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CIVIL RIGHTS. The agreement called for "aggressive action to remove the remaining vestiges of segregation or discrimination in all areas of national life"−a promise almost as sweeping as the Democratic civil rights plank. Rocky won an explicit endorsement of the South's Negro sit-in demonstrators, although in Chicago only a few days earlier the chairman of the platform subcommittee on civil rights had said that the party's platform approval of the sit-in movement would be "demagoguery."
"Damned Sellout." Republican reactions to the statement ranged from jubilation to fury. Kentucky's Senator John Sherman Cooper, chairman of the platform subcommittee on foreign relations, hailed it as "the best thing that could have happened to the Republican Party." In Newport, R.I., the President was decidedly cool; he had not been consulted in advance. The Texas convention delegation's Chairman Thad Hutcheson called it a "damned sellout," met with chairmen of the other Southern delegations to map a fight against any civil rights plank modeled on its broad promises. The angriest Republican of all was Conservative Barry Goldwater. Nixon had "surrendered" to Rockefeller, he cried, and the result was a "Munich" for the Republican Party. (Echoed the Chicago Tribune: GRANT
SURRENDERS TO LEE.)
Nixon had not surrendered to Rockefeller. The language of the statement was Rockefeller's, but the substance violated none of Nixon's basic principles or policies. Where he sharply disagreed with Rockefeller proposals, such as putting medical care for the aged into the social security system or setting an arbitrary national growth rate, Nixon insisted on his own views. He was confident that despite the conservatives' anger he had improved his prospects of winning in November. Onetime G.O.P. National Chairman Leonard Hall, now Nixon's unofficial campaign manager, assured him that the meeting and the statement helped his chances of carrying Pennsylvania and California as well as New York.
There were some who thought that the meeting with Nixon had got Rocky off a dangerous limb. Benefits to Rockefeller, reported the New York Times's political reporter Leo Egan, "included his extrication from an impossible political situation that was threatening a major rupture in the Republican Party in New York State and endangering his prestige and relationships with Republican leaders in other states." By the same token, some experts saw the pressures growing on Rocky to accept the vice-presidency despite all his disclaimers.
Many New York Governors in modern times have been candidates or serious contenders for the presidency, but the only two who ever made it were those who had come to the aid of the party on request and run for Vice President—Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt.
Political logic would seem to favor Nelson Rockefeller's following in the footsteps of the two Roosevelts, both of whom he admires. But politicians and their advisers are not necessarily logical at convention time.