Paul V McNutt
Banned
Who will be in a Rockefeller Cabinet?
Vice President Charles H. Percy
No Rockefeller is going to needs conservative. In November 1967, there wasa Time magazine cover story on the dream ticket of Rockefeller Reagan.
Who will be in a Rockefeller Cabinet?
Vice President Charles H. Percy
No Rockefeller is going to needs conservative. In November 1967, there wasa Time magazine cover story on the dream ticket of Rockefeller Reagan.
When I first looked at this suggestion, I was inclined to dismiss it, simply because it's Spiro Agnew. Then I thought about it with less coffee and salmon swilling around in my system, and I realised the perverse sort of sense it makes.
Rockefeller was the best candidate for the general election, giving the polling at the time. I could see him win comfortably. But to do it, you'd have to get rid of Nixon and Reagan. Nixon had been stealthily gaining support, only to see a last-minute challenge from Reagan nearly take it away. A Reagan assassin was arrested at the 1968 Governor's Conference, but by this time Nixon would have won the nomination without Reagan.
What if that assassin had instead gone for Nixon and succeeded? With Nixon out of the picture Rockefeller would undoubtedly have a smoother path to the presidency
“Weird Memories of ’68: A Private Conversation with Richard Nixon” from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (pp. 58-61) said:It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy-clothes cop at the wheel. Sitting next to the cop, up front, were two of Nixon’s top speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchannan [sic].
There were only two of us in back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late —almost midnight then, too— and the cop was holding the beg Merc at exactly sixty-five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town somewhere near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech, to the airport up in Manchester where a Lear Jet was waiting to whisk the candidate and his brain-trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.
It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk, and when we got to the airport, I stood around the Lear Jet with Dick and the others, chatting in a very relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been…and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands….
But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God, I thought as I reeled backwards, Here We Go … “Watch out!” somebody was shouting. “Get the cigarette!” A hand lashed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth, then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe, Nixon’s chief advance man for New Hampshire, saying, “God damnit, Hunter, you almost blew up the plane!”
I shrugged. He was right. I’d been leaning over the fuel tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached out to shake hands again, while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt.
The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. “What worries me,” he said, “is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the boss….”
“Very bad show,” I said, “especially when you remember that I did about three king-size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell, I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones …. You people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.”
“Not you,” he said. “egomaniacs don’t do that kind of thing.” He smiled. “You wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t live to write about, would you?”
“You’re probably right, I said. “Kamikaze is not my style. I much prefer subtleties, the low-key approach — because I am, after all, a professional.”
Both of them gone would be an interesting way to parallel the MLK-RFK assassinations and get a Humphrey/Rocky/Wallace race, which would be very interesting.