National Affairs: Two More Shots

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Grinning engagingly, New York's Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller rolled up to the mountaintop convention of U.S. Governors at Montana's Glacier National Park last week to an official cool hello.

As Rocky made his way through scores of bulb-snapping photographers and autograph-hunting college students, Host Governor Hugo ("Galloping Swede") Aronson, a fellow Republican, conspicuously edged into the lobby gift shop to avoid a public welcome. But when Rocky breezed a little late into the dining room for an executive committee luncheon, Democrats and Republicans alike rose to applaud him. Exception: Iowa's Herschel Loveless. "Hell," muttered Democrat Loveless, "he isn't President."

Toward the end of the luncheon, Rocky's fellow Republicans sprang a carefully prepared surprise. Indiana's Harold Handley, an ardent Nixon man, passed a piece of paper to Rocky. It was an oath pledging "full and loyal support" to Vice President Richard Nixon for President, signed by every Republican then at the convention and already released to the press. Rockefeller smiled wryly and said: "You guys are some artists, aren't you?" He folded his glasses and handed back the paper—unsigned.

Rockefeller got vengeance of a sort in a formal, carefully prepared indictment of two basic Administration positions:

Defense. "The relative military power of the U.S. has steadily and drastically declined over the past 15 years," said he, lumping together the Eisenhower and Truman administrations. "Our power to retaliate after a Soviet attack is increasingly and seriously vulnerable. The decline has also become plain in terms of tactical forces for countering local aggression." Rockefeller's program for the "decade of danger" in the 1960s: quicken the development of mobile missiles (Minuteman, Polaris, etc.) and anti-missile defensive systems, put much of the Strategic Air Command on a round-the-clock alert, start building to meet the urgent need for civil defense fallout shelters.

Medical Care for the Aged. TheNixon-endorsed "Medicare" plan for voluntary, federally subsidized health insurance for the aged (TIME, May 16), said Rocky, is "fiscally unsound." He recommended a semi-compulsory plan to be financed by additional social security payroll taxes, an idea closely akin to one put before the Senate by Jack Kennedy. When the issue came to a vote among the Governors, they thumbed down a vaguely non-partisan proposal, endorsed Rockefeller's. The count: 30 (including six Republicans) to 13.

"If that man only was a Democrat," said Virginia's Lindsay Almond, "we'd nominate and elect him." Massachusetts' Democratic Governor Foster Furcolo, who is running for the Senate and could use a headline himself, suggested that the Democrats tap Rockefeller as their Defense Secretary-presumptive, during the campaign.