Nation: Divorce & the Voter

After New-York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller announced last November that he and his wife of 31 years would soon be divorced, he insisted that it was purely his own, private business, and nobody else’s. The divorce, he said, was not in the “public domain.” As for his political prospects, either for re-election this November or as the 1964 G.O.P. presidential nominee, his marital mishap, he said confidently, would not affect them by “the slightest iota.” By last week, with Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller halfway through the six weeks’ legal residence in Nevada which are necessary for a Reno divorce, Rocky had changed his mind about what the voting public might think—or do. At a press conference in Albany, he still argued that the divorce was a private affair. But when asked about its possible political repercussions, he said: “This is something that is up to every voter when he gets into the booth.”