidate might well argue, a la Eisenhower, that a new Administration is needed to end an unpopular war. The looming threat of inflation—”profitless prosperity” as Washington’s Governor Evans calls it—is another bugaboo. The decaying cities and the exploding ghettos could develop into the biggest issue of all. Taken together, the problems are helping to build a formidable “anti” vote—the kind that helped Ike to defeat Adlai Stevenson, and Franklin Roosevelt to unseat Herbert Hoover.

Indeed, Dump-Johnson movements are proliferating, and stickers reading A.B.J. (for Anyone But Johnson) have begun appearing on auto bumpers in Maine. Says Nixon: “Johnson will have it tough in ’68. We had to run against his promises in 1964. Now we can run against his performance.”

Even so, Johnson may prove no easier to unhorse in 1968 than Harry Truman was 20 years earlier when threatened by an overconfident G.O.P. Like Truman, Johnson faces flank attacks from two sides, the radical New Leftists and the segregationist supporters of former Alabama Governor George Wallace. Like Truman, also, he is getting no help from the 50,000-member Americans for Democratic Action, which is noisily critical of his Viet Nam policy. But the A.D.A. came around and backed Truman after he was nominated in 1948, and nobody would be surprised if it did the same thing for L.B.J. After all, during its convention in Washington last month, the A.D.A.’s national board refused by a 6-to-l margin to come out against him. As Chairman J. Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, the organization has a “longstanding commitment to political realities.”

So do most other Democrats. What ever their feelings about the war, they are beginning to line up behind Johnson for 1968. Even as outspoken an Administration critic as Oregon’s Senator Wayne Morse says he would rather “take my chances” with L.B.J. than back a Republican. Says Texas Congressman Jake Pickle, who holds Lyndon’s old seat in the House: “We be lieve in unity, even if we have to fight for it.” Also in Johnson’s favor, as California Pollster Mervin Field notes, is the fact that he “has it in his power to change the rules of the game overnight. He can change his stand on Viet Nam, he can allocate funds to the poor, and put pressure on the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy.”

Seismic Upheaval. Short of death or disablement, about the only thing that could keep Johnson from renomination in Chicago would be a Trumanesque decision to retire. That decision, in Truman’s case, came only after the popularity rating of his scandal-plagued Administration had sunk to a bare 23% in November 1951 and Kefauver defeated him in New Hampshire the following spring. Whether Johnson will win re-election if he runs is another question. Harry Truman, earthy and at times almost embarrassingly open in showing his feelings, made an appealing underdog in 1948. Johnson, by contrast, is just as earthy but all too plainly inclined to hold his cards close to his vest—or up his sleeve—and attracts no sympathy votes.

Moreover, the entire U.S. electorate is in the midst of a seismic upheaval that has left politicians of both parties unsure of their footing. An upsurge in registered Negro voters is changing equations in the South and the major cities. Fully 46% of the nation’s 19 million union members now earn between $7,500 and $15,000 a year and are more uncommitted than ever. “We’ve got to get the guy who goes home and has a bottle of beer and checks the TV schedule,” says one astute Democrat. The G.O.P. is after the same fellow.

Even so, the Republicans also have some serious problems. According to Gallup, the G.O.P. is now outnumbered by independents. The latest reckoning gives the Democrats 42% of the electorate, independents 31%, Republicans 27%. The implications for the party are clear: to win an election, it not only has to win over a large batch of independents but siphon off millions of votes from the Democrats as well.

A growing number of Republican officials—and voters, judging from the polls—believes that the surest way to accomplish that in 1968 would be with a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket. The idea sets some normally phlegmatic party regulars to daydreaming: here is Rocky, launching his campaign from the steps of a Harlem tenement and blazing a triumphant trail through the nation’s big cities; there is Reagan, wowing the farmers at the plowing contest in Fargo, N. Dak., and, as he stumps through the cornfields of the Midwest and the canebrakes of the South, leaving in his wake legions of charmed citizens, particularly women, who will have 62 million votes next year—4,000,000 more than U.S. men. Rockefeller, in particular, could capture new bases of support for the party among urban Negroes, workers and intellectuals.

While an R. & R. ticket is more than a Mittyesque dream, it has some towering obstacles to hurdle. The least of them is the fact that both men are on their second marriages. “We’ve never had a candidate who was divorced,” says North Carolina Republican Marcus Hickman, chairman of Mecklenburg County. “This would give us two.”

Most & Least. If Rocky is to win the top spot, 1) Nixon and Romney would have to gut one another in the primaries, 2) bandwagons for Reagan and Percy would have to be derailed before they got rolling, 3) the moderate Governors would have to coalesce be hind their colleague from New York, and 4) Rocky, in all likelihood, would have to strike a deal with the conservatives in advance by guaranteeing the second spot to Reagan.

Even that might not win them over. Rockefeller has perhaps the greatest assets and the greatest liabilities of any man in the G.O.P. The assets make him the party’s most electable candidate; the liabilities make him its least nominable contender. Chief among the latter is the right wing’s almost pathological hatred of Rocky—a feeling that Goldwater is unlikely to detoxify. “He’s failed to support Republican candidates,” says Barry. “It’s kind of hard to forget these things.” Particularly in Dixie. “I don’t think Texans would vote for Rockefeller,” says Republican State Committeeman Albert Fay, “if Jesus Christ were his running mate.” They just might if Ronald Reagan were. Indeed, signs of grudging support for an R. & R. ticket are beginning to sprout even in the South’s stony soil.

Too Artful? Could the two men share a ticket without tearing it to bits? Some Republicans doubt it; others are concerned that the pairing would strike voters as a little too artful. Actually, while the two are far apart in their political philosophies, they are by no means incompatible. “Keep in mind that Nelson is not of the liberal wing of the party,” says New York’s Senator Jacob Javits, who decidedly is. “He is more of a moderate Republican than he is a liberal. He could accept Reagan ideologically.” Rockefeller himself cautioned friends to take the Californian seriously after his 1,000,000-vote victory last year. “When he gets engaged with the realities of being a Governor,” said Rocky, “you’ll find he is no extremist.” A Rocky-Reagan ticket, moreover, would pull both men more toward the G.O.P.’s ideological center.

By and large, Reagan has borne out Rockefeller’s prediction. “I campaigned in the belief that the people are the best custodians of their own affairs,” Reagan said last week on William F. Buckley’s TV show, Firing Line. But he has learned quickly that it is not easy for the state to return custody of many affairs. As a result, he was forced to levy the biggest one-shot tax increase in the history of any state ($933 million) in order to balance the biggest state budget ever ($5.09 billion).

Both men would like to shift as much power—and tax money—as possible from Washington back to the states and localities. The difference is that Rea gan thinks that decentralization is altogether more feasible than does Rocky, who has had nine years as Governor in which to learn. During his tenure, Rockefeller has increased aid to secondary and elementary schools by 170%, tripled the size of the state university system, inaugurated a $1 billion program to end water pollution, pushed through a $1.50 minimum wage, and proposed a $2.5 billion program to modernize mass transportation. Though he was not entirely satisfied with the state’s new constitution (see THE LAW), he endorsed it last week, a move that aligned the Governor with Bobby Kennedy and against practically everybody else, including other G.O.P. leaders, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.

On Viet Nam, Rockefeller has shrewdly refused to stake out an explicit position. All along, he has expressed his support of the President but has never allowed himself to get involved in a debate on specific features of his policy. “I just don’t have enough information to make a judgment on a thing which has to do with military tactics,” he explains. When reports circulated recently that he was shifting to an anti-Johnson stance, he declared: “The President needs the support of the American people in the quest for an honorable peace.” Rocky has thus hewed precisely to the course that Scammon, mixing metaphors, thinks Republican candidates should follow: “They should sit still, and if there is this wave of discontent, let the apple fall into their laps.” Reagan, by contrast, is outspokenly in favor of an intensification of the U.S. war effort.

Par for the Course. Both men, of course, protest that they are not candidates. Last week Rockefeller wrote to groups in New Hampshire and New York asking them to end their efforts to draft him lest they prove “divisive and destructive” to the party. “I just don’t have the ambition or the need or inner drive—or whatever the word is—to get in again,” he has said. But it was once said of Thomas E. Dewey that “the only cure for presidentitis is embalming fluid,” and Rocky has been waging a noncampaign that will leave him in a strong position if Romney’s bid fails. Nelson did not appear conspicuously unhappy when supporters unfurled a Rocky-for-President banner during a G.O.P. meeting in Long Island last week. Nor does Reagan’s professed noncandidacy jibe with his heavy speaking schedule in key primary states and his decision to become California’s favorite son. “If the Republican Party came beating on my door,” he admits, “I wouldn’t say, ‘Get lost, fellows.”

As for the vice-presidency, Reagan insists that the governorship “offers a greater opportunity” to him “than there is in that other office.” However, his protestations leave many professional observers unconvinced. “That’s par for the course,” chortled an elderly party in a Washington steam bath last week. That comment came from white-thatched Earl Warren, now Supreme Court Chief Justice, who, as Governor of California in 1948, gave up his dreams of running for President and accepted second spot on a ticket headed by New Yorker Tom Dewey.

Undoubtedly, Reagan’s denial of interest in the vice-presidency is reinforced by his belief that he can win the top spot. His delirious reception in South Carolina two weeks ago, the apparent readiness of Southern Republicans to jilt faithful old Dick Nixon if the charismatic Californian will only whistle, and his high popularity back home support that conviction. So do his conservative friends, who think a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket would be just fine—the other way around.

Reagan at the top of the ticket becomes more of a possibility when it is realized that the South and West will have more votes than the Midwest and the Northeast at Miami Beach (682 to 634). But he would have drawbacks. Said a former Goldwater stalwart in New Hampshire: “Reagan might be nice, but he will have a big liability from the nut faction—they’ll all attach themselves to him and hurt his image. Unless we win over the independent, we’ll be in trouble again.”

In the cities and suburbs, Reagan would undoubtedly command a strong following among the lower middle-class white voter who, as Scammon notes, “doesn’t want a wave maker. This is the virtue of Reagan. He’ll stand firm against hippies and blood for the Viet Cong. He’ll protect you against dirty new things you don’t like such as four-letter words and colored people moving into the neighborhood.” But his appeal to independents and middle-class Democrats would be limited.

Personality Issue. In any case, Nixon is still the man to beat at the convention. In a poll taken last spring, G.O.P. county chairmen overwhelmingly endorsed him, 1,227 votes to 341 for Romney, 233 for Reagan, 119 for Percy and 67 for Rockefeller. He is the favorite of grass-roots party workers, and even those who concede that he might not be the ideal standard bearer say nonetheless that they will vote for him in Miami Beach in deference to his experience and unflagging service. Nixon himself rejects the idea that any man should get the nomination in payment for his party labors, insists that it should go to the strongest candidate. And who might that be? Says Nixon: “In a World Series game, they often call on the seasoned hitter whose re cent batting average isn’t so good, but who is reliable in a pinch. The next President must have that same judgment, coolness and poise. It can’t be his first World Series.”

All the same, Nixon may have struck out too many times: his defeat in 1960 and in the 1962 California gubernatorial race have embossed him with a “can’t win” image that he may never fully erase. He has mellowed considerably, is less the coiled spring of past campaigns. But enough voters may remember him as the 1960 Nixon (“Would you buy a used car from this man?”) to neutralize the personality issue. With a less abrasive candidate, the G.O.P. could point out to voters that Lyndon Johnson might also have trouble selling used cars.

Centrist Choice. Even so, many Republicans can see Nixon gathering strength in the primaries, collecting additional votes in the South and South west and arriving at Miami Beach with more than the required 667 votes. Or they can imagine Rockefeller and Reagan deadlocking the convention and finally accepting Nixon as a compromise “centrist” choice. Should all three of them be eliminated, as well as Romney, Percy would be waiting.

Percy—”Chuckie Goodboy” to his detractors and too much the Boy Scout even to some friends—is almost everybody’s choice for the second spot, closely followed by Reagan. His principal non-admirer is Nelson Rockefeller, not only for ideological reasons (the two are too close in their philosophies), but for personal ones as well. When Rocky visited the Rockford fair in Illinois in 1964, Percy, then in the midst of his losing gubernatorial bid, refused to appear with him. The reason for the snub, presumably, was that Percy was afraid of being identified with a man whose recent divorce and remarriage had punctured his appeal to the distaff voter.

Percy’s credentials are impressive: a self-made millionaire businessman, a liberal who nonetheless would not have what one Republican calls “that hate bloc” against him, mildly dovish on Viet Nam (but with enough hedges to landscape a steeplechase course), and demonstrably concerned with the sickness of the cities. But his lack of experience could hurt him if he wanted to be at the top of the ticket.

Trump Card. Percy’s time is more likely to come in 1972 than next year. Another attractive young Republican in much the same situation is Lindsay, also mentioned for both spots. Lindsay squelches such talk and categorically refuses to consider a national campaign —on anybody’s ticket. That, after all, is only sensible. He has been mayor for less than 22 months, needs more time to prove his worth—and to win re-election in 1969—before he can raise his sights. In 1970, he could run for Senator or Governor, whichever post that Bobby Kennedy is not seeking. The two may well clash some day, and it would be foolish for either to risk a fatal collision in New York.

If Lindsay can maintain the pace and record he has set so far in “un governable” Gotham, he may well prove a formidable opponent by 1972 or 1976 for Bobby or any other Democrat. He is a dove on Viet Nam, but maintains: “I do not believe, and never have, that the U.S. should unilaterally withdraw from Viet Nam tomorrow.” His intimacy with the urban crisis is his trump card for the future, since that is likely to be the No. 1 U.S. domestic problem for generations.

Little Man’s Ticket. When Lindsay’s bid for the presidency moves forward —and there are many who consider it inevitable, despite his lack of a substantial power base—he may find an ideal running mate on the opposite end of the continent. Washington’s Governor Daniel Evans, 42 this week, has already been in office three years, and is frequently mentioned as a vice-presidential possibility for 1968. Like the others, he dismisses such speculation. “If I had to make my choice between the two Washingtons,” he says, “I would select Washington State any time.”

Nonetheless, Evans may well be destined for the other Washington. A civil engineer who, appropriately, keeps a slide rule on his desk at the capitol in Olympia, he can point at a 12% rise in state personal income and a budget surplus of $115 million where a $32 million deficit existed three years ago. When he talks of “the involvement of individuals,” the need for “a mechanism for getting together those who need help and those who want to help,” he reminds listeners of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner.

While Lindsay and Evans spurn the vice-presidency now, there are others who court it openly. “Here I am,” says Florida’s Governor Kirk, “from a Texas family, born in California, Governor of Florida. When you stop to think about it—which I never do—that’s 176 convention delegates for openers.” Texas’ Senator John Tower, 42, will go to the convention as a favorite son, figures his record of what he calls “progressive conservatism” makes him an ideal second man on almost any ticket. Wags suggest that a combination of Percy (5 ft. 8 in.) and Tower (5 ft. 5 in.) would be the perfectly Lilliputian event: a Little Man’s Ticket.

Filling a Vacuum. For the G.O.P., 1968 may represent the best opportunity in years—but the party has earned a reputation for booting such opportunities away. The late Sam Rayburn once said: “Just leave the Republicans alone and they’ll manage to screw it up every time.” As Esquire magazine noted this month: “The Republican Party could probably beat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 if it did not have to run a candidate against him.” The more likely it seems that Lyndon Johnson can be defeated, the more tempted the G.O.P. may be to blow its chances by putting up a candidate who is acceptable to the party pros rather than to the electorate.

One complication is that 15 men, controlling 666 votes (one short of the needed 667), will be going to the convention as favorite sons. That will make it difficult, though not impossible, for any candidate to stitch together a majority before the first gavel sounds, as Goldwater did. Nixon or Reagan could do it only by forging a solid block in the South and West, which is improbable. The moderates can prevail, but only by showing far greater cohesion and determination than they did in 1964. “We have learned from sad experience,” says Rhode Island Governor Chafee, “that when most of us remain passive, the vacuum is filled by those who do not represent what we and our party historically believe.”

Some moderates fear nonetheless that they will be thwarted by what many see as a general drift toward the right in the U.S. One of them recalls the meeting between a group of moderates, including Javits, Pennsylvania’s Senator Hugh Scott and Henry Cabot Lodge, at a Manhattan restaurant after the 1964 debacle; all agreed that the Republican right wing was washed up. “They were wrong,” he said. “Goldwater missed his timing by four years. Why do you imagine Reagan has come on as fast as he has?” His analysis could be correct. But it may also turn out that voters in the suburbs and big cities of the East, Midwest and even parts of the South are less receptive to Reagan’s appeal than was California’s electorate.

In any event, with traditional electoral patterns changing and once invincible Democratic bastions crumbling, the major population centers are the places where next year’s election, and many another to come, will be won or lost. Last year young, energetic, nondoctrinaire Republican candidates won victories from New England to the Pacific Northwest. If the G.O.P. plans realistically to capture the White House in 1968, it can do so only with the same sort of men—and a platform shaped to the needs of an urban nation sorely in need not of new faces alone but also of new ideas and the popular support to translate them into reality.