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Should there be a Nixon-Rockefeller ticket and should it lose the election, Rockefeller will have lost nothing; he would remain Governor of New York and would have gained enough party good will to be the almost certain odds-on choice for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1964—provided, of course, that he did not get into political trouble between times. Should a Nixon-Rockefeller ticket win, Rockefeller, of course, would not be the G.O.P. nominee in 1964. He would have lost the governorship of New York—which has not seemed to attract his talents lately anyway—but he would be the No. 2 Republican and possibly the No. 2 U.S. statesman on the national scene, and, as the politicians' phrase has it be "one heartbeat away" from the presidency. But the secret creed of ardent Rockefeller partisans on convention eve seemed to be that Nixon without Rockefeller will lose in November, that Rockefeller will suffer no party penalties, will capture the G.O.P. for himself in 1961 and ride on triumphantly to nomination and victory over President Jack Kennedy in 1964.
Burst of Drama. Whatever effect the Nixon-Rockefeller meeting might have on the political future of Nelson Rockefeller, it had a powerful impact on the Republican Convention and on the position of Richard Nixon in the coming campaign. Nixon's bold stroke brought a burst of drama into a convention that had seemed doomed to dullness, and it lent drama to the appearance before the convention this week of that exclusive Republican asset, the President of the U.S., whose total record during his two terms in office will, despite Nixon's pilgrimage to New York, constitute the core of the case that the Republican Party will put before the voters between now and Nov. 8.
With brilliant timing and tactics, Richard Nixon had used the meeting with Rockefeller to position himself on the side of new departures for the 19605, broadening his potential appeal to independent voters, without losing the political value of identification with the Eisenhower Administration record—a record that got a considerable boost last week from the announcement of a billion-dollar budget surplus and the successful shot of the new Polaris missile from a submerged submarine (see Defense). Yet by easing the G.O.P. platform in the directions that Nelson Rockefeller had urged, Nixon largely canceled out the political appeal of the Democratic platform, and made the G.O.P. platform what he wanted to make it—an elective basis for his campaign and a point of departure for the challenging decade ahead.
* Said a Democratic cynic: "Nobody paid any attention to him; he disguised himself as Eisenhower."