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Fifth Avenue Compact. If any more piquancy were needed to build the gate, there is the additional fact that this is something of a grudge match. Nixon and Rockefeller collided in 1960 over the nomination when, as today, Nixon was the announced candidate with much strength in the regular party organization and Rockefeller the non-candidate in search of a draft. The contest was woefully uneven then, but Nixon badly wanted the backing of liberal Republicans. Rockefeller refused to consider the vice-presidential nomination, harpooned the outgoing Eisenhower Administration—and by implication, Nixon—and, as the price of support, exacted from Nixon the famed 14-point Fifth Avenue compact that put Nixon in bad odor with the Republican right wing.
That agreement on platform planks, hammered out in Rockefeller's Manhattan apartment* while the convention roiled in Chicago, was not so offensive to Nixon ideologically as it was politically. In 1964, they tangled again, not so much over principle as over party loyalty. Nixon supported the ticket and worked for it, later attacked Rockefeller as a "divider" and "spoilsport" for doing neither.
Although much is made of the conservative-liberal split between the two, they have rarely been in conflict on basic principles. When Rockefeller worked for Eisenhower as Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and later as his Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs, he occasionally found an ally in Nixon against more conservative elements in the Administration. Certainly Nixon is at home with the congressional wing of the party, oriented toward the Middle West and limit ed government, while Rockefeller is of the Eastern Establishment, prone to look first toward the executive branch. Yet if during the '60s Goldwater has symbolized Republicanism's right frontier and Rockefeller its left, Nixon falls well between. On several of the big emotional issues defined in liberal-conservative terms, Nixon has fallen on the liberal side. He was denouncing the John Birch Society and right-wing extremism in California before it became fashionable for Republicans to do so. He supported the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills and the nuclear test-ban treaty although Goldwater opposed them.
New York Cornucopia. How they will differ on 1968 issues remains to be seen. Nixon has not yet produced a sheaf of detailed proposals on major questions, although he talks a hard line on Viet Nam and calls for budget cutting at home. Nixon has also made some thoughtful statements on poverty here and abroad, on racial issues and other subjects that indicate he is developing new proposals for use when he considers the time right. Rockefeller in recent months has been studiously sticking to state affairs, venturing afield as a rule only in his capacity as chairman of the Republican Governors Association policy committee. Seven months ago, the committee put out a 60-point package on urban problems similar in some respects to the presidential riot commission's report last week.