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Rockefeller kept insisting that he would not consider the vice-presidency in any circumstances, and after two hours Nixon gave up, promised to refrain from urging him any more. (Said Rocky later: "I restated my position that I was not available in any circumstances, and he restated his position that he would respect my feelings in the matter.") Then the discussion moved on to agreement and disagreement on issues. While the two men were working out the substance of the agreement, Rocky's Press Secretary McManus, who had hurriedly flown in from Chicago, kept up a hum of telephone consultation with Rockefeller staffers in Chicago.
During the last few hours of the conference, Nixon and Rockefeller spent a lot of the time talking with Chuck Percy in Chicago on a three-way conference hookup, filling him in on what changes in the platform would be called for by the Nixon-Rockefeller statements. Then, in the last half-hour, Nixon went over the Rockefeller statement, suggested some changes, finally approved it.
Posture for the '60s. The statement was a Rockefeller document, couched in the language of Rockefeller writers, quoting many phrases, sentences, even whole sections, from the one-man platform that Rockefeller had submitted to Chuck Percy two weeks before (TIME, July 18). Main provisions: FOREIGN POLICY. Nixon accepted Rockefeller's pet proposal for regional "confederations." DEFENSE. Shaking off his burden of defending Administration defense policies without reservation, Nixon agreed that the "military posture" of the 1950s would not do for the 1960s, joined in a call for more and better bombers, an airborne SAC alert, more missiles, dispersed bases, greater limited-war capability and "an intensified program for civil defense." Unmentioned but implied was Rocky's old demand that the defense bill should be bigger by billions.
GOVERNMENT REORGANIZATION.
Nixon went along with Rockefeller's proposals for two new high-level Government posts to "assist the President," something that Ike himself had suggested in one form or another.
ECONOMIC GROWTH. Nixon agreed that U.S. economic growth "must be accelerated by policies and programs stimulating our free enterprise system," a declaration that did no violence to his conviction that Government should not try to force-draft any specified rate of growth. Included in the statement at Nixon's own suggestion was a sentence that mentioned Rockefeller's goal of a 5% growth rate without committing Nixon to it as a goal: "As the Vice President pointed out in a speech in 1958, the achievement of a 5% rate of growth would produce an additional $10 billion of tax revenue in 1962."
FARM POLICY. Nixon okayed Rockefeller's proposal for a doubling of the Department of Agriculture's conservation reserve, for using price supports "at a level best fitted to specific commodities," and for an "expanded food-for-peace program."
MEDICAL CARE FOR THE AGED. Rockefeller compromised, agreed to a vague call for a program "on a sound fiscal basis," with no mention of folding the program into the social security system, as Rocky had been urging.