The Challenger

In his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller last week made a daring, four-day, 35-appearance assault on Nixon Country—the Pacific Coast—and came out swinging. In California, heartland of the Nixon-for-President movement, Rocky got a few bruises, changed hardly a vote. His luck was better in the friendlier climate of Washington and Oregon (Oregon's crucial primary will be held next May). But wherever he went. Rockefeller left the strong impression of a slugger who is going to wage an all-out campaign for the nomination he wants.

The Rockefeller invasion was shrewdly planned, and the mere sound of the Rockefeller trumpets from afar worried many Nixon supporters. "A synthetic boom could easily be organized," warned Nixonite Thomas Pike in a Paul Revere letter widely mailed to Los Angeles Republicans the week before Rocky's trip. But as Rockefeller first arrived on the scene, his every move seemed to be in the wrong direction. Early morning smog forced his plane to land in Burbank, 25 miles from Los Angeles' International Airport and the official reception. After an hour-long trip in a rattletrap bus, Rocky finally caught up with the official welcome from an incongruous dance band (hired by the sea-captain husband of the movies' retired Marion Davies), from a corporal's guard of Cal-Rock boosters, and from National Committeeman Edward Shattuck, who wore a silver and blue pin with the word "Nixon" etched on it.

High-Flown Speeches. Everywhere Rocky went, the shade of Nixon was there to haunt him. So many Nixon supporters turned out for a big dinner at the Hollywood Biltmore that some of Rockefeller's own fans had trouble getting tickets. "Nixon Now" banners and badges bloomed everywhere, and the mere mention of the Vice President's name drew storms of applause. A huge photomural of Dick Nixon's face (flanked by the images of Dwight Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln) stared fixedly down at the challenger. Rockefeller's speeches drew respectful attention, but they were not much help. For his themes, Rocky stuck to above-it-all international problems, and his formal speeches were so high-flown, as Scripps-Howard Correspondent Albert M. Colegrove reported, that they "orbited right over the heads of his audience." (Sample: "The concept of the self-sufficient nation-state cannot be the essential instrument of the future.")

Rocky even managed to offend the television crews at a Los Angeles press conference by insisting on dividing it into two parts—one for the general press, one for TV. The technique had worked well enough back East, but the Angelenos would have none of it. As the TV crews noisily packed up and marched out in a mass huff, Rockefeller observed wryly: "A lesson in how to win friends and influence people."