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The former Vice President's cardinal rule has been to treat fellow Republicans as lovingly as an election year will allow. He praised Romney's vigor as a campaigner; he also did his bit to debunk the stalking-horse theory. Romney's withdrawal, he said, "was not designed to stop Nixon. It was designed to save Romney from a defeat."
But Nixon has been arguing all along that his own itinerary to the nomination—via the primaries—must be followed by all the other hopefuls. Last week he challenged Rockefeller's argument that full-scale primary battles would sunder the party. For one thing, he said, a high-minded campaign such as his own would not injure the Republicans but merely add a second barrel to the anti-Democratic gun. Then he invoked a decidedly Democratic name: "As John F. Kennedy said in February of 1960— in Albany, N.Y., incidentally—the time is past when presidential nominees, untested in the primaries, would be named in smoke-filled rooms by political bosses." Thus Rockefeller's tabernacle of unity becomes Nixon's den of iniquity. They have each promised to support the other in the general election, but until the convention the genteel barbs will be there. While renewing his pledge to Nixon, for instance, Rockefeller took a dig at his weakness: "The party has got to make up its mind on who has a real chance of getting the votes of independents and Democrats."
Study in Contrasts. Rivalry between the two would be fascinating regardless of the prize. They are a study in contrasts. Richard Milhous Nixon, only 55 but a political force in the nation for a full generation; the steely infighter who developed from a boy beanpicker in Whittier, Calif., to the second-youngest Vice President in U.S. history; the man who has been around so long, sat so high, fallen so far, and so discreetly risen again that some of his oldest enemies have grown mellow toward him; and the politician who, despite his origins and his own mellowing, has been unable to shake entirely the opportunist's image. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, 59, a megamillionaire via the Rockefellers, a political patrician through the Aldriches; a Republican brought into public life by F.D.R.; a man of charm and assurance who got on a silver platter the early prominence that Nixon had to claw for, who wandered away from a Republican Administration rather than be frustrated by it, who eschewed the easy life for elective politics and then turned into a blintz-eating back-slapping vote catcher.
Yet they also have some things in common. Both have lusted for the presidency for eight years. Both have been pronounced politically dead, Nixon after signing his own burial order at his bitter 1962 press conference ("You won't have Nixon to kick around any more"), Rockefeller after being divorced from a middle-aged wife and marrying a divorcee—and raising state taxes to boot. Both have reemerged, old pros in a youth-happy age, miraculously well-preserved politically in the formaldehyde of ambition and determination.