The stars were fading and streaks of rose were brightening the eastern horizon as a chartered Learstar, just in from New York, taxied onto an apron at Washington's National Airport. Rumpled and heavy-lidded, Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon stepped forth uncertainly, clinging to the doorframe with one hand as he felt for the step with a wavering foot. He had put in a long night's work.
For nearly eight hours, from 7:30 p.m. to 3:20 a.m., Nixon had huddled with New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller at the Rockefeller apartment on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. From that meeting emerged a history-making document: a Rockefeller-Nixon policy agreement, soon dubbed the Treaty of Fifth Avenue, that changed the course of the Republican Party for the 1960s, and perhaps beyond.
Anchor Aweigh. On Nixon's suggestion, Rockefeller issued the statement setting forth their agreement on basic policies, and Rocky was jubilant. Arriving in the convention city of Chicago, he triumphantly waved a copy of the statement.
"If you don't think that represents my views," he crowed, "you're crazy." Though he expressed it with private smiles rather than public grins, Dick Nixon had reason to be jubilant, too. By his secret, dramatically sudden trip to New York, he warded off a threatening Rockefeller mutiny that could have badly damaged Republican prospects in November.
The smile of victory on Rockefeller's face guaranteed that Rocky would endorse the party's platform and campaign for the party's ticket, helping Nixon's chances of carrying New York, with its hefty 45 electoral votes. And by working out a truce with Rockefeller, Nixon had tugged loose his restraining anchor in the Eisenhower Administration; barred by his position as Vice President from speaking out freely on issues, he had let Nelson Rockefeller speak out for him.
Question-Mark Emblem. The New York meeting brought about a pregnant truce in as strange a war as the Republican Party had ever seen. It started in October 1958, when Rocky was running for Governor in his first try for elective office. He was so ambitiously bent on projecting his own rather than a party image that a top Rockefeller backer urged Nixon to cancel a scheduled TV speech in New York City lest he spoil that image. Nixon came to New York and had a well-publicized breakfast with Rocky.
Catapulted into the political big time by the spectacular feat of unseating an incumbent Democratic Governor in a year when most Republican candidates got roundly trounced, Rockefeller began showing the unmistakable flush of presidential fever. And since Richard Nixon already towered up as the almost certain Republican presidential nominee in 1960, Rockefeller's presidential hopes inevitably made Nixon a competitor, apart from any disagreements on national issues.