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Nelson Rockefeller's divorce in 1962 led to a sharp dip in his ratings in the polls--but it was made up within a few weeks. As Rick Perlstein writes in *Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus* (p. 194): "Divorce was a tragedy: people accepted that sometimes it had to happen." (I don't see Stevenson as an example to the contrary, or if so, only to a slight extent; IMO he did about as well against the immensely popular Ike as any Democrat of any marital status would have done.) Anyone could see that Rocky's marriage to Mary Todhunter ("Tod") Clark had long been dead. (Rocky would explain to his love interests that "I want you to know that Tod and I have an agreement that we will never get divorced but will live our own separate lives.") What really hurt was not the divorce but his remarriage next year to Margaretta Fitler ("Happy") Murphy, who divorced her husband on April 1, 1963 (immediately signing away custody of her children to her husband) and married Rockefeller a few weeks later. (Happy was thirty-six; Nelson and Tod were both fifty-five.)

Mores have changed so much that it is hard for us to realize today the depth of the reaction to Rocky's remarriage. (Perlstein writes that "It was a time, according to Betty Friedan, when it was easier to find an abortionist than a minister willing to marry a divorcé.") For example, Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush denounced Rocky at a prep school graduation ceremony:

"Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state -- one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for president of the United States -- can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade the mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?. . . Have we come to the point where one of the two great political parties will confer upon such a one its highest honor and greatest responsibility? I venture to hope not." https://books.google.com/books?id=9VXpsfGyMiYC&pg=PT18

(As Perlstein notes, nobody bothered to ask Happy's ex-, who remarried as quickly as she did, whether he felt "abandoned.")

At the convention of the National Federation of Republican Women, when Rocky arrived with Happy on his arm, they made their entrance into the ballroom to stony silence. "An entire table of bejeweled, begloved matrons rose and marched out. The same matrons raised the roof when Barry and Peggy [Goldwater] arrived." (Perlstein, p. 196) Plenty of less affluent women shared their opinions; a Denver representative heard from a woman who "would rather have Liz Taylor in the White House than that Happy." (Of course that's a what-if in itself, presumably involving John Warner becoming president sometime between 1976 and 1982....)

The following Sunday clergymen deplored the remarriage. It wasn't just right-wing fundamentalists, either. No less a theologian than Reinhold Niebuhr reported that his pious Baptist cleaning woman was disgusted, paused a beat, and added "I share that view." The Hudson River presbytery brought up for censure the minister who had performed the ceremony, calling him a "disturber of the peace and unity of the church"; he expressed "deep regret" at violating the Church's requirement of a one-year waiting period before divorced people could remarry.

(Even Nikita Khrushchev got into the act: at a Moscow reception for US businessmen, he denounced "parasitic" capitalists who "live a life of luxury, drinking, carousing, or changing wives." He then eased off: "I'm your host here...So please don't put me in the position of going into each individual here and asking where he directs his activities and so forth, how many wives he has. One of your fellow capitalists Rockefeller is losing in prestige because of that."
http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~andi/somlib/data/time60/files/T495.txt One does not have to be a Khrushchev, though, to see an issue of class privilege in the remarriage; the presiding judge in Happy's divorce announced that the case would be sealed "in order to protect the children"--and some questioned whether this would have been done had she not been about to marry a billionaire...)

The results were dramatically indicated by the Gallup poll on May 26, three days after Rocky returned from his honeymoon. Previously 43 percent of Republicans had been for Rocky, 26 percent for Barry. Now it was Goldwater 35 to 30. Unlike the backlash to his divorce, the backlash to the remarriage never really went away, and in 1964 Rocky was taunted by pro-Goldwater placards saying "Vote for a Leader, Not a Lover!" Happy's giving birth just before the California primary kept the issue prominent in that closely contested race. (The Goldwater campaign didn't comment openly on the remarriage but behind the scenes they did exploit it. On May 27, Rocky had been scheduled to speak at Loyola University in Los Angeles. Goldwater's assistant campaign manager, Dean Burch, dispatched a prominent Goldwater backer and lay Catholic, trucking executive Dick Herman, to remind Los Angeles' Cardinal McIntyre--the most conservative leader in the American Catholic hierarchy--of the Pope's recent comments on remarriage. "The gamble paid off. Six hours before Rockefeller was to mount the podium, McIntyre announced that the Church could never host a candidate who took the sacrament of marriage so lightly. Loyola withdrew the invitation. Other venues began following suit. The next day sixteen Protestant ministers issued a statement suggesting Rockefeller should withdraw from the race." Perlstein, p. 351)

So let's ask ourselves what would have happened if Rocky hadn't remarried. (Of course if not for Happy, he might not have gotten divorced in the first place, but let's assume that after Rocky's divorce, Happy dies or changes her mind about marrying Rocky or he changes his mind about marrying her. In any event, Rocky remains a bachelor.) As mentioned, prior to the divorce he was seen as the front-runner. He was even trying to reach out to conservatives, suggesting that JFK was "appeasing" the Soviets on Cuba. OTOH, one should not exaggerate his prospects. Many conservatives in early 1963 assumed Rocky would be the nominee but that didn't make them like him any better. And they had a large political base on the South and West. Of course, to defeat Rocky they needed a candidate of their own, and it is true that before the remarriage, Goldwater had seemed reluctant to run. (As one who had blasted LBJ in 1960 for running for both the vice-presidency and for re-election to the Senate, Goldwater knew that he would have to choose between running for the presidency in 1964 and running for re-election as senator, and seemed inclined to the latter. He was especially worried that even if he could win the presidential nomination, he might lose decisively to JFK, and that this would set back the conservative movement.) But in the first place, he never totally ruled the idea out. In the second place, even if the remarriage hadn't made him more interested in running for president, the civil rights upheavals of mid-1963, which caused JFK's popularity to decline, especially in the South, would probably have done so. [1]

We'll assume that Rocky's not remarrying does not butterfly away JFK's assassination (theoretically, it might, since if Rockefeller seemed more likely than Goldwater to get the nomination, the GOP might have less chance of carrying Texas and therefore JFK might consider it less urgent to be in the state on November 22...). In early 1964, both Rocky and Goldwater are candidates to oppose LBJ. Rocky's chances are clearly somewhat better than in OTL, but the question is how much better? In OTL, polls showed that a large percentage of New Hampshire Republicans preferred some candidate other than Goldwater or Rockefeller. That set the stage for the successful Lodge write-in campaign. Lodge's victory was a setback to both Goldwater and Rockefeller but it was really a much more serious setback to Rockefeller. As George Gilder and Bruce Chapman wrote (*The Party That Lost Its Head*, p. 130):

"Defeat for Goldwater in New Hampshire disabused his supporters of faith in an irresistible rightist trend and sobered the pros. But it did not mean his immediate demise, for the Goldwater campaign was built on a grass-roots foundation that was politically shock-resistant. For Rockefeller, however, the campaign was the clear proof of his self-incapacitation. He no longer could pretend to be the popular choice, and he lacked an ideological or programmatic movement on which to fall back. No miracle could save him after New Hampshire, but maybe, just maybe, he thought, a series of miracles could."

If there is no Lodge candidacy and if the majority of Lodge's OTL votes go to Rocky, allowing him to win New Hampshire, it's obviously a boost for Rocky, and almost certainly means he will win the California primary (which he almost did even in OTL, despite the remarriage issue) but Goldwater would still have enormous strengths. Above all, there was his support in the South. In OTL, of the 278 southern delegates, 271 voted for Goldwater, and Goldwater's southern coordinator, John Grenier, claimed that 260 of them were "rock solid", meaning that they would have stayed with Goldwater even had he lost in California. (Gilder and Chapman, p. 184). Had Rocky not remarried, and had he won both New Hampshire and California, the numbers for Goldwater in the South might be a little lower, but not much. Goldwater also had the advantage that whereas he had virtually unanimous support of delegates in southern and some western states, even the most "liberal" northeastern states were not solidly anti-Goldwater. There were at least *some* absolutely unshakeable Goldwater delegates almost everywhere. Even Massachusetts contributed five Goldwater delegates--including the man who had been campaign manager for Robert Welch in the latter's unsuccessful 1950 campaign for lieutenant governor...

One possibility is that Rocky gets enough support, along with minor candidates and "favorite sons", to stop Goldwater, but not enough to get the nomination. And this raises the possibility of Richard Nixon as a compromise candidate. (In New Hampshire, the result had been Lodge 35.3 percent, Goldwater 22.9, Rockefeller 20.5, Nixon 16.6, Margaret Chase Smith 3.0 and Harold Stassen 1.4. So even as a write-in non-candidate, Nixon had finished only a few points behind Goldwater and Rockefeller, though far behind Lodge.)

Of course, there is the question of whether Nixon would be interested; see http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/3f9fc0e9de290ec3 for my argument that "Nixon's behavior in OTL 1964 does not seem to me to be that of a man who was convinced that the GOP was sure to lose and would not take the nomination under any circumstances."

Any thoughts?

(One other what-if here: Perlstein writes [p. 195] that when Rocky divorced Tod, "most presumed that Rockefeller would remain a playboy bachelor (there were rumors that he was dating Joan Crawford). That would have served him in better stead. But that was never his intention. For he was in love. And now he was getting remarried. Which was a political disaster." Anyone want to make a what-if out of the Joan Crawford rumors?...)

[1] Despite this decline, one should not exaggerate JFK's difficulties. As I have pointed out before, his popularity ratings just before his death were still a quite respectable 59 percent, and he was leading Goldwater substantially everywhere but in the South.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/8d7801f0ed0c657f
The point, however, is not whether Goldwater could have beaten JFK, but whether it became more plausible for him to *think* he just might do so.
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