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Without ever openly declaring himself a candidate for the G.O.P. presidential nomination. Rockefeller set out last autumn to try to stir up support west of the Hudson River, encountered neither public nor Republican enthusiasm, and found that the party's leaders thought Nixon would be the better candidate by far. With a sourish complaint that the Republicans who would control the convention were "opposed to any contest for the nomination," Rocky declared himself out of the running. Then and later he refused to endorse Nixon for President.
Last month, long after any realistic hope of winning the nomination in 1960 had faded away, Rockefeller leaped onstage again with a 2,700-word statement accusing Nixon of failing to speak out on national issues. The nation and the party, said Rockefeller, cannot march "to meet the future with a banner aloft whose only emblem is a question mark." Many a cynic inferred that Rockefeller, eying the 1964 presidential nomination, wanted Nixon to lose in 1960. and was deliberately trying to undercut him. But Nixon took a soft-answer tone, defended Rockefeller's right to voice his disagreements with the Ad ministration, issued a soothing call for party unity. He also publicly promised that Rockefeller's "oft-expressed desire that he not be drafted as a candidate for Vice President will be respected — certainly by me."
Jolted Strategy. Dick Nixon likes to say that what a political candidate needs most, and is least likely to find in the heat of campaigning, is time to think. To get time to think in 1960, he set aside the fortnight preceding the opening of the Republican Convention in Chicago. With his staff protecting him from intrusions, he spent most of the time at his fieldstone house in the Wesley Heights section of Washington — and he found plenty to think about, more than he had expected. Jack Kennedy's choice of Lyndon Johnson as his Democratic running mate jolted Nixon's campaign strategy by upsetting his hopes of hauling in a lot of Southern electoral votes.
With Johnson's appeal in the South added to Kennedy's footing in Catholic New England, winning New York suddenly became an urgent necessity for Nixon, and among Nixon men, Nelson Rockefeller took on a new allure. "There's no longer any question about it," groaned a staunchly pro-Nixon member of the Republican National Committee staff. "If we're to have any chance at all against Kennedy-Johnson in November, Rockefeller's got to be on the ticket." Again and again during his erratic flir tation with the Republican presidential nomination, Nelson Rockefeller insisted that he did not want to be a candidate for Vice President. On the first of his two trips to Chicago last week, he repeated that he would "positively, absolutely" not consider the vice-presidential nomination.
Rocky still seemed to be cherishing a faint hope of a presidential-nomination draft. He solemnly declared that he would accept a "genuine draft," though he added that the possibility was "very remote."