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The Political Scene The Political Scene

1. The Republican Party 1. The Republican Party

THE TABLES OF ORGANIZATION of New York City politics are far less interesting than the unspoken sociology of New York City politics. The salient features are quickly related, and quickly understood, without the necessity to explore the mazes, or to absorb statistical tables. The most noticeable political fact about New York is that it is a Democratic city and has been one for about as long as can be remembered. It is a Democratic city in part because it is a left-minded city, about which more anon; and in part because the lubricants of a one-party city flow freely, with the result that the Democratic organization is everything that the Republican organization is not. It is merely suggestive to note that there are an estimated twenty thousand Democratic clubhouse workers as contrasted with a pitiable two thousand Republicans, a ratio greatly exceeding the registered Democratic plurality of about three and one-half to one. Democratic judges overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans, and it is generally conceded that such Republicans as there are, are there simply because, at some point, judicial seemliness requires that a second party should be seen, if not heard—if only to provide those comfortable democratic delusions which are formally satisfying. Indeed, of the seven Republican (out of twenty-eight) City Councilmen, five are mandatorily there because the law expressly requires a minority representation by the other party. The most prominent Republican Party leader in the city is Mr. Vincent Albano, the Republican boss of the unbossable county of New York (Manhattan), who was an orthodox Democrat until circumstances impelled him to back Dewey in 1948, from which point he elided gracefully into Republican County leader. Even less noisily he slipped into a position as chairman of the board of a brand-new commercial bank which achieved its charter (the first in Manhattan since 1930) by special action of a Democratic-controlled federal agency. He quickly made a stock killing; the general inference being that a few highly compliant Republicans situated here and there are useful coloration for the Democratic Party, and that those Republicans who cooperate will be remembered, if not hereafter, certainly in this world.

This does not mean that “Republicans” never got elected in New York. Four mayors during this century, the incumbent included, were “Republicans,” all of them fusionists and the penultimate, Mr. La Guardia, a gentleman who, like his successor Republican, took considerable pains to endure his congenital deformity with a heroic disregard, leaving him, for all that one would notice, as clean-limbed as a freshly minted Democrat. The upstate Republicans, who have predominated in the governorship since the long reign of Thomas Dewey began in 1942, have acquiesced in the situation—for one thing because the patronage powers of the Governor within New York City are exiguous, for another because Messrs. Dewey and Rockefeller, having measured the odds, appear to have thought it the wiser counsel not to attempt seriously to organize the Republicans in New York City, or even the latent Republicans. So long as New York City behaved sportingly as regards its own elections, the danger was that the Republicans might, by serious attempts to organize New York City Republicanism, so antagonize the very powerful Democrats as to cease to qualify for their discreet cooperation, which has been given to the Republicans from time to time; the most newsworthy recent example was the collusion between Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner in the spring of 1965 on the matter of organizing the Albany legislature.

Besides, assuming it were organizationally possible, around what is the Republican Party of New York to organize? The notion that it should organize around certain political ideas different from ideas regnant within the Democratic Party appears to have been discarded as, simply, ridiculous. Would the GOP run on the integrity of its racial stock? It sometimes appeared to be doing so, complained Mr. Leonard Hall, a highly competent political technician, though not competent enough to have secured for himself the Republican nomination for Governor in 1958, at a time when Rockefeller also desired it. Hall added his voice to the chorus of breast-beaters after the ignominious defeat of Senator Goldwater. “We have permitted our party,” he said, “to become too exclusive. We have been trying to elect national candidates with the descendants of the people who came over on the Mayflower, and that boat just wasn’t big enough. . . . Our party gives the appearance of being an organization of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” (The WASP vote in New York City is 12 per cent, somewhat less than the Negro vote alone.)

There has been lacking in the Republican Party of New York, everyone appears to agree, a fighting faith through which to distinguish the GOP from the Democratic Party and through which to lure the services of ideological partisans who cannot be commandeered by patronage. Indeed, on those occasions when the Republican Party has won municipal elections it has done so precisely by effacing any distinguishing characteristics of the Republican Party; by tagging along with the idea of Fusion, as was done so successfully by Mr. Fiorello La Guardia, hereinafter not referred to as the Little Flower. The voters of New York, on the other hand, are not immobile. There was, for instance, the insufficiently remembered victory of Mr. Vincent Impellitteri, who, in the special election of 1950, running as an Independent, beat the Democratic-Liberal and (needless to say) the Republican candidate. Mr. Impellitteri ran as himself; as a man who had been denied, brusquely, inhumanly, the Democratic nomination which was popularly supposed to have belonged to him. In any case, he won 1,161,175 votes, as contrasted with 935,000 for Ferdinand Pecora, the Democrat-Liberal, and 382,000 for Edward Corsi, the Republican. It is a matter of minor historical interest that that year, two years after Mr. Dewey practically won the Presidency (and the same year that he outpolled his Democratic opponent in New York City in his successful bid for re-election as Governor), the Republican mayoral candidate in New York City polled 15.4 per cent of the total vote, or less than 2 per cent more than the Conservative Party polled in 1965.

If there was a single conference held by Republican leaders during the winter or spring of 1965 devoted to the subject of whether the Republican Party might amass a series of positions around which to base an opposition to continuing Democratic rule, that session is unrecorded. There were conferences aplenty, most of them in the weeks before the first of March, devoted to the question whether John Lindsay should himself run. As of March 1, Mr. Lindsay, according to the accounts of his biographers,¹¹ had decided not to, on the grounds that the odds against him were insuperable. Subsequently, after a breakfast meeting with Mr. John Hay Whitney from which he left feeling considerably more resourceful, and after an exhortatory barrage of letters, telegrams, etc., that followed upon a planned leak by his manager, Mr. Robert Price, to the effect that Lindsay was wavering, Lindsay decided that New York did indeed deserve to be saved, and cast his die: but always on the strict understanding that, like his Republican predecessor Mr. La Guardia, he would be running not as a Republican but as himself. His own words, given at a press conference, were that he desired it to be “clear to the whole world” that he was running for Mayor “as Lindsay” rather than as a Republican. The whole world, as we shall see, did not get the message, but the New York swing vote did, and of course, it remains to be decided who was deluded, the Republican Party or the Democratic electorate.

For instance, Messrs. Peter Maas and Nick Thimmesch, writing on January 2, 1966 in New York, the magazine of the Sunday Tribune, in which they delivered what is commonly accepted as the official Lindsay view of the chronology of the mayoralty campaign.

I shall be devoting attention to the dilemma of the Republican Party, in New York City and nationwide, and see no purpose in any anticipation of the argument. What should be stressed at this point is that in the spring of 1965 the high morale of the Republican Party had nothing to do with the prospective exhilaration of a confrontation between two different approaches to municipal government. It was all along assumed that Mr. Robert Wagner would be running for re-election, and the prospect of yet another, redundant term was viewed with despair by many politically and morally energetic men, who, though they found it difficult to criticize the Mayor’s general ideas about governing New York, consolidated around the position that a change in personnel was drastically overdue. Later, when Mr. Wagner pulled out, thus guaranteeing that someone other than himself would be the next Mayor—whether Mr. Lindsay or Mr. Abraham Beame, or Mr. Paul Screvane, or Mr. Paul O’Dwyer, or Mr. William Fitts Ryan—the pro-Lindsay coalition I speak of shifted to the derivative position that whereas, to be sure, Mr. Wagner would personally disappear, and presumably with him the awful fatigue of his administration, the point now became to replace Wagner with someone formally unattached to the Democratic Party. Therein—not in a new set of ideas about municipal government but in his person, and in his unalignment—lay the prospects for a refreshed New York, most of Mr. Lindsay’s supporters would be saying. It became more difficult to advance that line after Mr. Lindsay sought, and secured, the backing of the Liberal Party, whose iron hold on Mr. Wagner had been manifest, thus renewing formal ties which (the argument had run) Lindsay would be unencumbered by. And then, to add to the difficulties, after one of the most exhaustive searches in political history, Mr. Lindsay designated as his Comptroller—a Democrat, Mr. Milton Mollen, a much-censured associate of Wagner (for whom he had served as Housing Commissioner), whose prestige was at a lower ebb even than Mr. Wagner’s. The columnist, Murray Kempton, who had contributed to Lindsay the slogan, “He is fresh, everyone else is tired,” although he stopped short of outright disaffection, commented acidly that his jingle had been composed “before Congressman Lindsay decided to begin our municipal rebirth by borrowing his candidate for Comptroller from Mayor Wagner. So it must be amended to say that Congressman Lindsay is not only fresh but, when necessary, he can be downright impudent” (New York World-Telegram, August 26, 1965).

But the doctrine held together—even if, intellectually, it was at this point bursting at the seams—that John Lindsay was a free agent. And then, when Mr. Beame was designated at the primary as the Democratic candidate, his placid defense of the status quo and his unbemused affiliations with the Democratic bosses reinvigorated the notion that Mr. Lindsay was uniquely independent.

It is, finally, interesting to recall that the weary Mr. Wagner had only four years before been freshly remandated—as the “reform” Mayor who, by extraordinary moral exertion, had freed himself from the bosses, whom indeed he had roundly denounced in 1961, succeeding to re-election as the quintessentially emancipated man. Nobody quite knew what exactly had happened to the reformist momentum that had buried the bosses, and even though Mr. Wagner never did reunite with them, somehow daisies did not spring up on the pavements of New York. It transpired that New York City government without Carmine De Sapio was not noticeably better than it had been with Carmine De Sapio: indeed, to judge from the crystallization of the discontent, New York was a great deal worse after one unboss-ridden term than after the two boss-ridden preceding terms. The reformers’ new kick, at least during the period of the Democratic Primary, was the humorless ideologue Mr. William Fitts Ryan; and when he fell, the mantle went to John Lindsay. The Republicans were increasingly maneuvered into the position of believing in John Lindsay qua John Lindsay, as their shriveled justification for their original enthusiasm (he is untied to the people who tied up Wagner) gave way under the weight of one after another entanglement with the same old crowd: the same organization, the same personnel, the same ideology.

2. The Idea of Fusion 2. The Idea of Fusion

When Fiorello La Guardia left City Hall in 1945 he proclaimed, with characteristic self-appreciation, that thanks to himself, “partisan politics, dishonesty, graft, selfishness, favoritism, have been entirely abolished.” (By contrast, the Son of God’s tenure was a bust.) But allowing for political hyperbole, La Guardia had, it was generally agreed, accomplished the principal mission for which he had been picked by the Fusionists, which was to liberate New York from a city government which had come to view politics as a form of commerce. The good feeling the name of La Guardia popularly evokes is in part owing to his personality—it was La Guardia’s color that made his reign so lastingly impressive. But for the serious minded, his name suggests high standards of public service.

He gave Fusion a very good name, in the best tradition of his predecessors Seth Low and John Purroy Mitchel, and it thereafter became a part of a happy legend that those who go beyond their own political parties are the most desirable candidates for municipal office. John Lindsay was to stress repeatedly the nonpartisan nature of his own candidacy, assiduously cultivating the air of transcendence that devolves to a candidate too big for any single party.

In 1933, when New York City government had been so greatly discredited by the Seabury investigations, a Fusion group looked hard for a candidate who would be anti-Tammany Hall, period. Actually, neither La Guardia nor—later—John Lindsay was “above” parties. They disdained only those servile relationships to political parties which, on public analysis, tended to diminish their appeal as idealists. La Guardia, who fought savagely for the Fusionists’ endorsement (even as Lindsay maneuvered hard for the Liberal endorsement), had been the reluctant choice of the Fusionists in part because of his unorthodox mien, in part because he was formally a Republican; and it was doubted that a candidate who suffered the liability of that connection could, in a town registered four to one Democratic, beat the Democrats. The Fusionists desired to beat the incumbent with practically anybody at all, and the candidate’s own social and political views were held to be utterly immaterial. What mattered were personal integrity and the ability to reform the administration of the city. This was fusion not in behalf of a set of social positions about government but in behalf of elementary reform. For a generation, the political professionals called the civic-minded men who went in for that kind of thing, Goo-goos.²² The Goo-goos of 1933 were determined to rescue New York, caring not at all about the ideological list of the man they were determined to make the Mayor of New York.

Said, by some, to trace back to “Good Government Boys.”

The most prominent members of the Fusion Conference Committee, which was charged with finding a suitable candidate, were, as a matter of fact, political conservatives. Before they formally settled on La Guardia, they had rated as qualified candidates prominent men whose social and political views ranged right across the political spectrum. Judge Seabury, the patrician reformer, was offered the designation, and turned it down on the grounds that to profiteer from the findings of his own committee might have the effect of discrediting his motives. Nathan Strauss, Jr., scion of the famous merchandising family, unidentified with any political ideology, also declined—on the grounds that Herbert Lehman was Governor and to propose another Jew as Mayor might bring on an anti-Semitic backlash. Robert Moses, an independent Republican, was turned down only because Judge Seabury violently opposed him.³³ A ticket including Al Smith and Norman Thomas was seriously considered—Al Smith, who had already begun to question what he deemed the left excesses of Franklin Roosevelt, and had thus emerged as a conservative; and Norman Thomas, the firebrand socialist. Smith said no, as did a half-dozen others. Fusion’s very favorite candidate was Joseph McKee, a Democrat of impeccable reputation who had actually served for a couple of months as Acting Mayor after Jimmy Walker quit. But McKee resigned from politics and went into business, whence he was resurrected a few months later by FDR and persuaded to run against La Guardia and the Tammany incumbent, Mayor O’Brien, whose daze during the entire period was symbolized by his speech to the Greek-American society in which he confessed his lifelong devotion to “that great Greek poet, Horace.”

Because Moses was opposed to proportional representation (against which Seabury, in his final years, finally turned); and because Moses was an Al Smith man. Seabury always resented Smith because, he believed, Smith had edged him out of the Presidency. (Seabury was convinced he could have beaten Hoover in 1928.)

The Seabury disclosures that brought Fusion to the fore are not to be confused with the routine malversations of public officials. Tammany Hall had been insouciantly bleeding New York, and the place stank. “The gang that had misgoverned the city,” Professor Arthur Mann has written,⁴⁴ “had made bribery, wirepulling, and influence-peddling into a way of life, from fixing lowly traffic tickets all the way up to buying a judgeship. By 1943, the city’s credit was so badly impaired that municipal securities were selling twenty-six points under par.”

La Guardia Comes to Power, 1933 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965).

The job at hand, moreover, was not merely to oust the rascals, but to cause the people to desire that this should be done; to persuade a sufficient number of voters that the whole notion of good government was in jeopardy, that fiduciary standards of public service were actually in danger of deinstitutionalization. Though Seabury was the final hero of the investigations, he had by no means been the crowd-pleaser: the people seemed greatly amused by, and certainly were infinitely tolerant of high rascality. The boss of Tammany during another investigation had been Richard Croker, who, when asked what was his opinion of free silver, replied blandly, “I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.”⁵⁵ When the dashing Jimmy Walker was asked by Seabury to justify elevating one of his hack predecessors as judge of the Children’s Court of Queens, the Mayor said, “The appointment of Judge Hylan means the children can now be tried by their peer.” But the conscience of the city consolidated, even as the Victorian conscience of London finally reacted against the breezy degeneracy of Oscar Wilde: and the search was on for a truly invincible Goo-goo.

Ibid., p. 40.

Judge Seabury was primarily responsible for the choice of La Guardia, to whom he had been introduced by Adolf Berle, Jr., who in turn had come to know him through the enthusiastic intercession of the young and influential reformer Newbold Morris. Having got the Fusion nomination, La Guardia was promptly endorsed by the Republican Party. At the outset of his campaign, La Guardia stuck single-mindedly to his mandate. He was running against Tammany Hall, period. He was asked by an association of newspaper editors for his social and economic views and replied that they were immaterial: “The only question is honest and efficient administration of our municipal government.” “There is only one issue,” La Guardia repeated to his fellow Fusion candidates halfway through the campaign, “and that issue is the Tammany Hall of John F. Curry.”

To the Fusionists’ astonishment and dismay, Franklin Roosevelt, sensing that Tammany Democracy was at least temporarily out but desiring his very own man in New York, persuaded McKee to run on the “Recovery” ballot, pledging to reform the Democratic Party from within. The popularity of Roosevelt and his New Deal was enormous, with the result that La Guardia faced the awful possibility that he might well lose to McKee, who went busily to work identifying himself with the New Deal. La Guardia feared that McKee would have a special appeal for the city’s poor, who were more numerous, even, than the city’s Italians, the ethnic base of La Guardia’s own strength. As Professor Mann put it, “the task before La Guardia was as clear as it was urgent: to build a bridge between the aspirations of the Goo Goos and the needs of the Disinherited.”

Goo-gooism, in other words, would not be enough. So La Guardia went on from his call for administrative purification to welfarist proposals embodied in his famous phrase, “What is needed is government with a heart.” He spoke “feelingly” about social justice, said La Guardia, “because I feel so strongly about it”—which was certainly the very best of reasons for speaking feelingly about it. And indeed, although La Guardia could be accused of any number of hypocrisies and polemical venalities (he prided himself that he could “out-demagogue the demagogues”); and although it is altogether possible that he finally took the election away from McKee only by imputing anti-Semitism to him (which caused FDR, in fright, to withhold the tacit endorsement he had planned), it cannot be contended that La Guardia’s unscheduled turn to an emphasis on social welfarism was out of character. He had been known for years as America’s most liberal Congressman. He was to go on, his biographer concludes, to “join the liberal political establishment of the 1930’s and 1940’s.” Yet at his inauguration, what he stressed was his original mandate for good government in the technical sense of an honest, just administration. “Our theory of municipal government is an experiment,” he said, “to try to show that a nonpartisan, nonpolitical local government is possible.” Whereupon he recited the famous Oath of the Young Men of Athens, whose appropriateness is both a tribute to its universality, and confirmation of the essentially non-programmatic character of La Guardia’s mandate . . . “We will fight for our ideals and sacred things of the city, both alone and with many. We will revere and obey the city’s law and do our best to incite a like respect in those above us who are prone to annul them and set them at nought. We will strike unceasingly to quicken the public sense of civic duty. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this city not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful, than it was transmitted to us . . .”

It is hard to understand the applicability of the Fusion idea to John Lindsay’s candidacy. A little oil in the machinery is almost always in order after a long stretch in office by a single administration. But that is Goo-gooism of a completely different order from what was needed in New York after the Seabury investigations. Mayor Wagner’s administration was not corrupt, except in the sense that fatigue can be a form of corruption. A close study of the public indictments of Mr. Wagner by Mr. Lindsay confirms that his administrative delinquencies were, by the standards of 1933, utterly trivial. And as if to reinforce the implicit contention that Mr. Lindsay had no deep quarrel with Mr. Wagner, he picked as his running-mates one Liberal—the State Chairman of the Party that had endorsed Wagner’s re-election—and one Democrat who was intimately implicated in Wagner’s administration. It is as though La Guardia had picked as running-mates two men intimately associated with Jimmy Walker. If the objective in 1965 wasn’t merely the routine objective of bringing in another administration—and we were told the objective was something far more hallowed, calling for the august concept of Fusion—then didn’t Lindsay face the difficulties that the reformer McKee faced in 1933? At that time Walter Lippmann, declaring for La Guardia, had written, “Can the machine be sufficiently reformed by men who, until a month ago, were part of it? [La Guardia’s Fusion had answered with a resounding “No!” Lindsay’s Fusion embraced one of Wagner’s highest lieutenants and ran him for Comptroller.] Or is it desirable to overthrow the whole machine of misgovernment and install men who are entirely unentangled with it? [La Guardia’s Fusion: “Yes!” Lindsay’s Fusion: “No!”] . . . Do the people wish a partial change of control at the top or a radical change of control from top to bottom? [In 1965, the people evidently desired only a change at the top—except for those who were deluded by the Fusion rhetoric into believing that they were voting for radical change of control from top to bottom.] In the McKee [read: Lindsay] faction they have men who have been a part of the existing machine, have done business with it, have acquiesced in it, have sustained it, still represent an important part of it, and, barring miracles, must continue to compromise with it. In Fusion [read—see below—the Conservative Party] they have a group of candidates who are the sworn enemies of the machine, owe nothing to it, have every interest in destroying it, and no interest in compromising with it.”

Lindsay’s Fusion, in a word, was a verbal operation. It was essential in order to hang on to the Republicans while pandering explicitly to the left. If the time for Fusion of the 1933 variety is truly here, one must discard sectarian prejudices. If New York is really going under, Fusion must be called to the rescue: and in behalf of Fusion, Republicans, like the conservative gentlemen on the old Fusion Conference Committee, must put aside their own values as irrelevant until the storm blows itself out. It doesn’t make any difference whether the man’s social views are those of Al Smith, or those of Norman Thomas; submerge your own ideas, and vote to save New York. Lindsay’s Fusion was procedural rather than substantive. Even so, the bugle of Fusion instantly fused together the Tribune and the New York Post, Life and The Nation, Richard Nixon and Richard Rovere, Ray Bliss and Ray Walsh, David Lawrence and David Dubinsky, all in the cause of extirpating Wagner from this earth. After the smoke had settled and the Democrats had named their own ticket, Murray Kempton calmly observed that Lindsay’s anti-Wagner ticket was one-third composed of anti-Wagner men, while Beame’s had evolved as three-thirds anti-Wagner. As for Wagnerism, if it was something other than Wagner, Lindsay was running on it, even while denouncing its eponym.

Wagner’s most opportunistic detractors within the liberal community could never quite find a way to state their case against him except in pallid Goo-gooisms. Lindsay’s need was to identify the city’s dissatisfactions as the direct result of the approach to government of Mr. Wagner. That was never easy to do. Because the trouble in New York was—is—not so much with maladministration as with a frozen ideology. If a public school’s standards are lowered because of a precipitate and thoughtless racial integration, what do you call that? Maladministration? If the traffic chokes up not because you don’t but because you daren’t control the flow of it into the city, what do you call that? If the middle class begins to flow out of the city because the schools are bad, housing scarce, and taxes high, what is the matter? If the crime rate rises while fresh judicial mores make its detection and conviction harder, what will Goo-gooism contribute to that? If rent control actually causes inequities and depresses the construction of new buildings—what is a Fusion, dedicated to preserving rent control, going to do about that? If labor unions exercise crushing power, what is a cool-cat administrator with vision, imagination, energy, devotion, compassion, and genius—who appeared prostrate before a couple of labor union leaders for their support and inveighs against Right-to-Work—going to do about that?

3. The Conservative Party 3. The Conservative Party

The Conservative Party of New York was founded in February 1962. The idea had been kicking around for several years. I remember discussing such a party with a few friends in 1955. We were moved to do so by the denial of the New York Democratic senatorial nomination to James Farley—because of pressure from the Liberal Party, which disdained him as too old-fashioned (read, too conservative). That was, of course, the Democrats’ business, but in American politics the position of the one party tends to influence the position of the other—on the whole a good idea in a political community which tends to discourage political polarization. But the line of the major parties should, of course, reflect substantial bodies of opinion within the consensus of each party. It seemed to me that the neglect of one body of opinion on the political spectrum, even while its counterpart at the other end, because it was effectively organized, was militantly represented, had resulted in distortions in the policies of both major parties. If the Liberal Party, which effectively mobilizes left-opinion in New York, did not exist, neither (I reasoned, and still do) would a Conservative Party need to exist.⁶⁶

A few conservatives around the country, having become convinced that the Republican Party is for some reason metaphysically useless, have been trying, and will probably continue to do so, to establish Conservative Parties in every state of the Union, looking forward to a national party. They do not recognize that the essential precondition for such state parties is the pre-existence of an equivalent party on the left. It requires the special provocation of a successful left-splinter party to justify direct pressure from a fourth party on the GOP. The Liberals, for the most part, well satisfied with the policies of the Democratic Party, have not felt the necessity to found third parties outside New York, and in all probability will not do so in the foreseeable future. The possibility of a national third party, like Henry Wallace’s and backed by roughly the same people for roughly the same reasons, is something else again.

The Liberals’ influence on the Democratic Party in New York is not anywhere doubted. The influence, in fact, is greater than the vote regularly deployable by the Liberal Party would seem to merit—mostly for psychological reasons. That vote has fluctuated in the twenty years since the Liberal Party peeled off (in 1944) from the American Labor Party in patriotic protest against the ALP’s capture by the Communists. Its high point was in 1951, when it won (with the help of a minor party) the City Council Presidency with 659,000 votes. Two years later it got 465,000 votes for its candidate for Mayor, Mr. Rudolph Halley, who had become famous as the principal investigator for the Kefauver Committee (ironically, become famous by the use of tactics roundly condemned by Liberals when they were subsequently used by Senator McCarthy). Its low point was in 1964, when it delivered only 272,106 votes to Mr. Bobby Kennedy, running against Mr. Kenneth Keating. But its power, whatever the fluctuations of its performance, remained high. Its deliberations—which are a colloquy between Mr. David Dubinsky and Mr. Alex Rose—are copiously reported; and Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, when running for election, or re-election, as President, all appeared in person to accept the Party’s endorsement at great big to-dos. The Liberal Party paused to take credit for no less an achievement than the election of John Kennedy as President of the United States, a demonstration which required a certain flair for the use of statistics but which is not uninteresting; any more, for instance, than the Conservative Party’s claim—more plausible, as a matter of fact—to having cost the Republican Party the control of the New York State Assembly in 1965 is uninteresting. The Liberals’ reasoning was this simple: if the voters who voted for JFK on the Liberal line in 1960 had voted instead for Richard Nixon, Nixon would have carried New York; and if he had carried New York, he’d have got a majority of the electoral college. The flaw, of course, is that the voters who voted for Kennedy on the Liberal Party ticket would, most of them, have voted for him anyway; that is to say, irrespective of whether they had been coaxed to do so by the Liberal Party. The Conservatives’ claim is, although self-serving, at least one step more plausible. Seven Republicans running for the State Assembly in New York in 1965 were offered Conservative Party support and turned it down. Accordingly, the Conservatives nominated their own people, who amassed, individually, more votes than their Republican opponents lost by. Ergo, if the seven Republicans had accepted Conservative support, they’d have been elected, and the Republicans, with that seven-vote margin, could have organized the Assembly and thus controlled both branches of the State legislature, instead of merely a single branch. Almost-ergo, of course, because there is a weakness in the argument: it is impossible to compute how many votes the seven Republicans might have lost through the alienation of those who are allergic to the Conservative label . . .

But statistical rodomontade cannot detract from the fact of the Liberal Party’s enormous influence; or from the Conservative Party’s. Indeed, the Conservative Party is already given the (ironic) credit for having elected John Lindsay Mayor of New York by drawing more votes away from Abraham Beame than from Lindsay, as regards which analysis, more anon.

A Conservative Party was finally organized in 1962. Its existence, I think, is a very good example of the fact that however obvious the need, things don’t necessarily get done unless someone does them. The Party owes its existence to the energies, physical and moral—I shall maintain—of two young men who set aside their law practices and worked feverishly over a period of months beginning in 1961, ending with the certification of the Conservative Party of New York on Election Day in 1962. J. Daniel Mahoney was then twenty-nine; his brother-in-law Kieran O’Doherty, thirty-four. Mahoney, relaxed, humorous, wise, a peerless conciliator, had been a magna cum laude graduate from St. Bonaventure’s University and graduated from the Columbia Law School. O’Doherty, intense, fascinated by politics, prodigiously informed, with an infinite capacity for righteous indignation, was a cum laude graduate of City College of New York, and received his LL.B from Columbia. They had, as the saying goes, no funds, no machines, no underwriters—and only an inexplicit mandate, but one they never doubted—namely, that a significant number of New York voters felt disfranchised.

“It is by now a mark of advancing years,” the young founders of the new party wrote in a memorandum privately distributed on July 4, 1961, “for a conservative to have voted in a Presidential election with enthusiasm. . . .

“Witness the plight of the conservative voter in New York State who approaches the critical 1962 gubernatorial and senatorial elections with the foreknowledge that the Republican Party, the normal vehicle of conservative political policies, will offer him the uncherished opportunity to cast his ballot for Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits. . . .”

The Declaration of Principles of the prospective party emphasized the necessity for realistic anti-Communist policies abroad and, “at home, [opposition to] a crushing burden of taxation for purposes unconnected with defense, [to] never-ceasing inflation, [to] a constantly delaying educational practice [which] combine to transform America gradually but unmistakably into a socialist society, in which the individual person will count for nothing.”

The founders put concrete emphasis on ending government support for special privileges to special groups through:

freeing the workingman, industry, and the community at large from the imperial domination of trade-union bosses, by reducing their monopoly power to a level compatible with the rule of law;⁷⁷

I have never seen a better one-sentence statement of the problem.

freeing the farmers from bureaucratic regulation as dependent wards of the government, by eliminating in gradual stages the entire crop control, price control, and subsidy program;

freeing the energy of American industry, by eliminating specialized subsidies and governmental favors;

freeing the consumer (who is all of us) from the pressure of constant inflation, which is largely brought about by the curbs of special privilege on American productivity and by the cost of the non-productive bureaucracy which enforces these curbs.

As for the principal political vehicle through which they intended to exert influence, the founders were unequivocal: “We agree that the conservative political movement cannot place its ultimate faith in a third party, but must instead seek its ultimate political realization within the Republican Party.”

The New York Daily News’ James Desmond, who, by avocation, is a biographer of Nelson Rockefeller, got wind of the memorandum and wrote in the News, November 16, 1961, that “some far-out conservatives,⁸⁸ many aligned with the right wing of the Republican Party, were surveying the feasibility of entering a candidate against Rockefeller in next year’s election. The group, which has been talking informally for several weeks, includes the principal backers of the National Review, and has been meeting in the magazines office.” And the conservative columnist and political expert Raymond Moley remarked that the Conservative Party’s sponsors, “no doubt sincere young people,” would in due course recognize how meager was their experience, and predicted that “their cause will vanish in two or three months, when the hillsides, along with Christmas jewelry, turn green.”

The far-outers, in addition to Messrs. Mahoney and O’Doherty, included Joseph H. Ball, former Senator from Minnesota; Charles Edison, former Democratic Governor of New Jersey and Secretary of the Navy under FDR; Devin Garrity and Alex Hillman, New York publishers; Professors Thomas Molnar, Charles Rice, and Sylvester Petro; journalists Suzanne La Follette, Frank Meyer, William Rickenbacker, and George Schuyler; and New York attorneys Godfrey Schmidt and Thomas Bolan.

Murray Kempton, getting wind of the organization, predicted (New York Post, November 16, 1961) that “the Conservatives, if they go through with this, should handsomely reward their enemies. Nothing destroys a dedicated fanatic faster than going into politics, particularly independent politics. . . . It is never wise for any group which says it speaks for hundreds of thousands to test its statistics at the ballot.” Four years later, the Conservative Party rolled up 340,000 votes in New York City alone.

In 1962, Governor Rockefeller was running for re-election, having increased the state budget by 44 per cent over the peak reached by a Democratic predecessor identified in the public mind as a profligate spender. His methods of financing had been exposed, by diligent analysis, as relying heavily on sleight-of-hand fiscal manipulation. (He was given to the device of capitalizing current expenditures so as to get around the legal obligation that the state’s budget balance.) In 1960, having failed to cop the nomination for himself, he had done everything he could to torpedo Richard Nixon on the eve of the Republican Convention in Chicago by springing a series of demands which rocked the Republican Convention—and Nixon, whom he may very well have thrown fatally off balance in that close election. (The Democrats made the most of the schism Rockefeller had publicized.) For Senator, the Republican Party renominated Jacob Javits, whom the Americans for Democratic Action had acclaimed with a hundred-per-cent rating for his dutiful record during the current session of Congress, and about whom the late columnist George Sokolsky, while greatly sympathetic to the Kennedy Administration, had thundered that “he has made his own record, and it is not a record for which a conservative of any hue can vote.”

The response of the New York State Republican Party, which belonged, in usufruct, to Governor Rockefeller, was—after courtly preliminaries by the Governor professing his joy at any civic-minded movements—to do everything possible to abort the establishment of the Conservative Party. Mr. Leo Egan commented (March 12, 1962) in The New York Times (“Right Wing Irks GOP”) that Governor Rockefeller and his aides were determined not to make the “mistake” the Democrats had made when the Liberal Party was formed. The Democrats had originally viewed the Liberal Party as simply another organizational adjunct, useful for seining extra votes. They did not pause to consider the quid pro quo, namely that the Liberals intended to exercise a veto power over Democratic designations, and would proceed to do so.⁹⁹ The Republicans, the word went out, must discourage the projected Conservative Party, by pressures rhetorical and legal.

Leo Egan in The New York Times, March 12, 1962:

The emergence of a militant conservative movement in New York State is raising serious political problems for Governor Rockefeller and other Republican leaders. Depending on how these problems are resolved, they could have a major impact on elections and government in the state for many years to come. In many respects the problems Republicans now face are similar to those that confronted Democrats two and three decades ago when the liberal movement, which gave rise to the American Labor Party and later the Liberal Party, was cresting. The solutions reached then have plagued the Democrats ever since.

Essentially, what the leaders of the new Conservative movement would like (and they have made no secret of it) is a political position in relation to the Republican party comparable to that now held by the Liberal Party in relation to the Democrats.

As things now stand, a Democratic candidate for statewide office in New York has only a remote chance of winning unless he gets a Liberal Party endorsement. [The Republicans] are opposed to letting any minority group get any similar veto power in the choice of Republican statewide candidates. For this reason their strategy with respect to the conservative movement is likely to be exactly the opposite of that used by the Democrats when they faced the liberal problem. . . . Instead of helping the Republican conservatives attain legal status, the Republican leadership can be expected to use all means at its command to prevent them from achieving this status. . . . Possible stratagems include full use of all the intricacies of the election law; first to prevent the new group from getting the signatures needed to put its candidates on the ballot, and second to prevent it from obtaining the 50,000 votes for Governor needed to achieve legal status.

The former were first officially exerted by the Republican State Executive Committee, meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in June 1962. “No Republican,” the Committee pronounced, “can be a member of a splinter party and at the same time be a Republican.” The leaders of the fledgling party, the Committee threw in, are “political pied pipers who could only betray those whom they lured into their political adventure.” At a sticks-and-stones level, Governor Rockefeller ordered his staff to do everything possible to prevent the Conservatives from garnering the fifty signatures per county required to put a party on the ballot. A district attorney from Tompkins County publicly acknowledged, at one point, that he had solicited affidavits of repudiation from voters who had signed the petition; and Rockefeller, asked to investigate, declined comment. Meanwhile, guarding the political store, New York State Republican Chairman L. Judson Morhouse sent out, on August 14, a confidential aide mémoire to all county chairmen and vice-chairmen on how to combat the preposterous charges that Governor Rockefeller was not really a conservative. The covering note was more interesting than the attached demonstration, which merely recapitulated in congested statistical form the discredited contention that Rockefeller had proved himself fiscally sound. “It”—warned Morhouse concerning the enclosure—“must be used cautiously and should not be published because we do not want to emphasize the conservative side so much that we lose some other votes.” But along about midsummer, it became apparent that the Party had surprising stamina and a no-nonsense legal adviser—and could not be stopped; whereupon Governor Rockefeller suddenly withdrew his opposition, falling back on the bravely Voltairean stance from which he had originally greeted the Conservative Party’s founding, on February 13: “The greater citizen participation we have in public affairs the better.”¹⁰¹⁰ And the big question was now: how well would the brand-new party do at the polls?

Three years later, State Chairman Daniel Mahoney called on the Governor to declare February 13, 1963, the third anniversary of the founding of the Conservative Party, “Greater Citizen Participation Day,” in “lasting commemoration” of the Governor’s noble and generous attitudes towards dissenting political opinion.” The Governor was not amused.

The Conservatives named as their candidate for Governor a forty-four-year-old Syracuse businessman, Mr. David Jaquith. Jaquith, a Princeton graduate, president of Vego Industries, a lifelong Republican, president of the Board of Education of Syracuse, had an extensive social and civic background. He campaigned against Rockefeller’s domestic policies, stressing that during his free-spending administration as Governor, expenditures had increased by 48.9 per cent and income tax collection by 55 per cent¹¹¹¹ over Averell Harriman’s top budget four years earlier. Against Senator Javits, the Conservatives fielded Kieran O’Doherty, the Party’s State Chairman, who roasted Senator Javits’s record as a fundamental liberal, citing his record in Congress. The Conservative Party climaxed its first campaign at a rally in Madison Square Garden which, although it began a half-hour after President Kennedy’s dramatic televised ultimatum to the Soviet Union, nevertheless produced a surprisingly large audience—upward of ten thousand people—and a great deal of enthusiasm.¹²¹²

Which figures sounded, two years later in 1964, like the Good Old Days Department. Rockefeller’s 1965 budget called for spending 94 per cent more than the Harriman Administration had spent.

An interesting essay could be written on Madison Square Garden and politics. It is the symbol of Big Time—and it is greatly feared, because the mere fact of its use is a taunt to the New York press, which can be counted on to remark the empty spaces, if there are such; and the resulting effect can be greatly demoralizing. The professionals tend to avoid Madison Square Garden as being too risky. New York conservatives have had good luck with it—SRO twice during 1964 for Senator Goldwater, and once in 1962 by the Young Americans for Freedom. But the effort required to fill the Garden is enormous, as also the expense of publicizing the event and trying to lure into it the twenty thousand needed to appease the unoccupied-seat counters. In 1962, the Conservative Party, alone among the political parties, rented the Garden. In 1965, none of the Mayoralty candidates did. The Garden, as a matter of incidental intelligence, rents for ten thousand dollars per night.

Javits won in a landslide, well over a million votes. Rockefeller, by contrast, did poorly. The State Chairman Mr. Morhouse had predicted a victory of 800,000 to 1,000,000. Instead, he won by 529,000 votes, 43,000 below his 1958 pluralty. Jaquith polled 141,000 votes which would almost surely have otherwise gone to Rockefeller. The slippage was greatly noticed around the country, and considerably affected Rockefeller’s reputation as the undeniable contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964. Homer Bigart summarized the results in The New York Times: “In New York the new Conservative Party fell considerably short of the 200,000 votes its leaders had hoped for. David Jaquith . . . candidate for Governor, polled only 118,768¹³¹³ votes, and Kieran O’Doherty, Conservative candidate for Senator, only 116,000. The party took comfort in the fact that it drew considerably more than the 50,000 votes it needed to win a permanent place on the ballot.” Indeed, Mr. Jaquith, promising that the Party would do better the next time around, observed that “only two or three voters in ten ever heard of the Conservative Party [even] in upstate New York.” Regarding this extraordinary success of Senator Javits, Mr. Jaquith remarked, with that political genius for which the Conservative Party is becoming renowned, that Javits’s re-election was “just stupidity on the part of the voters.”

118,768 was the original figure reported the day after the election. The final count, however, was 141,000.

In 1964, the Conservative Party’s principal public contender was Henry Paolucci, a professor of Political Science at Iona College, a diminutive, learned, amiable, talkative, eloquent, versatile nationalist. Senator Keating, following the Rockefeller line, had declared publicly that he would not accept the designation of the Conservative Party if offered to him; and indeed, he and Mr. Robert Kennedy were to spend much of the campaign debating whether Mr. Keating’s record in the Senate had been truly truly liberal; so that it is unlikely that Keating, even if Rockefeller had waived his objections, would have wanted the Conservative endorsement. I believe it is accurate to say that the Conservatives would have tendered it to him (a) in recognition of his anti-Communist policy statements during his term of office (particularly concerning Cuba); and provided (b), he would use his influence with Rockefeller to permit the Conservatives to nominate Goldwater’s slate of electors. Rockefeller had meted out an especially spiteful and humiliating blow to the Conservatives by refusing to permit the electors pledged to Goldwater to appear on the Conservative slate, with the ironic consequence that Goldwater, who had been diligently supported by the Conservatives over the preceding years, now that he was officially nominated by the national Republican Party, could only appear on the slate of the New York Republican Party, which was dominated by anti-Goldwaterites; but not on the Conservative Party slate. Meanwhile Goldwater had, of course, to endorse Keating (inferentially rebuking the Conservatives’ candidate, Paolucci). Add to all these technical and psychological complications the schismatic determination of many Conservatives to vote for Keating on the grounds that strategic statesmanship required the repression of Robert Kennedy, for anti-dynastic and other reasons.

Of considerable professional political interest were the questions not only of how would Paolucci fare against Keating and Kennedy, but also of how many lesser candidates would win on account of Conservative Party support, or lose on account of Conservative opposition. Although Rockefeller’s ban on Republican association with the Conservative Party had effectively bound the major candidates, his hold on lesser candidates was beginning to weaken. No doubt the quite unexpected appearance by Republican State Senate Majority Leader Walter J. Mahoney at the Conservatives’ Second Anniversary Dinner in the fall of 1963 had had the desired effect of sending out the word to Republican office-holders that, as a matter of practical politics, the choice would be theirs to make in 1964 whether to accept or decline co-sponsorship by the Conservatives. Senator Mahoney, among the world’s most urbane men (and effective public speakers), had said at the dinner, most amiably, in effect, that if you can’t lick them (as the Republican Party had tried to do), join them.

In the summer of 1964, at the famous post-nomination Republican unity session in Hershey, Pennsylvania, at which Rockefeller submitted to the discipline of shaking hands with Candidate Goldwater, Rockefeller called a press conference to observe that the Conservative Party “has entered candidates against regular and incumbent Republicans in 58 separate contests for Congress, the State Senate, and the State Assembly,” and is therefore “a major obstacle to Republican unity in New York State,” incompatible with the spirit of Hershey.

Daniel Mahoney, the Conservative State Chairman, pounced on Rockefeller’s statement as a

misleading and incomplete summary of the Conservative Party’s actual role in Congressional and State legislative contests this year.

More than half of the Conservatives’ independent races [he explained] are taking place in safe Democratic districts in New York City. Many of these independent candidacies resulted from a Republican rejection, prompted by the Republican State leadership, of Conservative Party endorsement which [had been] offered to Republican candidates. In several important races, notably the Nassau County race, and the 1st and 5th Congressional Districts, the Conservative Party declined to enter candidates in close races where we would clearly have provided the margin of victory for a liberal Democrat, despite a Republican rejection of our offer of endorsement.

Only in comparatively rare cases is the Conservative Party opposing incumbent Republicans. “For example, the Conservative Party is opposing only two incumbent Republican Congressmen, liberals John Lindsay and Ogden Reid, and five incumbent State Senators. The Liberal Party, whose endorsement President Johnson will accept with the blessing of the Democratic State leadership, is opposing six incumbent Democratic Congressman and eight incumbent State Senators.

Furthermore, the Conservative Party has endorsed 59 Republican candidates for Congress and the State legislature, including 42 incumbents.

Notwithstanding the prevailing confusion, Paolucci polled 203,369 votes, an increase of 75 per cent over the senatorial vote polled by the Conservatives in 1962. (Kennedy beat Keating by 650,307 votes.) Paolucci’s vote in New York City was 122,967 votes.

In six Assembly races, the Conservative Party vote either changed the outcome or came within five or ten votes of doing so. Thirty-two members of the New York State legislature were elected with Conservative Party endorsement, as well as Congressman McEwen from the upstate 31st District.

Earl Mazo, replacing Homer Bigart as The New York Times’ postelection coroner, commented somberly that “an official canvass showed the two-year-old Conservative Party had polled as well in major contests on November 3rd as the Liberal Party, which was founded twenty years ago. . . . Their polling strength is being studied by Democratic and Republican leaders to evaluate the potential impact of the recognized minor parties in future elections.” The results of that study have not been made public.

The official Republican opposition to the Conservative Party of New York has centered on the thesis that ideological quarrels should be transacted within the Party, as Governor Rockefeller put it in the midsummer of 1962. The Conservatives have countered that the GOP under Rockefeller has been notoriously insensitive to the existence of reasoned conservatism within the Party¹⁴¹⁴ and that the probable reason why this is so is the special pressures exerted by the Liberal Party, combined with the collapse of any organized educational effort to lure New York City voters away from dogmatic liberalism—deficiencies which the Conservatives explicitly seek to mend. It is not generally realized that the Republican Party of New York has a highly authoritarian tradition, and that it is very difficult for the dissenter to make his voice heard. Thomas Dewey, for instance, on the eve of the Chicago Convention of 1952, threatened all but public execution for any New York delegate who voted for Taft over Eisenhower. The State GOP is firmly dominated by two or three top Republican office-holders—Rockefeller primarily, and Javits, and now Lindsay—who are impatient of democratic Republicanism.

Which Governor Rockefeller denounced, on July 14, 1963, in the most sundering terms, as “every bit as dangerous to American principles and American institutions as the radical left”—a thunderbolt he did not trouble to direct only at supporters of, let us say, Robert Welch, but at supporters, in general, of Senator Goldwater. The conservatives, Rockefeller went on, “utterly reject the fundamental principles of our heritage,” and desire to “subvert the Republican Party itself.” Perhaps overcome by the general momentum, he went on to anathematize, while he was at it, the Kennedy Administration as responsible for the “unprincipled opportunism [that] has captured the Democratic Party.”

“At the State level,” Daniel Mahoney observed on January 30, 1965, “the Republican Party is simply the Rockefeller Party, as Governor Rockefeller demonstrated when he named his appointments secretary State Chairman of the Party last week. And now John Lindsay has proposed that the Republican Mayoral nominee should control the selection not only of the Republican citywide ticket, but of every Republican legislative and City Council candidate in New York City. Our election law presumes to entrust these nominations to enrolled Republicans voting in their local primaries, but Mr. Lindsay is prepared to waive this archaic arrangement.” It is an interesting conjecture, on which I shall in due course be dwelling, that the effect of the Republicans’ closed shop is not only to discountenance a useful bloc of Republican voters but to discourage a potential flow of voters whose background is Democratic, and who might well view the Conservative Party as a way-station to a remodeled Republican Party.

But the final historical responsibility of the Conservative Party of New York will be to answer the question raised in an editorial in The New York Times (October 31, 1962). “The Conservatives,” it grumbled, “in running a splinter ticket against the Republicans are pursuing a willfully destructive course. With their wrongheaded mischief-making the worst thing that could happen to them would be to succeed.” The reasoning is that as the Conservative Party of New York strengthens, so the Republican Party’s strength will diminish, and thus also will diminish the number of office-holders who do service to Conservative ideals. That reasoning—it is curious, of course, that the identical arguments are not raised to urge the liquidation of the Liberal Party—is correct if the big officeholders of the Republican Party in New York State are indeed furthering such ideals. If, on the other hand, such calipers as the ADA’s are at all useful for measuring, at least by contemporary political standards, the differences between conservative and liberal policies (and if not the ADA’s, whose?), then Mr. Javits, Republican, with his hundred-percent ADA record is hardly furthering those ideals; and if fiscal husbandry and a resistance to bloc-pressures are conservative, then Mr. Rockefeller is hardly satisfying those ideals: and so with Mr. Lindsay. The Conservative Party becomes a party of nose-spiters only as it moves, which it has yet to do, against moderate Republicans who in their public careers have stood up against incontinent liberalism. There are the sectarians within the Conservative Party, one must suppose: but they have not made any apparent headway in converting their Party into a utopianist affair, mindless of the here and now. Meanwhile, in microcosm, the Republican Party’s dilemma in New York is as it is nationwide—only a little more so because New York, alas, is New York. There are those who wish it were slightly otherwise, and the year the Voting Rights Bill was passed, and the re-apportionment decision enforced, was perhaps not quite the year in which to tell New York conservatives that they alone must not vote according to their lights.

1. For instance, Messrs. Peter Maas and Nick Thimmesch, writing on January 2, 1966 in New York, the magazine of the Sunday Tribune, in which they delivered what is commonly accepted as the official Lindsay view of the chronology of the mayoralty campaign.

2. Said, by some, to trace back to “Good Government Boys.”

3. Because Moses was opposed to proportional representation (against which Seabury, in his final years, finally turned); and because Moses was an Al Smith man. Seabury always resented Smith because, he believed, Smith had edged him out of the Presidency. (Seabury was convinced he could have beaten Hoover in 1928.)

4. La Guardia Comes to Power, 1933 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965).

5. Ibid., p. 40.

6. A few conservatives around the country, having become convinced that the Republican Party is for some reason metaphysically useless, have been trying, and will probably continue to do so, to establish Conservative Parties in every state of the Union, looking forward to a national party. They do not recognize that the essential precondition for such state parties is the pre-existence of an equivalent party on the left. It requires the special provocation of a successful left-splinter party to justify direct pressure from a fourth party on the GOP. The Liberals, for the most part, well satisfied with the policies of the Democratic Party, have not felt the necessity to found third parties outside New York, and in all probability will not do so in the foreseeable future. The possibility of a national third party, like Henry Wallace’s and backed by roughly the same people for roughly the same reasons, is something else again.

7. I have never seen a better one-sentence statement of the problem.

8. The far-outers, in addition to Messrs. Mahoney and O’Doherty, included Joseph H. Ball, former Senator from Minnesota; Charles Edison, former Democratic Governor of New Jersey and Secretary of the Navy under FDR; Devin Garrity and Alex Hillman, New York publishers; Professors Thomas Molnar, Charles Rice, and Sylvester Petro; journalists Suzanne La Follette, Frank Meyer, William Rickenbacker, and George Schuyler; and New York attorneys Godfrey Schmidt and Thomas Bolan.

9. Leo Egan in The New York Times, March 12, 1962:

10. Three years later, State Chairman Daniel Mahoney called on the Governor to declare February 13, 1963, the third anniversary of the founding of the Conservative Party, “Greater Citizen Participation Day,” in “lasting commemoration” of the Governor’s noble and generous attitudes towards dissenting political opinion.” The Governor was not amused.

11. Which figures sounded, two years later in 1964, like the Good Old Days Department. Rockefeller’s 1965 budget called for spending 94 per cent more than the Harriman Administration had spent.

12. An interesting essay could be written on Madison Square Garden and politics. It is the symbol of Big Time—and it is greatly feared, because the mere fact of its use is a taunt to the New York press, which can be counted on to remark the empty spaces, if there are such; and the resulting effect can be greatly demoralizing. The professionals tend to avoid Madison Square Garden as being too risky. New York conservatives have had good luck with it—SRO twice during 1964 for Senator Goldwater, and once in 1962 by the Young Americans for Freedom. But the effort required to fill the Garden is enormous, as also the expense of publicizing the event and trying to lure into it the twenty thousand needed to appease the unoccupied-seat counters. In 1962, the Conservative Party, alone among the political parties, rented the Garden. In 1965, none of the Mayoralty candidates did. The Garden, as a matter of incidental intelligence, rents for ten thousand dollars per night.

13. 118,768 was the original figure reported the day after the election. The final count, however, was 141,000.

14. Which Governor Rockefeller denounced, on July 14, 1963, in the most sundering terms, as “every bit as dangerous to American principles and American institutions as the radical left”—a thunderbolt he did not trouble to direct only at supporters of, let us say, Robert Welch, but at supporters, in general, of Senator Goldwater. The conservatives, Rockefeller went on, “utterly reject the fundamental principles of our heritage,” and desire to “subvert the Republican Party itself.” Perhaps overcome by the general momentum, he went on to anathematize, while he was at it, the Kennedy Administration as responsible for the “unprincipled opportunism [that] has captured the Democratic Party.”

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