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Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: Notes

Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma
Notes

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Notes

table of contents
  1. List of Illustrations
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Introduction
  4. Part One: Striving for a Civil Rights–Era Party of Lincoln, 1958–1962
    1. 1. New York’s Shaky Liberal Racial Consensus
    2. 2. The Life of the Party
    3. 3. Limited Victories and Harmful Concessions
  5. Part Two: Hollowing Out the Party of Lincoln, 1963–1966
    1. 4. A Fruitless Defense
    2. 5. The Denunciation of Rockefeller Republicanism
    3. 6. Law and Order as “Enlightened Liberalism”
  6. Part Three: In the Absence of the Party of Lincoln, 1968–1975
    1. 7. Rockefeller Republicanism’s Last Gasp
    2. 8. The Twilight of Rockefeller-Era New York
    3. 9. Rockefeller Unmoored
  7. Epilogue
  8. Notes
  9. Bibliography
  10. Index

NOTES

Introduction

  1. 1. Early in his career, Rockefeller embraced organizations like the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he learned in the late 1950s that the former’s local New York chapters had grown tired of the symbolic victories Rockefeller so often offered. The examination of Rockefeller’s interaction with the civil rights movement and ultimate rejection of its objectives in New York, particularly in areas such as housing, criminal justice, redistributive policies, and welfare rights, is informed by scholarship on the civil rights and Black Power movements. Historian Martha Biondi writes that “the early civil rights movement in New York is the story of Jackie Robinson to Paul Robeson to Malcolm X, a trajectory from integrationist optimism to Black nationalist critique, with a flourishing African American left at its center.” As governor, Rockefeller would disappoint adherents from each of these groups as he struggled, and eventually refused, to meet the demands of, and his promises to, Black activists looking to end inequality in the North. Martha Biondi, “How New York Changes the Story of the Civil Rights Movement,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 31, no. 2 (July 2007): 15; Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (New York: Brandywine Press, 2000); Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Black Power and Civil Rights in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 265–288; Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009): 751–776; Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

  2. 2. Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Intellectual Properties Management in association Warner Books, 1998), 187–204.

  3. 3. Histories of modern US conservatism examine the activism of elected officials, populist movements, Christian evangelicals, and conservative business leaders, among many others, with a particular emphasis on the Sun Belt. For example, Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); Edward H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Matthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (New York: Basic Books, 2022); Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jonathan Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2011).

  4. 4. Although the majority of histories about the Republican Party after 1960 focus on the conservative elements that eventually dominated the modern party, there are exceptions such as studies on African American Republicans. Examples include Devin Fergus, “Black Power, Soft Power: Floyd McKissick, Soul City, and the Death of Moderate Black Republicanism,” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 2 (2010): 148–192; Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Joshua D. Farrington, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); David Hamilton Golland, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019).

  5. 5. James F. Clarity, “Jacob Javits Dies in Florida at 82,” New York Times, March 8, 1986; Geoffrey Kabaservice, “On Principle: A Progressive Republican,” in Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream, ed. Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 50.

  6. 6. Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 522–550; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 551–578; Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Stacie Taranto, Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). For books on efforts to end racial inequality in the North as a significant branch of the civil rights movement, see Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); Brett V. Gadsden, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Jason Sokol, All Eyes are upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

  7. 7. Rockefeller had a well-established record for supporting, both rhetorically and financially, civil rights causes. He hosted King at his home and worked with him on numerous occasions to galvanize northern support for the civil rights leader’s activism. Rockefeller also advocated for antidiscrimination laws in New York that were initially opposed by some Republican leaders in the New York legislature. King, 1960–1970, Folder 180, J.2 George L. Hinman Files, Nelson A. Rockefeller Paper (NAR), Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC); Human Rights Alabama-Georgia, 1965–1970, Folders 232–233, 21.2 Hugh Morrow Series, NAR, RAC; Warren Weaver Jr., “Rebuffed by G.O.P.,” New York Times, April 1, 1960.

  8. 8. Accounts of Rockefeller’s confrontations with the national Republican Party in 1960 and 1964 can be found in works such as Laura Jane Gifford, The Center Cannot Hold: The 1960 Presidential Election and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009) and Nancy Beck Young, Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). Rockefeller has been the subject of a number of biographies, including the treatment of his personal and professional life by Richard Norton Smith, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Random House, 2014); Michael Kramer and Sam Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President of Anything!”: An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Joseph E. Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908–1958 (New York: Doubleday, 1996).

  9. 9. In addition to his record on drug policy, historian Heather Ann Thompson has written about Rockefeller’s role in the retaking of Attica Correctional Facility on September 13, 1971. Thompson’s work highlights the ways in which Rockefeller’s disregard for prisons and the welfare of prisoners fit within a larger history of poor treatment of prisoners and the resultant prisoner rights movement. Historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, for example, looks at this period in Rockefeller’s career to reveal a bipartisan effort to adopt politically advantageous punitive policies that pitted Americans against one another and advanced the idea that government could not provide “social and material security to all citizens.” Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 6–7. Additional works that focus on Rockefeller’s drug policies in the 1970s include Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “ ‘The Attila the Hun Law’: New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 71–95; Jessica Neptune, “Harshest in the Nation: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Widening Embrace of Punitive Politics,” Social History of Alcohol & Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26, no. 1 (June 2012): 170–191; Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Stuart Schrader, “A Carceral Empire: Placing the Political History of U.S. Prisons and Policing in the World,” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 289–316.

  10. 10. Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice asserts that progressive Republicans in the mid-twentieth century descended from the progressive Republicans who left the Republican Party for Roosevelt’s progressive party in 1912, whereas moderates descended from those who stayed in the Republican Party. According to Kabaservice, moderates were figures like Thomas Dewey, whom he describes as a fiscal conservative, and Dwight Eisenhower, whereas progressives were people such as Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and Nelson Rockefeller. Kabaservice, “On Principle,” 31–33.

  11. 11. Barry K. Beyer, Thomas E. Dewey: A Study in Political Leadership, 1937–1947 (New York: Garland, 1979), 243–250; Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 30–31, 334.

  12. 12. According to David L. Stebenne, Eisenhower and his adviser Arthur Larson were the architects and practitioners of a midwestern form of moderate or modern Republicanism, as Larson called it, that was influential in the 1950s and reflective of the political consensus in the Midwest. Two synthetic works on moderate Republicanism are by political scientist Nicol C. Rae and historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, which were published in 1989 and 2012, respectively. Rae’s work begins by exploring moderates’ domination of presidential politics in the Republican Party and then their failure to unite and strategize in an effort to counter the rise of conservatives. Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin is the only history of moderate Republicanism that spans the 1960s to the 2010s and traces the efforts of moderates to counteract New Right conservatism in the 1960s and the range of factors that led to their declining numbers in the 1970s and their virtual expulsion from the party after 1980. More recently, Kristoffer Smemo has argued that liberal Republicanism was the result of compromise politics practiced by Republicans who believed it was their only path to electoral viability at the height of the New Deal order. The majority of work on moderate Republicanism is dominated by biographies or studies of individual moderates and their influence on the Republican Party such as Margaret Chase Smith, Wendell Willkie, and Arthur Larson. David L. Stebenne, Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), ix–x; Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans, from 1952 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kristoffer Smemo, “The Making of ‘Liberal’ Republicans During the New Deal Order,” in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, ed. Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 54–70; Janann Sherman, No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order (New York: Liveright, 2018).

  13. 13. Historians of modern conservatism and the Republican Party tend to present Rockefeller as the antithesis of the conservative activists of the 1960s largely because they typically only address his involvement in national politics between 1960 and 1964. Although these authors are correct to conclude that Rockefeller was left of many mainstream Republicans, referring to him as a liberal or in the terms used by conservatives can obscure the nuances in his politics. Some historians of the right, however, do present a more nuanced portrayal of Rockefeller. Mary C. Brennan, for example, refers to Rockefeller as a “pragmatic liberal” while observing that in 1960, he “provided the Right with the ‘villain’ necessary to mobilize the conservative faithful.” Brennan notes that after Nixon’s defeat in 1960, Rockefeller attempted to find common ground with Goldwater and reasons that this was possible because of Rockefeller’s pragmatism and conservative foreign policy views. Critchlow notes that Rockefeller attempted to gain the support of conservatives during his bid for the 1964 presidential nomination by attacking President Kennedy’s proposal for a new federal department of urban affairs and denouncing the nuclear test ban treaty. One exception appears in Lewis L. Gould’s history of the Republican Party where he describes Rockefeller as “tend[ing] to be conservative except on civil rights.” Nancy Beck Young also provides a nuanced account of Rockefeller’s political ideology during his bid for the 1964 presidential nomination, but the book’s scope is limited to 1964. Joseph Crespino, “Goldwater in Dixie: Race, Region, and the Rise of the Right,” in Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape, ed. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 150; Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 66; Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 138; Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 227; Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties, 52; Critchlow, Conservative Ascendancy, 66; Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of Republicans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 351; Young, Two Suns of the Southwest, 58–59.

  14. 14. Conservatives were not alone in identifying “Rockefeller Republicanism” as early as 1960. The Minneapolis Tribune reported that James Malcolm Williams, a local Republican who sought to challenge US senator Hubert Humphrey, identified himself as a “Rockefeller Republican.” “The Seaboard Sect,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1960; John C. McDonald, “Minnesotans Start Filing for Primary Election,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 16, 1960.

  15. 15. By 1961, frustration grew so intense among some conservative Republicans that they founded the New York Conservative Party to counter the authority of moderates who they believed unfairly dominated the state party. For a history of the Conservative Party of New York, see Timothy J. Sullivan, New York and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: Redrawing Party Lines (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).

  16. 16. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Harper Perennial Political Classics, 2009), 198; Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 315–316; “Delegates Cool to Nixon Tactics,” Globe and Mail, July 26, 1980.

  17. 17. Carol Anderson has shown that Cold War politics and anti-communism limited the scope of African American activism to a narrow focus on civil rights, rather than human rights, because of accusations that demanding more was un-American and socialist. Thomas Borstelmann explores the ways in which the global struggle for racial equality and self-determination influenced US foreign and domestic policy. Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  18. 18. In his history of New Deal liberalism, Alan Brinkley identifies “rights-based liberalism” as the liberalism that emerged after the New Deal with an emphasis on “increasing the rights and freedoms of individuals and social groups. It has sought to extend civil rights to minorities, women, and other previously excluded from the mainstream of American life.” Rockefeller embraced “rights-based liberalism,” which I consider racial liberalism to be a part. I refer to Rockefeller as a “racial liberal,” however, to reflect the centrality of his emphasis on racial equality to his expression of Republicanism and to draw a distinction between Rockefeller’s views on race and his overall approach to politics, which was more heterogenous. More specifically, racial liberalism is a postwar phenomenon that forwards the idea that barriers to racial minorities’ full participation in society were a corruption of American ideals and must be dismantled in favor of integration and access to equal opportunities for all. Scholars have referred to racial liberalism by numerous different terms such as “color-blind liberalism,” which David Carroll Cochran defines as the belief that “people should be free to live their own lives as they individually choose with no restrictions or barriers raised against them because of their race” and that any impediments to that freedom, such as segregation and discrimination, “should be eliminated.” Eric Schickler argues that the term “racial liberalism” is a relative term that changes over time in response to the demands of civil rights activists. In the early 1960s, Rockefeller was in line with the priorities of the civil rights movement, but that would change in the latter half of the 1960s, at least publicly, as activists prioritized issues such as busing, welfare rights, and criminal justice reform. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995), 10; Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3, 212; Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2, 287; David Carroll Cochran, The Color of Freedom: Race and Contemporary American Liberalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 2–3.

  19. 19. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 14–16, 176–177; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1–10; Robert Allen Rutland, The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 1–79; Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 22–28, 167–170.

  20. 20. John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 207–210, 211–219; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999); C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  21. 21. In 1945, Taft introduced a bill to create a federal fair employment practices commission to counteract discrimination against African Americans but disappointed groups like the NAACP because of his refusal to support measures to ensure enforcement was compulsory. Gould, Grand Old Party, 264–348; Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 139–169, 193–220; Timothy N. Thurber, Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945–1974 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 6–11.

  22. 22. James E. Underwood and William J. Daniel, Governor Rockefeller in New York: The Apex of Pragmatic Liberalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982); Gerald Benjamin and T. Norman Hurd, eds., Rockefeller in Retrospect: The Governor’s New York Legacy (Albany, NY: Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, 1984); Nicholas Dagen Bloom, How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

  23. 23. New York State, Governor, Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 53rd Governor (Albany: New York State Government Documents, 1959), 14.

  24. 24. For more on Chicago’s history of de facto segregation and discrimination, see Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 15–53.

  25. 25. John E. Lockwood warned Rockefeller about focusing on domestic problems. “Rocky Views a ‘Candidate,’ ” New York Journal American, May 2, 1960; Speeches, April 22, 1960–June 21, 1960, folder 150, Series 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  26. 26. George L. Hinman Memo to Nelson Rockefeller, December 11, 1961, folder 640, J.2 Politics-George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC.

  27. 27. Rockefeller contacted the attorney general’s office again in July 1962 when King and Ralph Abernathy decided to serve their forty-five-day sentence for their protest in Albany the previous December. The press reported that Rockefeller urged the attorney general “to assure the physical safety of Dr. King and his companions.” The anticlimactic end of the Albany movement was due, in part, to strategic disagreements between the civil rights organizations that had coalesced to end disenfranchisement, job discrimination, segregation, and police brutality in Albany. Participants and contemporary observers labeled the Albany movement an embarrassing failure for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council because it did not produce tangible gains, but it illustrates the type of private actions Rockefeller took in this era to aid King and other civil rights causes in the South. For more on the Albany movement, see David Levering Lewis, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Promise of Nonviolent Populism,” in Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 277–303; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 86–91, 100–106; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 601–632; King, Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 151–169. Hugh Morrow Memo to Nelson Rockefeller, December 19, 1961, folder 180, J.2 Politics-George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC; Cary Reich Interview with Wyatt Tee Walker, circa early 1990s, folder 303, Cary Reich Papers (CRP), RAC.

  28. 28. Robert Douglas Memo to George Hinman, December 21, 1961, folder 180, J.2 Politics-George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC.

  29. 29. Robert Douglas Memo to George Hinman, December 21, 1961, folder 180, J.2 Politics-George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC.

  30. 30. Emmet John Hughes Testimony during the Senate Hearings on the Rockefeller Nomination, 11/18/1974, folder “Senate Hearings Transcript,” box 97, Edward Hutchinson Papers, Gerald R. Ford Library.

  31. 31. Clayton Knowles, “Kennedy Breaking Pledges on Rights, Rockefeller Says,” Atlanta Constitution, February 16, 1962; Charles N. Quinn, “Rockefeller Says JFK Does ‘Nothing’ on Rights,” Washington Post, February 16, 1962; “Kennedy Rapped by Rockefeller on Civil Rights,” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1962; “Rockefeller Assails JFK on Civil Rights,” St. Petersburg Times, February 16, 1962.

  32. 32. “Rocky Hits Demo Lag on Rights,” Austin American Statesman, February 16, 1962.

  33. 33. Doris Fleeson, “Rockefeller Words Strain His Relations with Javits,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, February 7, 1962; Jack Bell, “Some Republicans Delving into Soul-Searching of Party Aims,” Austin American Statesman, February 13, 1962.

1. New York’s Shaky Liberal Racial Consensus

  1. 1. Rockefeller resigned from his position in the Eisenhower administration on December 31, 1955. Marquis Childs, “Why Rockefeller May Seek Office,” Washington Post, March 3, 1958.

  2. 2. J. P. McFadden, “The Royal Road to Albany: When a Rockefeller Needs a Friend,” National Review, August 2, 1958, 107.

  3. 3. Laura Spelman was a charter member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Her family opened their home to numerous slaves from Tennessee and Kentucky, including Harriet Tubman who is said to have spent several days with them. Florence Matilda Read, The Story of Spelman College (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 175–176; Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 69, 89–90.

  4. 4. Gould, Grand Old Party, 78–113.

  5. 5. Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich: A Leader in American Politics (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), 14–20; Lewis L. Gould, The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 19–24; Chernow, Titan, 352; Richardson, To Make Men Free, 160–162, 165–166.

  6. 6. Letter from Nelson Rockefeller to John D. Rockefeller Jr., May 1937, folder 376, H Family and Friends, NAR, RAC; Letter from John D. Rockefeller Jr. to Nelson Rockefeller, May 12, 1937, folder 1563, A File: Trips, NAR, RAC.

  7. 7. Darlene Rivas, Missionary Capitalist: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 2–3, 10–11.

  8. 8. Rockefeller expressed views similar to business leaders whom Richard E. Holl refers to as “corporate liberals” who cooperated with Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda as the nation prepared for war. “Nelson Rockefeller Lectures Standard Oil on Social Responsibility, 1937,” in Major Problems in American History, Volume 2: Since 1865, ed. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman and Jon Gjerde (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 199; Joe Alex Morris, Nelson Rockefeller: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1960), 114–116; Reich, Life of Nelson Rockefeller, 167–169; Richard E. Holl, From the Boardroom to the War Room: America’s Corporate Liberals and FDR’s Preparedness Program (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005).

  9. 9. Rockefeller was appointed the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in July 1941, folder 76, O 1940–1970, NAR, RAC.

  10. 10. Reich, Life of Nelson Rockefeller, 175–187; “Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller: A Biographical Chronology,” RAC, accessed February 14, 2018, http://rockarch.org/bio/narchron.pdf.

  11. 11. Reich, Life of Nelson Rockefeller, 313.

  12. 12. Letter from the White House, March 31, 1945, folder 76, O 1940–1970, NAR, RAC.

  13. 13. Frank Gervasi, The Real Rockefeller: The Story of the Rise, Decline and Resurgence of the Presidential Aspirations of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 170–172.

  14. 14. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 689.

  15. 15. Joseph H. Boyd Jr. and Charles R. Holcomb, Oreos & Dubonnet: Remembering Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 34.

  16. 16. William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 35; Jules Witcover, Party of the People: A History of the Democrats (New York: Random House, 2003), 352, 356, 399, 423–424.

  17. 17. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 688–689.

  18. 18. Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), xxi, xxiii–xxiv.

  19. 19. Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Prospect for America, 328–332, 380–385, 465.

  20. 20. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 665–666; McFadden, “The Royal Road to Albany.”

  21. 21. David F. Freeman, a lawyer by training who had worked for foundations since 1950 when he joined the Ford Foundation, began working at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in March 1958. Rockefeller’s aides adapted Freeman’s report into a staff paper dated April 23, 1958. Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  22. 22. Twenty-one other states considered similar laws during the 1945 legislative session where New York passed the law. Ultimately, only New York, New Jersey, and Wisconsin were able to pass legislation eliminating discrimination based on race, creed, color, and national origin. According to Elmer A. Carter, who was one of the first commissioners and an African American Republican, New York’s law instituted the harshest penalties and was the most comprehensive. Elmer A. Carter, “Fighting Prejudice with Law,” Journal of Educational Sociology 19, no. 5 (January 1946): 299–306.

  23. 23. Edward N. Saveth, “Fair Educational Practices Legislation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 275 (May 1951): 41–46; “Dewey Approves College Bias Ban,” New York Times, April 6, 1948.

  24. 24. “Anti-bias Measure Signed by Dewey,” New York Times, March 30, 1952; Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  25. 25. Frieda Wunderlich, “New York’s Antidiscrimination Law,” Social Research 17, no. 2 (June 1950): 219–247.

  26. 26. Brian Purnell, “Desegregating the Jim Crow North: Racial Discrimination in the Postwar Bronx and the Fight to Integrate the Castle Hill Beach Club (1953–1973),” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 33, no. 2 (July 2009): 47–78; A. Scott Henderson, Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 161–163.

  27. 27. Since 1945, Jews reported 12 percent of the complaints. Of those reports, 86 percent involved employment, while 85 percent occurred within New York City. Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  28. 28. Warren Weaver Jr., “Harriman Vetoes G.O.P. Rights Bill,” New York Times, April 26, 1957.

  29. 29. “State G.O.P. Asks Bureau on Rights,” New York Times, February 27, 1957; “Abrams, NAACP Hit New Right Bureau,” New York Amsterdam News, March 9, 1957.

  30. 30. “Harriman Names 2 to Anti-Bias Panel,” New York Times, July 18, 1957.

  31. 31. Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  32. 32. Historian Touré F. Reed notes that John D. Rockefeller Jr. became a donor to the National Urban League in 1924 when it launched a new program to encourage African Americans’ participation in industrial occupations. Initially, the Urban League intended for this effort to include encouraging Blacks’ participation in labor unions, but Rockefeller opposed this idea and encouraged a focus on job placement instead. Touré F. Reed, Not Aims but Opportunity: The Urban League & the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 83–86; Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban League, 1910–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

  33. 33. Rockefeller spoke before the Star of Bethlehem Grand Chapter, Order of Eastern Star at Riverside Church. His father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was a major donor and founder of the church. “Rockefeller Would Rush Civil Rights,” New York Herald Tribune, May 19, 1958; “Nelson Rockefeller Calls for Rights,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 20, 1958.

  34. 34. Truman appointed Rockefeller chairman of the International Development Advisory Board in 1950. The board was intended to offer advice for the implementation of Truman’s Point Four foreign policy initiative to provide economic aid to developing nations as a means to prevent the spread of communism. Point Four had sparked controversy in Washington among Democrats and Republicans because of the cost, and as a result, its budget was reduced. When Truman first proposed Point Four, Robert Taft, for example, criticized the program as a “global WPA [Works Progress Administration]” and an “international boondoggle.” Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 445–449, 452–454.

  35. 35. Samuel Lubell to Frank Jamieson, August 8, 1956, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  36. 36. Lubell completed similar public opinion studies the previous year in Michigan and California for a series in the Saturday Evening Post.

  37. 37. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  38. 38. Lubell’s findings are consistent with numerous histories of race, racism, and opposition to the civil rights movement in the North. For example, Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” 522–550; Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” 551–578; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty; Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Fight for School Integration in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism; Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, eds., The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

  39. 39. The number of Blacks in the Bronx and Brooklyn jumped from 312,000 to 545,000 in the same period.

  40. 40. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC; Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 141–161.

  41. 41. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  42. 42. “New York’s Non-Whites,” New York Times, November 20, 1957.

  43. 43. Housing segregation and discriminatory practices such as restrictive covenants had long frustrated African Americans outside of the South and inspired activist movements. Urban Black communities experienced an acute housing crisis dating back to the 1940s. The NAACP launched its first legal campaign to end restrictive covenants in the 1920s, for example. Jeffrey D. Gonda, Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 5, 21–33; Arnold Hirsch, “With or Without Jim Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United States,” in Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 65–99. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  44. 44. Kenneth T. Jackson found that by 1960, not one of Levittown’s 82,000 residents were African American. Milton Klein, ed., The Empire State: A History of New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 634; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 241.

  45. 45. The data in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund report were provided by the US Census and the New York State Commission Against Discrimination’s Division of Research. Data released publicly by SCAD in 1957 noted that the decline of whites in the Greater New York area was despite the fact that 90 percent of Puerto Ricans, a growing community in the region, was considered white in its data. Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC; “New York’s Non-Whites,” New York Times, November 20, 1957.

  46. 46. A discussion of suburban communities’ use of zoning to extract resources from central cities can be found in Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, 242–245.

  47. 47. Peter Eisenstadt, “Rochdale Village and the Rise and Fall of Integrated Housing in New York City,” in Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era, ed. Clarence Taylor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 77–117.

  48. 48. The data were provided by the US Census and the New York State Commission Against Discrimination’s Division of Research. Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  49. 49. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 79.

  50. 50. By 1960, the African American population totaled over 1 million and Puerto Ricans constituted more than half a million, together making 22 percent of the city’s population. Klein, The Empire State, 629–631; Frederick Douglas Opie, Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 9–12.

  51. 51. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  52. 52. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  53. 53. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  54. 54. Thomas Dewey signed the 1945 Ives-Quinn Anti-Discrimination Bill, which forbade bias in employment in New York. Irving Ives, who was a member of the New York Assembly and went on to become a US senator from New York in 1947, was the Republican cosponsor of the bill. Klein, The Empire State, 626.

  55. 55. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  56. 56. For an extended treatment of the New Deal’s racially discriminatory policies, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005); Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), xvi; Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  57. 57. Chernow, Titan, 237–242.

  58. 58. Chernow, Titan, xix–xxi; Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1976), 59–65.

  59. 59. Spelman Seminary, originally named Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, was renamed Spelman College in 1924. Read, Story of Spelman College, 179–180.

  60. 60. Education historian James D. Anderson notes that although Tuskegee and Hampton were associated with industrial education, their primary purpose was the education of teachers. Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 154–155; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 33–34.

  61. 61. Norrell, Up from History, 3–9, 153; Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 130.

  62. 62. Historian Natalie J. Ring explains that northern philanthropists’ interest in the South was to solve the “southern problem,” which identified the South as being remarkable for its intellectual backwardness, poverty, disease, and distinctiveness. Although some at the turn of the twentieth century would argue that the most significant problem for the South was its Black population, distinctiveness could also refer to the large presence of uneducated poor whites. Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 177, 3–4, 33, 60; Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 36, 273, 86, 134.

  63. 63. General Education Board, The General Education Board: An Account of Its Activities, 1902–1914 (New York: General Education Board, 1916), 155–157, 203; Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 7, 23.

  64. 64. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  65. 65. Economist Michael French notes that between 1948 and 1973, the national income averaged a 3.7 percent per annum increase, while the recession of 1957–1958 was the worst in the postwar period, similar to the other recessions in this period (1948–1949, 1953–1954, 1960–1961, and 1970) when the nation’s growth rate decreased but national output and income remained steady. Michael French, US Economic History since 1945 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 39; Richard W. Gable, “The Politics and Economics of the 1957–1958 Recession,” Western Political Quarterly 12, no. 2 (June 1959): 557–559.

  66. 66. Gable, “The Politics and Economics of the 1957–1958 Recession,” 557–559.

  67. 67. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  68. 68. Commissioned Survey by Samuel Lubell, 1958, folder 477, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  69. 69. Jamieson, who had been a devoted Rockefeller staffer since 1944, was reported to be one of Rockefeller’s advisers who advised him not to run against Nixon in 1959. He died in 1960, at the age of fifty-five, a few months after receiving treatment for lung cancer. “F. A. Jamieson Dies; Rockefeller Aide,” New York Times, January 31, 1960.

  70. 70. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 687.

  71. 71. In 1955, New York outlawed discrimination in housing built with federal assistance but did not empower any agency to enforce the law. The following year, the legislature passed a bill that authorized SCAD to enforce the law that banned religious and racial discrimination. Edwin Holden, “Budget Increase for State’s Bias Board Beaten,” New York Herald Tribune, March 24, 1956; Warren Weaver Jr., “Housing Bias Bill Gains in Albany,” New York Times, February 29, 1956; “Summary of State Legislature’s Actions on Major Bills,” New York Times, March 25, 1956.

  72. 72. Holden, “Budget Increase for State’s Bias Board Beaten”; James H. Scheuer, “Funds Needed to Fight Discrimination,” New York Herald Tribune, March 31, 1956.

  73. 73. Memorandum on Anti-Discrimination Measures in New York State, April 23, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  74. 74. Holden, “Budget Increase for State’s Bias Board Beaten.”

2. The Life of the Party

  1. 1. Jo-Ann Price, “Alcorn Asks Women’s Aid in State,” New York Herald Tribune, June 28, 1957; Gervasi, The Real Rockefeller, 208.

  2. 2. Stewart Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 107.

  3. 3. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 674; Smith, On His Own Terms, 267–273.

  4. 4. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 757–758.

  5. 5. Rockefeller and Wilson appeared at the annual dinner of the Westchester Republican County Committee held on January 30, 1958. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 198; “Rockefeller to Speak at Republican Dinner,” New York Herald Tribune, January 16, 1958.

  6. 6. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 198; Hugh Morrow Interview of Malcolm Wilson, October 10, 1979, folder 24, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  7. 7. James Desmond, “GOP Contenders Rate Upstate as Crucial to Governor Quest,” Sunday News, June 29, 1958.

  8. 8. According to Rockefeller’s financial disclosures in 1974, he paid state and local Republican organizations in New York $2,447 in 1958, including $1,000 to the Westchester Republican County Committee, which was overseen by Gerlach. The same filings revealed that in 1957, Rockefeller contributed political gifts totaling $8,400 to state and local Republican organizations. The Westchester County committee received $1,500. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Rules and Administration, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to Be Vice President of the United States, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1974), 480; Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 198; Smith, On His Own Terms, 279.

  9. 9. Hugh Morrow Interview of Steven C. Rockefeller, June 27, 1980, revised March 2, 2005, folder 48, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  10. 10. “Nelson Rockefeller Enjoying His First Campaign,” Herald Statesman, July 23, 1958; Woodie Fitchette, “Candidate Makes Friends, Draws Applause from Crowd,” Binghamton Press Writer, August 2, 1958.

  11. 11. James Desmond, “Nelson Rockefeller Accepts ‘Challenge’ to Run for Gov.,” Daily News, July 1, 1958.

  12. 12. “Leader of the Young Guard G.O.P.: Lyman Judson Morhouse,” New York Times, August 25, 1958, 14; Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 668–669.

  13. 13. Journalist and editor Stewart Alsop claimed that the polls were “purely political in purpose and effect” and funded by Rockefeller to “persuade the upstate leaders not to commit themselves prematurely.” Rockefeller biographer Cary Reich states that there is no evidence of this to be true. Although Hall believed the Morhouse polls were fabricated, I have not found conclusive proof linking Rockefeller to these polls. Morhouse, like Rockefeller, was a student of the opinion poll and an advocate for their use in winning elections since 1954. “Hall Steps Up Drive to Check Rockefeller,” New York Post, July 14, 1958; Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller, 108; Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 698; Warren Weaver Jr., “G.O.P. Chiefs Bid Party Pick Slate,” New York Times, October 20, 1957.

  14. 14. Eric Pace, “Paul W. Williams, 94, U.S. Attorney, Is Dead,” New York Times, August 7, 1997.

  15. 15. Gervasi, The Real Rockefeller, 212.

  16. 16. Memorandum from Francis A. Jamieson to Nelson Rockefeller, April 3, 1958, folder 678, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  17. 17. Gervasi, The Real Rockefeller, 214.

  18. 18. Nelson A. Rockefeller Candidacy Announcement, folder 1397, Activities, NAR, RAC.

  19. 19. Statement by Nelson A. Rockefeller, folder 1397, Activities, NAR, RAC.

  20. 20. John G. Rogers, “Williams Releases 81 Votes to Rockefeller,” New York Herald Tribune, July 12, 1958.

  21. 21. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 718.

  22. 22. Douglas Dales, “Mahoney Enters Republican Race,” New York Times, July 19, 1958.

  23. 23. Fulton Lewis Jr. “Capital Report: Rockefeller—Long Shot for Governor,” New York Mirror, June 23, 1958.

  24. 24. Nelson A. Rockefeller Nomination Acceptance Speech, folder 1402, Activities, NAR, RAC.

  25. 25. Republican State Platform, 1958, folder 394, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  26. 26. “Rockefeller Hailed in Colorful Uproar by G.O.P. Delegates,” New York Times, August 26, 1958.

  27. 27. The Chicago Defender reported that Hampton became an avid supporter of Rockefeller after meeting him at an upstate party. “GOP Convention Sidelights,” New York Amsterdam News, August 30, 1958; Lee Blackwell, “Off the Record,” Chicago Defender, August 19, 1958.

  28. 28. Harold C. Burton, an assembly district leader in Harlem for at least thirty years, became active in the Republican Party when he campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt. James Booker, “Put Negro on State Ticket, Says Burton,” New York Amsterdam News, May 3, 1958; “Harold Burton, a G.O.P. Leader,” New York Times, July 24, 1971.

  29. 29. James Booker, “Harlem Republicans All Like Rockefeller,” New York Amsterdam News, July 12, 1958.

  30. 30. “Rockefeller Group Opens Permanent Office,” New York Amsterdam News, August 9, 1958; “Rockefeller Chances High,” New York Amsterdam News, August 23, 1958.

  31. 31. Marquis Childs, “Rockefeller Is Political Miracle,” Washington Post, August 26, 1958.

  32. 32. W. H. Lawrence, “Eisenhower Opens a Boom for Hall as ’58 Governor,” New York Times, March 8, 1957.

  33. 33. Charles N. Quinn, “Rockefeller Challenged to a Debate by Hall,” New York Herald Tribune, July 1, 1958.

  34. 34. “Rockefeller Enters Race for Governor: Attacks Rule by Harriman,” New York World Telegram and Sun, June 30, 1958.

  35. 35. “Nelson Rockefeller Candidacy Welcome,” Albany Knickerbocker News, July 2, 1958.

  36. 36. “Rockefeller’s Creampuff Bid Is a Bust: Hall,” Daily News, July 28, 1958; “Hall Steps Up Drive to Check Rockefeller”; “Rockefeller’s Creampuff Bid.”

  37. 37. “Rockefeller Begins to Answer Hall Jibes,” World Telegram & Sun, July 30, 1958.

  38. 38. George Wheeler and Stan Asimov, “Hall Blasts Nelson’s ‘Cream-Puff’ Fight,” Newsday, July 28, 1958; “The State Elections,” Newsday, June 10, 1958.

  39. 39. J. P. McFadden, “The Royal Road to Albany: When a Rockefeller Needs a Friend,” National Review, August 2, 1958, 105, 107.

  40. 40. George C. Connelly, “New York’s Upstate Republicans Find Nelson Rockefeller Hard to Swallow,” Berkshire Eagle, August 25, 1958.

  41. 41. Warren Weaver Jr., “State G.O.P. Split over Relief Curb,” New York Times, August 20, 1958.

  42. 42. “Relief Plank Out of G.O.P. Platform,” New York Times, August 26, 1958.

  43. 43. Weaver, “State G.O.P. Split over Relief Curb.”

  44. 44. Warren Weaver Jr., “G.O.P. Platform Mirrors Dewey,” New York Times, September 23, 1954.

  45. 45. “Truman Tells Rockefeller’s Only Fault,” New York Herald Tribune, September 19, 1958.

  46. 46. Alan L. Otten, “Rockefeller’s Rise,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 1958; Otten, “Rockefeller’s Rise”; Gallup Poll (AIPO), September 1958, retrieved February 9, 2013 from the iPOLL Databank, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html; Roper Commercial Survey, October 1958, retrieved February 9, 2013 from the iPOLL Databank, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html; Gallup Poll (AIPO), November 1958, retrieved February 9, 2013 from the iPOLL Databank, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html.

  47. 47. Gould, Grand Old Party, 342–343.

  48. 48. “Strange Political Islands,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 1958.

  49. 49. The Rockefellers contributed to the Metropolitan Opera House, the Philharmonic Orchestra, Fordham University, and the Ballet Theater, which were all elements of Lincoln Square. Drew Pearson, “Hard to Defeat Billion and Smile,” Washington Post, November 1, 1958; Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 60–61.

  50. 50. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 741.

  51. 51. “Blintzing the Issues,” Washington Post, October 26, 1958.

  52. 52. Leo Egan, “Survey of State Sees Rockefeller and Hogan Ahead,” New York Times, October 26, 1958.

  53. 53. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 747.

  54. 54. Leo Egan, “Issues as Voters See Them,” New York Times, October 26, 1958.

  55. 55. The previous record of 5,473,048 was set in 1950 when Thomas Dewey defeated Walter A. Lynch. “Rockefeller Tells Victory Party He Has ‘Deep Sense of Humility,’ ” New York Times, November 5, 1958; Leo Egan, “Upheaval Looms in State Politics,” New York Times, November 6, 1958.

  56. 56. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 766.

  57. 57. While Rockefeller was in office, state finance laws restricted primary candidates to a ten-cent-per-voter expenditure, but this rule could be circumvented by borrowing or creating numerous campaign committees because each one was allowed to contribute up to that ten-cent-per-voter limit. In 1974, Rockefeller disclosed to Congress that his first campaign cost $1.7 million. Robert A. Diamond and Stanley N. Wellborn, eds., Dollar Politics: The Issue of Campaign Spending (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1974), 44, 1; US Congress, Senate, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 554.

  58. 58. In 1942, Dewey carried some Black voting districts when he advocated a state fair employment practices law. Layhmond Robinson, “Minorities Moved in G.O.P. Direction,” New York Times, November 6, 1958.

  59. 59. James Desmond, Nelson Rockefeller: A Political Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 186.

  60. 60. Desmond, Nelson Rockefeller, 193.

  61. 61. Roscoe Drummond, “Meaning of the Election,” Washington Post, November 8, 1958.

  62. 62. “Transcript of the President’s News Conference on Domestic and Foreign Matters,” New York Times, November 6, 1958.

  63. 63. Historian David L. Stebenne asserts that Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union Address was “something of a last hurrah” for the president’s embrace of modern Republicanism, noting that the Eisenhower administration began adopting more conservative positions on economic policy and spending on domestic programs in particular, beginning with that year’s annual budget message. “Transcript of the President’s News Conference on Domestic and Foreign Matters,” New York Times, November 6, 1958; Stebenne, Modern Republican, 216–220.

  64. 64. Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Knopf, 2010), 370–371, 419–425.

  65. 65. Russell Baker, “Senate Vote Hits G.O.P. Right Wing,” New York Times, November 6, 1958; “The G.O.P. Wasn’t Pushed—It Jumped: Rockefeller’s Win Is a Last Warning against Dull Candidates and No Leadership,” Life, November 17, 1958; “William F. Knowland Is Apparent Suicide; Ex-Senator Was 65,” New York Times, February 24, 1974.

  66. 66. “The G.O.P. Wasn’t Pushed.”

  67. 67. Gladwin Hill, “Goldwater Wins in Arizona Race,” New York Times, November 5, 1958.

  68. 68. Milton Bracker, “Rockefeller a Hit in Spanish Speech,” New York Times, October 25, 1958.

  69. 69. “Rockefeller Hoisted Up on Shoulders of Crowd,” New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1958.

  70. 70. Reich, Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 752.

  71. 71. Charles N. Quinn, “Harriman, Rockefeller Share Dais,” New York Herald Tribune, September 15, 1958; James Booker, “Ave, Rocky Join King in Harlem Fri.,” New York Amsterdam News, September 20, 1958.

  72. 72. “Harriman, Rockefeller in Harlem,” New York Herald Tribune, September 20, 1958.

  73. 73. Perkins and Rockefeller, the latter as under secretary, served under Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby. During the campaign, he served as director of research for Rockefeller. “Precocious Counsel: Roswell Burchard Perkins,” New York Times, November 29, 1958.

  74. 74. Memorandum on Civil Rights by R. B. Perkins, September 13, 1958, folder 138, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  75. 75. “Harriman Assails Rockefeller’s Campaign as ‘Fraudulent,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, October 26, 1958; “Harriman Says Rival Is ‘Fraud,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, October 10, 1958; Martin G. Berck, “Harriman Says Rivals Are Split,” New York Herald Tribune, November 1, 1958.

  76. 76. The New York Times did not endorse Harriman in 1954. It also endorsed Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. “Our Next Governor,” New York Times, October 15, 1958.

  77. 77. The Amsterdam News endorsed Republican candidate Kenneth Keating for the US Senate, but stated emphatically that although he was a sound candidate, he was the choice because he was not a Democrat. If he were a Democrat, the newspaper would endorse his opponent because it was essential not to strengthen southern Democrats like James O. Eastland of Mississippi in Congress. “The Best Man,” New York Amsterdam News, October 25, 1958.

  78. 78. Berck, “Harriman Says Rivals Are Split.”

  79. 79. “Rockefeller for Governor,” New York Herald Tribune, October 31, 1958.

  80. 80. Dorothy Fleeson, “No Time to Meet?” Boston Globe, October 24, 1958; Earl Brown, “Looking Back,” New York Amsterdam News, November 8, 1958.

  81. 81. Raymond M. Lahr, “Democrats, Rockefeller Won Negro Vote in Election,” Chicago Defender, November 10, 1958.

  82. 82. “Rocky Wins State; Powell Holds Harlem,” New York Amsterdam News, November 8, 1958.

  83. 83. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, Fifty-Third Governor of the State of New York, 1959–1973 (Albany: n.p., 1959), 17, 11.

  84. 84. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 12.

  85. 85. Roscoe Drummond, “Rockefeller’s Address,” Washington Post, January 3, 1959.

  86. 86. Arthur Krock, “In the Nation: The Projection of the Event at Albany,” New York Times, January 6, 1959.

  87. 87. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 13.

  88. 88. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 14.

  89. 89. Krock, “In the Nation”; Smith, On His Own Terms, 295.

  90. 90. “Rockefeller Does Well to Stress State’s Role in Freedom Battle,” Albany Knickerbocker News, January 2, 1959.

  91. 91. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 18.

  92. 92. “The Rockefeller Message,” New York Times, January 8, 1959.

  93. 93. Hugh Morrow Interview of Joseph Murphy, August 11, 1980, folder 16, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; “Gas Tax Up 2 Cents, Mull Cigaret [sic] Hike,” Newsday, January 21, 1959.

  94. 94. Before the vote, five Republican legislators from Onondaga County voiced their opposition to the bill, which was highly unpopular in their community. The bill passed by a vote of 32 to 26 in the senate and 87 to 62 in the assembly. Democrats, who had supported an increase the year before, opposed the increase. “Responsibility at Albany,” New York Times, January 21, 1959; Douglas Dales, “G.O.P. Group Joins Fight on ‘Gas’ Tax,” New York Times, January 18, 1959.

  95. 95. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 33.

  96. 96. Leo Egan, “Rockefeller, Asking Record Tax, Challenges Foes to Trim Budget,” New York Times, February 3, 1959.

  97. 97. Warren Weaver Jr., “G.O.P. Grumbles over Fiscal Plan,” New York Times, February 3, 1959.

  98. 98. Leo Egan, “Rockefeller’s Votes Now Aid His Program,” New York Times, January 11, 1959.

  99. 99. “The State Budget,” New York Times, February 3, 1959.

  100. 100. Warren Weaver Jr., “Tax Mail Ignores Rockefeller Plea,” New York Times, February 15, 1959; “Mr. Rockefeller’s Program,” The Commonweal, February 20, 1959; Douglas Dales, “Coliseum Crowd Boos Rockefeller over Tax Policies,” New York Times, February 21, 1959; “The State Budget.”

  101. 101. Tax revolts and opposition to taxes would only become more common in the 1960s. Historian Molly C. Michelmore attributes it in part to liberal politicians dating back to the New Deal era who sought to disassociate popular programs like Social Security from the taxes required to maintain them. “The High Cost of Statism,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1959; Molly C. Michelmore, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

  102. 102. Leo Egan, “Governor Wins Tax Fight; Revolt in G.O.P. Collapses after a Compromise Fails,” New York Times, March 10, 1959.

  103. 103. Walter MacDonald, “Wagner Gets Usual Aid—Rockefeller ‘Meant Well,’ ” World Telegram & Sun, March 26, 1959.

  104. 104. Smith, On His Own Terms, 304, 308–309.

  105. 105. “Taxes Rockefeller,” Washington Post, March 13, 1959; “Resistance to Taxes,” New York Times, March 14, 1959.

  106. 106. 1960 Public Opinion Poll, folder 683, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  107. 107. Robert H. Connery and Gerald Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 65–71; Smith, On His Own Terms, 279, 296.

  108. 108. Smith, On His Own Terms, 304, 308–309.

  109. 109. Hugh Morrow Interview of Joseph Murphy, August 11, 1980, folder 16, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  110. 110. 1960 Public Opinion Poll, folder 683, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

3. Limited Victories and Harmful Concessions

  1. 1. “G.O.P. Told to Stick to Taft Principles,” New York Times, March 12, 1959; Robert C. Albright, “GOP Program Blessed by Ike,” Washington Post, March 14, 1959; Republican Committee on Program and Progress, Decisions for a Better America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960).

  2. 2. Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller, 9.

  3. 3. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller, Fifty-Third Governor of the State of New York, 1959–1973 (Albany: n. p., 1960), 1185, 1028–1031.

  4. 4. “From Nelson Rockefeller: The Blast That Rocked the Republican Party,” U.S. News & World Report, June 20, 1960; “Statement by Governor Rockefeller,” June 8, 1960, folder 184, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  5. 5. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960), 1046.

  6. 6. Fleming’s quote first appeared in the May 12 issue of the Reporter. Donald R. Campion, “Sacrifice for Dignity: Students Protest,” America, May 21, 1960, 284–285.

  7. 7. Although Joseph McNeil, Izell Blair (who changed his name to Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, and David Richmond organized the Greensboro demonstrations, they did not become leaders in the movement. For information on the role of African American women in the sit-in movement in Greensboro, see Deidre B. Flowers, “The Launching of the Student Sit-In Movement: The Role of Black Women at Bennett College,” Journal of African American History 90, no. 1–2 (2005): 52–63; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 9, 16–17.

  8. 8. Carson, In Struggle, 9–13, 19–21.

  9. 9. “Transcript of Eisenhower’s News Conference on Domestic and Foreign Matters,” New York Times, March 17, 1960.

  10. 10. “White House OK’s Student Sit-Ins,” New York Amsterdam News, March 19, 1960.

  11. 11. “Truman Reiterates Views on Sitdowns,” New York Times, March 25, 1960; Clayton Knowles, “Truman Believed Reads Lead Sit-Ins,” New York Times, April 19, 1960.

  12. 12. Doris Fleeson, “Lyndon Feels It’s Time to Cut Ol’ Jack Down,” Austin Statesman, June 4, 1960; Rowland Evans Jr., “Humphrey vs. Kennedy: The Big Debate Is Little,” New York Herald Tribune, May 5, 1960; Eugene Patterson, “Sit-In Question Needs Examining,” Atlanta Constitution, July 5, 1960.

  13. 13. Johnny Otis, “Johnny Otis Says: Let’s Talk,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 30, 1960.

  14. 14. In March, two hundred Skidmore students picketed a F. W. Woolworth in Saratoga Springs, New York, calling for the store to end segregation in the South. Some of the students were temporarily detained. Charles N. Quinn, “Rockefeller Sympathizes with Sit-Ins,” New York Herald Tribune, April 13, 1960; “Governor Hails Southern Sit-Ins,” New York Times, April 13, 1960; Excerpts from Governor Rockefeller’s Remarks to a Group of Students from Skidmore and Spelman College, April 12, 1960, folder 81, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  15. 15. Excerpts of Remarks by Governor Rockefeller Prepared for Delivery at National Sunday School and Baptist Training Union Congress of National Baptist Convention, June 17, 1960, folder 103, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  16. 16. Alvin C. Adams, “Rocky Endorses Sit-Ins, Job Opportunities,” Chicago Defender, July 19, 1960.

  17. 17. Javits announced his endorsement on July 17. “Javits Urges Strong Civil Rights Plank,” New York Herald Tribune, July 18, 1960.

  18. 18. “1960 Democratic Party Platform,” July 11, 1960, accessed June 26, 2020, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1960-democratic-party-platform; Louis Lautier, “Dixie Loses Plea for ‘Soft’ Civil Rights Plank,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 16, 1960.

  19. 19. Austin C. Wehrwein, “G.O.P. Foresees Rights Harmony,” New York Times, July 13, 1960.

  20. 20. Roswell B. Perkins to Nelson A. Rockefeller, July 12, 1960, folder 211, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  21. 21. Austin C. Wehrwein, “G.O.P. Foresees Rights Harmony,” New York Times, July 13, 1960.

  22. 22. “Virginians Predict Milder GOP Plank on Civil Rights,” Washington Post, July 19, 1960; Donald Bruce Johnson and Kirk H. Porter, comps., National Party Platforms, 1840–1972 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 554; “Virginians Predict Milder GOP Plank on Civil Rights,” Washington Post, July 19, 1960.

  23. 23. Arthur Massolo, “Carlino Sees Rocky Defeat on Rights,” New York Post, July 20, 1960.

  24. 24. William M. Blair, “Firm Rights Plank Offered by Nixon,” New York Times, July 22, 1960; Carroll Kilpatrick, “GOP Platform Makers Steer Nixon Road Down the Middle,” Washington Post, July 21, 1960; List of Witnesses to Testify before the Republican Platform Sub-committee, July 20, 1960, Presidential Campaign of 1960, January 1, 1960–December 31, 1960, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ProQuest History Vault, accessed June 29, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-014-0647&accountid=14553.

  25. 25. Steve Duncan, “Conventions Target of Protest Marches,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 18, 1960.

  26. 26. Barry, the future mayor of Washington, D.C., also called for self-government for the nation’s capital. “3 Farm Groups Urge Divergent Price Plans for G.O.P. Platform,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 20, 1960; Johnnie A. Moore, “ ‘End Snail Pace,’ NAACP Prods GOP,” Chicago Defender, July 21, 1960.

  27. 27. “Will the Republicans Shoot Santa Claus?” Baltimore Afro-American, July 30, 1960.

  28. 28. William Knighton Jr., “Platform,” Baltimore Sun, July 24, 1960; William M. Blair, “Firm Rights Plank Offered by Nixon,” New York Times, July 22, 1960.

  29. 29. White, The Making of the President 1960, 198; Nixon, Six Crises, 313–314.

  30. 30. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960), 1169.

  31. 31. Thurber, Republicans and Race, 124; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 85; Nixon, Six Crises, 315–316.

  32. 32. Eugene Patterson, “Nixon Is Dancing to Kennedy Tune,” Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 1960; Carroll Kilpatrick, “Nixon-Rockefeller Accord Stirs Storm over GOP Platform,” Washington Post, July 24, 1960; “Nixon Says He and Rocky Still Differ on Details,” Boston Globe, July 24, 1960; “Conservatives Vow Scrap over Platform,” Boston Globe, July 24, 1960; Conversations with Dwight Eisenhower, July 1960, Signatures. April 1958, Presidential Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, ProQuest History Vault, accessed June 30, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=002161-017-0045&accountid=14553; Carroll Kilpatrick, “Conservatives and Liberals Map Floor Fights,” Washington Post, July 25, 1960; Eugene Patterson, “N.Y. Plans to Fight Moderation,” Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1960; Vincent J. Burke, “Nixon-Rocky Rights Plank Is Rejected,” Austin American Statesman, July 25, 1960.

  33. 33. Thomas W. Ottenad, “Nixon, Rockefeller Insist on Stronger Civil Rights Plank in G.O.P. Platform,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 25, 1960; William Knighton Jr., “GOP Delays Shutdown on Rights Plank,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1960; “Report of Conversation of the President with the Vice President, Newport, July 24, 1960,” Signatures. April 1958, Presidential Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, ProQuest History Vault, accessed June 30, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=002161-017-0045&accountid=14553.

  34. 34. Walter Trohan, “Asserts He Didn’t Surrender to N.Y. Governor,” Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1960; Walter Lister Jr., “Nixon Wins Stiff Plank on Rights,” New York Herald Tribune, July 27, 1960; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 89–91; Gifford, The Center Cannot Hold, 155; Smith, On His Own Terms, 348.

  35. 35. Wesley South, “ ‘Rights’ Rally Spectacular,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 28, 1960; C. B. Powell, “Rockefeller Didn’t Pull Any Punches,” New York Amsterdam News, July 30, 1960; Andrew Tully, “Rockefeller Woos, Wins NAACP with Fervent Civil Rights Plea,” World Telegram & Sun, July 25, 1960.

  36. 36. Mary McGrory, “Cool of the Evening,” New York Post, July 26, 1960.

  37. 37. Republican Party and Lloyd L. Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Republican National Convention Resulting in the Nomination of Richard M. Nixon, of California, for President, and the Nomination of Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, for Vice President (Washington, DC: Republican National Committee, 1960), 254–256; “Sit-Ins Victorious Where They Began,” New York Times, July 26, 1960.

  38. 38. “Rocky Gives His OK to Civil Rights Plank,” New York Journal American, July 27, 1960.

  39. 39. Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, July 27, 1960, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: General, July–December 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed June 29, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001473-015-0779&accountid=14553.

  40. 40. “Convention Sidelights,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 6, 1960; Charles G. Whiteford, “Party Approves Most Liberal Platform in Its History,” Baltimore Sun, July 28, 1960; Max Johnson, “ ‘Maybe I’m behind Times,’ Butler Says after Walkout,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 6, 1960; “Comments on GOP’s Platform,” Cleveland Call and Post, August 6, 1960.

  41. 41. “Text of Rockefeller’s Chicago Speech,” New York Times, July 29, 1960.

  42. 42. Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, August 5, 1960, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: General, July–December 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed June 29, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001473-015-0779&accountid=14553; “3 Farm Groups”; “Will the Republicans Shoot Santa Claus?”

  43. 43. In 1956, the integrated or “black and tan” delegation had nine African Americans. In total, there were twenty-two African American delegates and twenty-eight alternates from nineteen states and the District of Columbia at the 1960 convention. Kenneth Toler, “ ‘Lily Whites’ Win Seat in Chicago,” Atlanta Constitution, July 24, 1960; “Republicans Off for Chicago; 50 Negro Delegates,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 23, 1960.

  44. 44. Conversation with Charles Percy, July 24, Signatures. April 1958, Presidential Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, ProQuest History Vault, accessed June 30, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=002161-017-0045&accountid=14553.

  45. 45. “Lauds GOP Civil Rights Measure,” Atlanta Daily World, July 30, 1960; “In GOP Spotlite at Chicago Convention,” Chicago Defender, August 6, 1960.

  46. 46. Phil Sullivan, “Tennessee Negro Hails GOP Plank,” Nashville Tennessean, July 28, 1960.

  47. 47. Thurber, Republicans and Race, 127; Gifford, The Center Cannot Hold, 64.

  48. 48. “1959 Metcalf-Baker Bill,” February 1958, folder 3601, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC; Irving Spiegel, “Albany Assailed on Housing Bill,” New York Times, June 15, 1959; Thomas W. Ennis, “Laws in 4 States Bar Housing Bias,” New York Times, June 28, 1959.

  49. 49. “1959 Metcalf-Baker Bill,” February 1958, folder 3601, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC; Memo from Roswell Perkins to Rockefeller, February 19, 1959, folder 3601, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 240.

  50. 50. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1959); “Rocky Pledges Housing Bill,” New York Amsterdam News, July 18, 1959; James Booker, “Criticism of Rocky Gets Jackie’s Backing,” New York Amsterdam News, March 14, 1959.

  51. 51. The other governors who had become life members included three former governors: Democrat Chester Bowles of Connecticut, Republican Goodwin J. Knight of California, and Democrat Averell Harriman of New York. Rockefeller also joined Javits, who was already a life member. “Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Directors, 1959,” National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers (2012). “Rockefeller Now NAACP Life Member,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 8, 1959.

  52. 52. Correspondence between Rockefeller and Stanley M. Isaacs, September 1959, folder 3601, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC.

  53. 53. “Text of Rockefeller’s Message Opening the 1960 Session of the State Legislature,” New York Times, January 7, 1960.

  54. 54. James Desmond, “Rock Goes Route as Joint Session Sits on Its Hands,” New York Daily News, January 7, 1960; Arthur Massolo, “Albany Lukewarm on Rocky’s Plans,” New York Post, January 7, 1960.

  55. 55. Charles N. Quinn, “Rockefeller’s Hand Now Strengthened,” New York Herald Tribune, January 10, 1960.

  56. 56. Leo Egan, “Governor Offers a Broad Measure on Bias in Housing,” New York Times, February 24, 1960; Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960); New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing 1960 Fair Housing Practices Memo #5, February 29, 1960, New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing, 1956–1963, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0452&accountid=1455.

  57. 57. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960), 141–142.

  58. 58. “1959 Metcalf-Baker Bill,” February 1958, folder 3601, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC; NYSCDH Open Letter to Rockefeller, January 20, 1960, New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing, 1956–1963, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0452&accountid=1455.

  59. 59. Walter MacDonald, “Governor Holds Line on Unpopular Issues,” World-Telegram & Sun, March 8, 1960.

  60. 60. Douglas Dales, “Housing Bias Bill Believed Doomed,” New York Times, March 9, 1960; “Austin W. Erwin, Ex-State Senator,” New York Times, August 15, 1965; James H. Scheuer, “Housing Our Minorities,” New York Times, March 16, 1956.

  61. 61. Keith R. Johnson, “Rockefeller Submits Bill to Combat Housing Bias,” New York Herald Tribune, February 24, 1960.

  62. 62. “Fair Housing Is Up to Republicans,” New York Amsterdam News, February 27, 1960; Charles N. Quinn, “Rockefeller Faces Bumps in Legislature,” New York Herald Tribune, February 28, 1960.

  63. 63. Charles Grutzner, “State Votes Finance Plan for Mid-income Housing,” New York Times, March 30, 1960.

  64. 64. Charles N. Quinn, “Governor Beaten on 3 Main Bills as Session Ends,” New York Herald Tribune, April 1, 1960; Charles N. Quinn, “City Won, Governor Lost in Legislature,” New York Herald Tribune, April 3, 1960; Walter MacDonald, “Stung by Housing Defeat, Governor Bars New Judges,” World-Telegram & Sun, April 1, 1960.

  65. 65. Warren Weaver Jr., “Rebuffed by G.O.P.,” New York Times, April 1, 1960; “Against Housing Bias,” New York Times, March 19, 1960; Arthur Massolo, Oliver Pilat, and Edward Katcher, “In the Backrooms,” New York Post, April 3, 1960; Charles N. Quinn, “Governor Beaten on 3 Main Bills as Session Ends,” New York Herald Tribune, April 1, 1960.

  66. 66. George R. Metcalf, “Comments Offered on Failure to Adopt All of Governor’s Program,” New York Times, April 9, 1960.

  67. 67. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960), 986–987.

  68. 68. The senate study examined the upstate communities of Plattsburgh and Rochester, Poughkeepsie in Dutchess County, Greenburgh in Westchester County, and the village of Freeport, which is located in Long Island’s Hempstead. “Albany Report Cites Housing Bias on LI,” Newsday, March 3, 1960; Layhmond Robinson, “ ‘Vast’ Bias throughout State Cited in Albany Housing Study,” New York Times, March 4, 1960.

  69. 69. Summary, Domestic Issues Civil Rights, January 11, 1960, folder 191, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Clarence Mitchell, “In Memoriam: C. Clyde Ferguson,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 6 (1984): 1253–1254; Glenn Fowler, “C. Clyde Ferguson Is Dead,” New York Times, December 22, 1983.

  70. 70. “Westchester Talks on Housing Bias Set,” New York Times, February 19, 1961; “1959 Metcalf-Baker Bill,” February 1958, folder 3601, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC.

  71. 71. “Meet the Press,” Washington, DC: Merkle Press, 4:24 (June 12, 1960): 5–6.

  72. 72. Memo from Robert MacCrate to Rockefeller, November 27, 1960, folder 437, 34 Dian Van Wie, NAR, RAC.

  73. 73. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1961), 25–26.

  74. 74. Statement by Governor Rockefeller, February 7, 1961, folder 1867, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  75. 75. Warren Weaver Jr., “State G.O.P. Housing Bias Bill,” New York Times, February 8, 1961.

  76. 76. Weaver, “State G.O.P. Housing Bias Bill”; “GOP to Bar Bias in Housing Bill,” New York Amsterdam News, February 11, 1961.

  77. 77. “NAACP to March on Albany,” New York Amsterdam News, February 18, 1961.

  78. 78. Layhmond Robinson, “Governor Facing Test on Bias Bill,” New York Times, January 8, 1961; “Albany Pushes OK of Tax Rebate,” Newsday, January 9, 1961; “Rocky Rights Plan Periled,” New York Post, January 12, 1961; Douglas Dales, “Governor Says He Compromised on Behalf of Housing Bias Bill,” New York Times, February 9, 1961.

  79. 79. Charles N. Quinn, “Legislature Plunges into Final Week,” New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1961.

  80. 80. “SCAD Cites Gains on Equal Housing,” New York Times, April 19, 1961.

  81. 81. New York State Conference, 1957–1958, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 24, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-006-0740&accountid=14553; Letter from Herbert Hill to Effie Gordon, February 11, 1958, New York State Conference, 1959, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 24, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-006-0740&accountid=14553.

  82. 82. State Conference Legislation Committee Minutes, January 20, 1959, New York State Conference, 1959, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0001&accountid=14553.

  83. 83. NY State Conference of NAACP Branches Housing Workshop, October 17, 1959, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0001&accountid=14553.

  84. 84. NAACP New York State Conference, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553.

  85. 85. Telegram from Roy Wilkins to Walter Mahoney, March 31, 1960, New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing, 1956–1963, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0452&accountid=14553.

  86. 86. Letter from Eugene Reed to Gloster Current, September 15, 1960, New York State Conference, 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0207&accountid=14553.

  87. 87. New York State Conference Press Release, September 27, 1960, New York State Conference, 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0207&accountid=14553.

  88. 88. Letter from Clarita V. Roane to Gloster Current, September 15, 1960, Letter from Gloster Current to Eugene Reed, October 18, 1960, New York State Conference, 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0207&accountid=14553.

  89. 89. The records of the NAACP do not mention whether a meeting with Mahoney occurred. Letter from Eugene Reed to Gloster Current, September 26, 1960, New York State Conference, 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0207&accountid=14553.

  90. 90. Survey Results, March 2, 1961, New York State Conference, 1960, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 22, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0207&accountid=14553.

  91. 91. Open Letter to Nelson Rockefeller, January 7, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553; “NAACP Raps Gov’s Housing Proposal,” New York Amsterdam News, January 21, 1961.

  92. 92. Memo from Jack E. Wood Jr. to Roy Wilkins, February 14, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553; “NAACP to March on Albany,” New York Amsterdam News, February 18, 1961.

  93. 93. Memo from the Legislative Committee to All Members, February 17, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553.

  94. 94. Letter from Jack E. Wood Jr. to New York State Branch Presidents, January 30, 1961, New York State Division of Housing, 1961–1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 21, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0726&accountid=14553.

  95. 95. “Albany Demonstration for a Fair Housing Bill,” February 28, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553.

  96. 96. Letter from Eugene Reed to George Fleary, March 7, 1961, Letter from Eugene Reed to Roy Wilkins, March 3, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553.

  97. 97. “NAACP Meets Rocky on Housing,” New York Amsterdam News, March 4, 1961; James Desmond, “Rocky Bids NAACP Accept Anti-bias Bill,” New York Daily News, March 1, 1961.

  98. 98. Eugene T. Reed to Governor Rockefeller, April 19, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553.

  99. 99. Press Release from Eugene Reed, April 19, 1961, New York State Conference, January–April 1961, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-007-0442&accountid=14553.

  100. 100. Letter from Roy Wilkins to James Wm. Gaynor, May 24, 1962, New York State Division of Housing, 1961–1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 21, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0726&accountid=14553.

  101. 101. Memo from Jack Wood to Roy Wilkins, May 23, 1962, Wood, Jack—General Correspondence, 1961–1965, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 20, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001453-014-0329&accountid=14553; State of New York Division of Housing and Community Renewal Press Release, May 22, 1962, New York State Division of Housing, 1961–1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 21, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0726&accountid=14553.

  102. 102. Memo from Jack Wood to Housing Committee Chairmen and New York Branch Presidents, June 6, 1962, New York State Division of Housing, 1961–1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed July 21, 2020https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=000004-011-0726&accountid=14553.

  103. 103. Charles G. Bennett, “Mayor Says Vote Hurt Rockefeller as ’64 Candidate,” New York Times, November 10, 1962; Leo Egan, “Rockefeller Edge Spurs ’64 Hopes,” New York Times, November 8, 1962.

  104. 104. Leo Egan, “Gov. Rockefeller and Morgenthau Both See Victory,” New York Times, November 6, 1962; Bernie Bookbinder, “Rocky Wins, Margin Cut,” Newsday, November 8, 1962.

  105. 105. Walter Lister Jr., “Republicans Cheered,” New York Herald Tribune, November 8, 1962; Egan, “Rockefeller Edge Spurs ’64 Hopes.”

  106. 106. Vincent Butler, “Rockefeller Wins; Javits Tops Ticket,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1962; Egan, “Gov. Rockefeller and Morgenthau”; Lister, “Republicans Cheered.”

  107. 107. For more on the Conservative Party of New York and its founding, see Sullivan, New York and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, 9; Peter Kihiss, “New State Party Lists Principles,” New York Times, February 16, 1962; Richard Heinrich McDonnell, “A History of the Conservative Party of New York State, 1962–1972” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1975); J. Daniel Mahoney, Actions Speak Louder (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968).

  108. 108. Walter Lister Jr., “In New York, Connecticut, New Jersey,” New York Herald Tribune, November 4, 1962; “Platform Issued by Conservatives,” New York Times, August 29, 1962.

  109. 109. Lister, “Republicans Cheered.”

  110. 110. Stan Hinden, “LI Poll Finds Levitt Bucking Rocky Tide,” Newsday, November 2, 1962.

  111. 111. “Major Results in Suburbs and Jersey,” New York Times, November 8, 1962; Lister, “Republicans Cheered.”

  112. 112. Frederick W. Roevekamp, “Unevenness Marks N.Y. Context,” Christian Science Monitor, November 3, 1962, 3; “Rockefeller for Governor,” New York Times, October 16, 1962; “For Governor: Rockefeller (R),” Newsday, October 15, 1962, 37.

  113. 113. “Negro Democrats Find Ticket Dull,” New York Times, November 3, 1962; “For Governor”; Layhmond Robinson, “Negroes Widen Political Role,” New York Times, November 8, 1962; James Booker, “Negroes Backed Dudley by 5 to 1,” New York Amsterdam News, November 10, 1962; “GOP Claims Gains in Negro Vote,” Chicago Defender, November 19, 1962; “Minorities Back JFK Rebuff GOP’s Pleas,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 22, 1962.

  114. 114. Rockefeller also said that he tried but failed to convince Nixon to cancel some of his southern campaign stops in favor of focusing on the urban and Negro vote. Robert D. Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 11–12.

  115. 115. Nixon received 32 percent of the African American vote in 1960 in comparison to Eisenhower’s 27 percent in 1952 and 32 percent in 1956. Thurber, Republicans and Race, 130; Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 44, 58, 83.

  116. 116. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1962), 135–138, 1215–1216.

  117. 117. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1962), 464–468; Layhmond Robinson, “Rockefeller Signs 5 Bills to Expand Housing in State,” New York Times, April 30, 1962.

  118. 118. Lister, “Republicans Cheered”; Egan, “Rockefeller Edge Spurs ’64 Hopes.”

  119. 119. James Wm. Gaynor, “Proposition No. 2,” New York Times, October 31, 1962.

  120. 120. Warren Weaver Jr., “Governor Urges Housing Subsidy,” New York Times, March 1, 1962; “State to Vote on Articles to Trim Constitution,” New York Times, April 8, 1962; “Amendments: What Voters Must Decide,” New York Herald Tribune, November 5, 1962; Charles Grutzner, “State Voters Reject Subsidy Plan on Low-Income Family Housing,” New York Times, November 7, 1962; “Housing Subsidies Head for Defeat,” New York Herald Tribune, November 7, 1962.

  121. 121. Robinson, “Rockefeller Signs 5 Bills.”

  122. 122. Thurber, Republicans and Race, 25, 41.

  123. 123. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1962), 756–758, 1077, 1215–1216.

4. A Fruitless Defense

  1. 1. John Dittmer, “Local People and National Leaders: The View from Mississippi,” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up, ed. Emilye Crosby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 43–51; Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Catherine Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

  2. 2. Jack Bell, “Views on Issues Told by Gov. Rockefeller and Sen. Goldwater,” Washington Post, October 21, 1963.

  3. 3. Ralph McGill, “A New Klan Hero,” New York Herald Tribune, November 26, 1961.

  4. 4. “The Gallup Poll: Rockefeller Gains as GOP Choice,” Washington Post, February 15, 1963.

  5. 5. George Gallup, “The Gallup Poll: Rockefeller Also Choice of GOP in the South,” Washington Post, December 12, 1962.

  6. 6. Roscoe Drummond, “Almost Certain ’64 Candidate: Rockefeller’s in the Driver’s Seat,” Washington Post, November 4, 1962.

  7. 7. Memorandum from Lloyd Free to Nelson Rockefeller, folder 691, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  8. 8. Laurence Stern, “Wisconsin Warms Up to Rockefeller’s Bid,” Washington Post, March 11, 1963.

  9. 9. Edward T. Folliard, “Clearing 1964 Path: Rockefeller Attacks ‘Confusion’ of Labels,” Washington Post, January 4, 1963.

  10. 10. Memorandum from Lloyd Free to Nelson Rockefeller, folder 691, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  11. 11. Julius Duscha, “Fiscal Integrity Stressed Here by Rockefeller,” Washington Post, April 11, 1963; Transcript of Nelson Rockefeller Press Conference, April 10, 1963, folder 934, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  12. 12. Marquis Childs, “Economic Advice for the Candidate,” Washington Post, April 19, 1963.

  13. 13. Walter Lippmann, “Two Witnesses,” Washington Post, April 16, 1963.

  14. 14. Excerpts of Remarks by Nelson Rockefeller, February 12, 1963, folder 902, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  15. 15. Memorandum from Elmer A. Carter to Hugh Morrow, January 24, 1963, RAC, NAR, folder 902, box 19, 33 Speeches, RG 15.

  16. 16. “Elmer Anderson Carter Dead,” New York Times, January 17, 1973.

  17. 17. Hedrick Smith, “G.O.P. in South Sees Hope for ’64 in Vote Gains,” New York Times, November 9, 1962.

  18. 18. Thurber notes that although there were numerous factors that influenced Republican gains in the South in 1962, “contests often had strong racial elements” and “race was central to several elections in Alabama.” Meanwhile, Goldwater denied that race played a role in the GOP’s growing success in the South. Thurber, Republicans and Race, 177–179; Gould, Grand Old Party, 338, 356.

  19. 19. Letter from George W. Lee to Robert A. Taft Jr., December 8, 1962, folder 902, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  20. 20. Hugh Morrow to Nelson Rockefeller, February 11, 1963, folder 902, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  21. 21. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1963), 1063.

  22. 22. “A Bipartisan Guilt,” New York Post, March 8, 1963.

  23. 23. For more information on the early relationship between Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, see Smith, On His Own Terms, 325–329, 405–407.

  24. 24. Smith notes that the governor had a well-established history of sexual indiscretion, particularly with female staff members; that was an open secret among the press that protected the governor’s reputation. Smith, On His Own Terms, 322, 329.

  25. 25. “Joan Denies Marriage Plans,” Washington Post, March 24, 1963.

  26. 26. “Governor’s Future in Politics Doubted,” New York Times, May 2, 1963; Stanley Meisler, “View of Rockefeller Remarriage Here Reported: ‘Political Suicide,’ ” Washington Post, May 2, 1963.

  27. 27. Memorandum from Lloyd Free to Nelson Rockefeller, June 13, 1963, folder 691, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  28. 28. Joseph Alsop, “Looking before Leaping,” Washington Post, May 3, 1963.

  29. 29. Foster Hailey, “U.S. Seeking a Truce in Birmingham; Hoses again Drive Off Demonstrators,” New York Times, May 5, 1963; Homer Bigart, “Gov. Rockefeller Marries Mrs. Murphy at Pocantico; Effect on 1964 Is Weighed,” New York Times, May 5, 1963.

  30. 30. Rockefeller’s polling numbers remained consistent during the first four months of 1963. In March, for example, Gallup showed Rockefeller still leading the Republican pack with 43 percent followed by 17 percent for Goldwater and 13 percent for Romney. The following month, Rockefeller’s numbers remained the same, but Goldwater gained strength, rising to 23 percent. Gallup Poll (AIPO), March 1963; Gallup Poll (AIPO), April 1963; Gallup Poll (AIPO), May 1963; Gallup Poll (AIPO), May 1963; Gallup Poll (AIPO), June 1963; Gallup Poll (AIPO), July 1963, retrieved June 16, 2011 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.htm.

  31. 31. “Text of the President’s Address on Alabama,” Washington Post, June 12, 1963.

  32. 32. Medgar Evers had helped James Meredith enroll in the University of Mississippi the previous fall and had been instrumental in organizing a boycott campaign in Mississippi. For more information on Medgar Evers, see Michael Vinson Williams, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013).

  33. 33. Richard L. Lyons, “GOP Silent on Position in Struggle,” Washington Post, June 20, 1963.

  34. 34. Robert C. Albright, “GOP Offers Rights Collaboration,” Washington Post, June 18, 1963; Lyons, “GOP Silent on Position in Struggle.”

  35. 35. Douglas Dales, “Rockefeller Urges Congress to Adopt a Civil Rights Bill,” New York Times, June 26, 1963.

  36. 36. “Warns GOP against Neutral Stand,” Chicago Defender, June 22, 1963; Marquis Childs, “Race Issue Snarls Old Party Lines,” Washington Post, July 12, 1963; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “The President’s Poll,” Washington Post, July 2, 1963.

  37. 37. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “The White House Chat,” Washington Post, June 20, 1963.

  38. 38. Gary Donaldson, Liberalism’s Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1964 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 255; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 431.

  39. 39. “Civil Rights Voting Record,” folder 255, IV 3A 18, Graham Molitor Collection, RAC.

  40. 40. Frank E. Taylor, “Poff, Tuck Lead Rights Bill Fight,” folder 114, J.2 Politics, NAR, RAC; “Rockefeller to Address Virginia Fete,” Washington Post, August 28, 1963; Anthony Lewis, “Civil Rights Bill Is Sent to Rules Panel,” New York Times, November 21, 1963.

  41. 41. Peter Kihiss, “Rockefeller Says Rightists Imperil G.O.P. and Nation,” New York Times, July 15, 1963.

  42. 42. The John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by John W. Welch Jr., was a conspiratorial Anti-New Deal group known for its anti-communism that inspired denunciations of the civil rights movement, the United Nations, and leaders including Eisenhower. “Text of Rockefeller’s Statement Criticizing ‘Radical Right’ of the Republican Party,” New York Times, July 15, 1963; Miller, A Conspiratorial Life, 1–10; Dallek, Birchers, 1–16.

  43. 43. “Text of Rockefeller’s Statement Criticizing ‘Radical Right’ of the Republican Party”; Rockefeller Statement, July 11, 1963, folder 966, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  44. 44. “Today” show, July 16, 1963, folder 761, 22 New York Office, NAR, RAC.

  45. 45. Peter Kihiss, “Goldwater Denies Sectional Appeals,” New York Times, July 16, 1963.

  46. 46. T. George Harris, “The Rampant Right Invades the GOP,” Look, July 16, 1963, 19–25.

  47. 47. Of the letters Rockefeller’s staff collected and sent responses, twenty-two came from New York, thirteen from California, and six from Massachusetts. The others came from all parts of the country including Iowa, Maryland, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Other than the letters referenced here that the author counted and sorted by state, the Rockefeller staff did not isolate or organize the letters that were sent in response to his statement on the Republican Party and the radical right. Folder 1216, 24 Political Files, NAR, RAC.

  48. 48. “Rockefeller to His Party,” New York Times, July 16, 1963; “Rockefeller Accepts the Challenge,” New York Herald Tribune, July 16, 1963.

  49. 49. “Letters to the Editor: The GOP Debate,” New York Herald Tribune, July 21, 1963; “Rockefeller Was Just in Time,” New York Herald Tribune, July 29, 1963.

  50. 50. Kihiss, “Goldwater Denies Sectional Appeals.”

  51. 51. Letter from Barry Goldwater to Leonard J. Nadasdy, March 25, 1963, folder 958, 33, Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  52. 52. Gervasi, The Real Rockefeller, 251.

  53. 53. “Thunder on the Right,” folder 259, IV 3A 18, Graham Molitor Collection, RAC.

  54. 54. “Thunder on the Right,” folder 259, IV 3A 18, Graham Molitor Collection, RAC.

  55. 55. Folder 1216, 24 Political Files, NAR, RAC.

  56. 56. Folder 1216, box 42, 24 Political Files, RG 15, NAR, RAC.

  57. 57. Folder 1216, box 42, 24 Political Files, NAR, RAC.

  58. 58. “The Changing Mood of America,” U.S. News & World Report, July 29, 1963, 36.

  59. 59. George Gallup, “JFK Pushing Too Fast on Rights, 36% Believe,” Washington Post, June 17, 1963, A9; Gallup Poll (AIPO), July 1963; Gallup Poll (AIPO), August 1963, retrieved July 20, 2011 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html.

  60. 60. “The Changing Mood of America,” 37, 39.

  61. 61. Letter from W. W. Edwards to Nelson Rockefeller, October 28, 1963, folder 1198, box 41, 24 Political Files, NAR, RAC.

  62. 62. Statement by Nelson Rockefeller, November 7, 1963, folder 1018, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  63. 63. Memorandum from Elmer A. Carter to Hugh Morrow, January 24, 1963, folder 902, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  64. 64. William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, “John Mercer Langston: Principle and Politics,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon F. Litwack and August Meier (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 119–120, 122–124.

  65. 65. Merline Pitre, “Frederick Douglass: The Politician vs. the Social Reformer,” Phylon 40, no. 3 (1979): 270; Blight, Frederick Douglass, 532–536, 722–724.

  66. 66. Excerpts of Remarks by Nelson Rockefeller, February 7, 1964, folder 1062, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

5. The Denunciation of Rockefeller Republicanism

  1. 1. Earl Mazo, “Rockefeller Finds Chances Buoyed by Oregon Vote,” New York Times, May 17, 1964, 1; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 112.

  2. 2. Julius Duscha, “Oregon Primary,” Washington Post, May 7, 1964, A21; F. Clifton White Interview, circa 1980s, folder 154, CRP, RAC.

  3. 3. Smith’s On His Own Terms, 439–447.

  4. 4. For more on the origins and politics of the Christian Crusade and Minutemen see Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard, 9–10, 93–97. “The Extremists,” Nelson A. Rockefeller Films, RAC.

  5. 5. Hugh Morrow Interview of Harry O’Donnell, August 9, 1980, folder 36, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  6. 6. Guy Wright, “Rocky’s Canceled Expose,” San Francisco News Call, June 17, 1964.

  7. 7. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 282; White, The Making of the President, 1964, 122; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 338–353.

  8. 8. F. Clifton White Interview, circa 1980s, folder 154, Cary Reich Papers, RAC.

  9. 9. Charles Mohr, “California Vote Puts Goldwater Near Nomination,” New York Times, June 4, 1964; Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 282.

  10. 10. For more information on Proposition 14, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 167–169; Thurber, Republicans and Race, 186–187; Hugh Morrow Interview of Harry O’Donnell, August 9, 1980, folder 36, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  11. 11. Letter from Hugh Morrow to Travis Cross, July 6, 1964, folder 1170, Speech Files, NAR, RAC.

  12. 12. The House of Representatives passed the civil rights bill by a vote of 290 to 130 on February 10, 1964. Robert D. Loevy, To End All Segregation: The Politics of the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 123–127.

  13. 13. Loevy, To End All Segregation, 238, 269, 283; Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 176–177.

  14. 14. “Rights Bill Roll-Call Vote,” New York Times, June 20, 1964.

  15. 15. Loevy, To End All Segregation, 330; “Text of Goldwater Speech on Rights,” New York Times, June 19, 1964.

  16. 16. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1964), 791–792.

  17. 17. Robert D. Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 446–447.

  18. 18. Memo from Roswell B. Perkins to Nelson A. Rockefeller, June 9, 1964, folder 598, 21.2 Hugh Morrow, NAR, RAC.

  19. 19. Stephen Shadegg, What Happened to Goldwater? The Inside Story of the 1964 Republican Campaign (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 64; February 15, 1964, folder 598, 21.2 Hugh Morrow, NAR, RAC.

  20. 20. Anthony Lewis, “Goldwater Foes Falter in Quest for Winning Issue,” New York Times, July 8, 1964.

  21. 21. Testimony of Roy Wilkins before the Resolutions Committee of the Republican National Convention, July 7, 1964, Speakers, Wilkins, Roy—Speeches, 1963–1965, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 27, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-032-0453&accountid=14553.

  22. 22. Lewis, “Goldwater Foes Falter.”

  23. 23. Testimony of Roy Wilkins before the Resolutions Committee of the Republican National Convention, July 7, 1964, Speakers, Wilkins, Roy—Speeches, 1963–1965, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 27, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-032-0453&accountid=14553.

  24. 24. Rockefeller’s Speech to the Platform Committee, RAC, NAR, folder 1171, box 29, Speech Files, RG15.

  25. 25. Robert C. Albright, “Rockefeller Joins Move to Reject ‘Extremism,’ ” Washington Post, July 8, 1964.

  26. 26. Lewis, “Goldwater Foes Falter.”

  27. 27. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “The Southern Republicans,” Washington Post, July 9, 1964.

  28. 28. “Analysis of 1964 Nevada GOP Platform,” May 21, 1964, folder 598, 21.2 Hugh Morrow, NAR, RAC.

  29. 29. Evans and Novak, “The Southern Republicans.”

  30. 30. Barry M. Goldwater, With No Apologies: The Persona and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater (New York: William Morrow, 1979); F. Clifton White, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1967); John H. Kessel, The Goldwater Coalition: Republican Strategies in 1964 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); Shadegg, What Happened to Goldwater?

  31. 31. White, Suite 3505, 386–387; Kessel, The Goldwater Coalition, 107–110.

  32. 32. Anthony Lewis, “Goldwater Ask a Tougher Stand against Red Bloc,” New York Times, July 11, 1964.

  33. 33. Charles McDowell Jr., Campaign Fever: The National Folk Festival, from New Hampshire to November, 1964 (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 100.

  34. 34. “Excerpts from Goldwater Remarks at G.O.P. Platform Session,” New York Times, July 11, 1964.

  35. 35. West Coast Region Monthly Report for June and July, August 7, 1964, West Coast Regional Office, Reports, 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 24, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001491-009-0102&accountid=14553.

  36. 36. Harris Survey, July 1964, retrieved March 20, 2012 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html.

  37. 37. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Current Tactics May Transform the GOP,” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1964.

  38. 38. “The GOP’s Civil Rights Plank,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1964; William Chapman, “Wants Strong Plank,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1964.

  39. 39. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 376.

  40. 40. Evans and Novak, “Current Tactics May Transform the GOP”; “Top Hypocrite,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 23, 1964.

  41. 41. “Text of Sections 1 and 2 of 1964 Republican Platform as Approved by Committee,” New York Times, July 12, 1964.

  42. 42. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Concession to the South: Omission of ‘Enforcement’ from Platform Plank of Civil Rights Significant to Dixieite,” Washington Post, July 19, 1964.

  43. 43. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1964), 813.

  44. 44. “The Goldwater Platform,” New York Times, July 13, 1964.

  45. 45. Report of the Executive Secretary, July and August 1964, July 1, 1964–December 31, 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553; Testimony of Roy Wilkins before the Resolutions Committee of the Republican National Convention, July 7, 1964, Speakers, Wilkins, Roy—Speeches, 1963–1965, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 27, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-032-0453&accountid=14553.

  46. 46. Lewis, “Goldwater Ask a Tougher Stand.”

  47. 47. Anthony Lewis, “G.O.P. Drafts Goldwater Planks; Scranton Pledges Floor Fight; Delegates Begin Sessions Today,” New York Times, July 13, 1964; Richard L. Lyons, “Scranton Girds for Floor Fight,” Washington Post, July 15, 1964.

  48. 48. Tom Wicker, “Goldwater Says He Has 739 Votes,” New York Times, July 13, 1964.

  49. 49. Sandy F. Ray was a prominent Black Republican Baptist minister in Brooklyn who presided over Cornerstone Baptist Church (1944–1980). He was an ally of Rockefeller throughout his governorship. Simeon Booker, “Senator’s Rise Is Compared to the Upshoot of Adolf Hitler,” Jet, July 30, 1964, 24–25; Thurber, Republicans and Race, 190; Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 118.

  50. 50. According to Rick Perlstein, the county convention was moved to an all-white section of town by John Grenier ensuring that the Blacks who had voted for George W. Lee in the past were not present for the vote. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 379; “Memphis—This Week,” Tri-State Defender, July 30, 1960.

  51. 51. Republican Party and Lloyd L. Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Republican National Convention Resulting in the Nomination of Barry M. Goldwater, of Arizona, for President, and the Nomination of William E. Miller, of New York, for Vice President (Washington, DC: Republican National Committee, 1964), 30–31.

  52. 52. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 32, 34; Richard Harris, “Delegate,” New Yorker, September 12, 1964, 136–138; Smith, On His Own Terms, xxi.

  53. 53. “Wake Up America!” New York Amsterdam News, July 25, 1964.

  54. 54. Tom Wicker, “Republicans: The Convention, the Men and Questions,” New York Times, July 12, 1964.

  55. 55. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 190.

  56. 56. Johnson and Porter, National Party Platforms, 683.

  57. 57. Roscoe Drummond, “Goldwater’s Platform: Some Handouts for Unity,” Washington Post, July 15, 1964.

  58. 58. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 229.

  59. 59. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 233, 240–243.

  60. 60. Goodell was likely referring to a quote from Lincoln when he attended a musical performance on April 10, 1865. Lincoln, as reported in numerous newspapers, said, “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. [Applause.] I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. [Laughter and applause.] I now request the band to favor me with its performance.” Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:393, accessed August 29, 2020, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln8/1:840?rgn=div1;view=fulltext; Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 237, 238.

  61. 61. Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964, 452.

  62. 62. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 216.

  63. 63. “NAR’s Address to Republican National Convention,” July 15, 1964, Nelson A. Rockefeller Films, RAC.

  64. 64. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 217–218.

  65. 65. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 218.

  66. 66. Hugh Scott, Come to the Party (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 212–213.

  67. 67. Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1972), 170, Smith, On His Own Terms, xxx.

  68. 68. Richard Harris, “Delegate,” New Yorker, September 12, 1964, 143.

  69. 69. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 226; White, Suite 3505, 399.

  70. 70. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 383.

  71. 71. F. Clifton White Interview, circa 1980s, folder 154, CRP, RAC.

  72. 72. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 368–369.

  73. 73. Before Goldwater’s nomination, several Republicans’ names were placed in nomination, including Scranton, Rockefeller, Romney, Lodge, Hiram L. Fong of Hawaii, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, and Walter H. Judd of Minnesota. The initial ballot tabulation had Goldwater in the lead with 883 votes, followed by Scranton with 214, Rockefeller with 114, Romney with 41, Smith with 27, Judd with 22, Fong with 5, and Lodge with 2. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 366–374.

  74. 74. Booker, “Senator’s Rise,” 24.

  75. 75. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 413, 419.

  76. 76. White, The Making of the President, 1964, 217.

  77. 77. Political scientist Henry Jaffa suggested the line to Goldwater. Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 207.

  78. 78. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 392.

  79. 79. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 418, 415.

  80. 80. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 414.

  81. 81. “Wake Up America!”

  82. 82. Michael W. Flamm argues that Goldwater was one of the first politicians to move the issue of “law and order” from the margins to the center of national politics during his presidential campaign. George Wallace had also used this issue effectively to appeal to northern whites in the spring of 1964. Goldwater first introduced law and order as a campaign issue during the New Hampshire primary in March when he claimed that civil disobedience—the most visible tool of the civil rights movement—and the welfare state were the cause of increased domestic violence in the form of crime and riots. Republican Party and Harkins, Official Report of the Proceedings, 414; Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2, 31–37.

  83. 83. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 206.

  84. 84. Statement from Rockefeller on Goldwater’s Acceptance Speech, folder 1178, Speech Files, NAR, RAC.

  85. 85. Folder 1322, box 49, 24 Political Files, NAR, RAC.

  86. 86. White, The Making of the President, 1964, 208.

  87. 87. Presidential Campaign of 1964, General, 1964, January 1, 1964–December 31, 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 24, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-015-0528&accountid=14553; Roy Wilkins’s Address before the NAACP Branch Freedom Fund Dinner, Saint Louis, Missouri, November 1, 1964, Speakers, Wilkins, Roy—Speeches, 1963–1965, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 27, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-032-0453&accountid=14553.

  88. 88. Survey Prepared by Eugene T. Rossides for Rockefeller, folder 695, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  89. 89. “Rockefeller Calls Goldwater ‘Man of Courage and Integrity,’ ” New York Times, October 7, 1964; Letter to Rockefeller from Jackie Robinson, October 7, 1964, folder 2078, Projects, NAR, RAC; “Goldwater and Rockefeller Exchange Praise in Albany,” New York Times, September 26, 1964.

  90. 90. Julius Duscha, “Republican Moderates Are Prepared to Sit It out This Year,” Washington Post, July 14, 1964.

  91. 91. Report of the Executive Direction for the Month of November, December 14, 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 24, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553.

  92. 92. Michael Oreskes, “The Political Impact of a Landmark Law,” New York Times, July 2, 1989.

  93. 93. Thurber, Republicans and Race, 196; Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 493; Robert David Johnson, All the Way with LBJ: The 1964 Presidential Election (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 225–227.

  94. 94. Excerpts of Remarks by Ray Bliss on November 5, 1965 and November 20, 1965, folder 26, J.2 George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC.

  95. 95. Jack Nelson, “Bliss Ducks Queries on Racism, Birch Society,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1965; Folder 26, J.2 George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC.

  96. 96. Grant Reynolds’s term as a staff specialist for the Republican National Committee was abruptly ended after the July convention. Dean Burch decided that Reynolds’s services would no longer be needed but did not tell Reynolds. Reynolds continued to serve his duties as previously determined and was later forced to send several letters to Burch and Morton asking to be reimbursed for various costs that Burch tried to avoid paying because they occurred after he decided that Reynolds was no longer needed. The NNRA enjoyed some success as it advocated for liberal party philosophy, but after the 1966 midterm elections, the organization’s leadership complained that it did not receive institutional support from the Republican National Committee. Reynolds, Grant, folder 319, J.2 George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC; Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican, 56–66, 93–94.

  97. 97. Speech by Grant Reynolds to Oberlin College Young Republicans Club, February 12, 1965, folder 319, box 51, J.2 George L. Hinman Files, NAR, RAC.

6. Law and Order as “Enlightened Liberalism”

  1. 1. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960), 11–20; Layhmond Robinson, “Governor’s Audience,” New York Times, January 9, 1964.

  2. 2. During the question-and-answer portion of the conference, Mapp v. Ohio, was discussed as an example of a Supreme Court decision that had disadvantaged the police. The 1961 case resulted in the exclusionary rule for illegally obtained evidence becoming a national standard. Transcript of News Conference with Nelson Rockefeller, January 20, 1964, folder 91, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC; ACLU History: Mapp v. Ohio,” ACLU, September 1, 2010, accessed October 16, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-mapp-v-ohio.

  3. 3. Major Robinson, “Leaders and Lawyers Up in Arms about ‘Open Door’ Arrest Bills,” New Pittsburgh Courier, February 1, 1964.

  4. 4. For additional context on the negative relationship between the African American residents of Harlem and the police, which was exacerbated by the racialization of crime see Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in postwar New York (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 124–150; New York State Conference 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed October 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-008-0088&accountid=14553; “Vicious Police Search Bills Passed by Senate,” New Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1964; “Seek Fed. Court Action on ‘Stop-Frisk’ Bills,” New York Amsterdam News, March 14, 1964.

  5. 5. Douglas Dales, “Rockefeller Signs Bills Increasing Powers of Police,” New York Times, March 4, 1964; Layhmond Robinson, “Assembly Votes Anticrime Bills,” New York Times, February 12, 1964.

  6. 6. “A Bad Law,” New York Amsterdam News, March 7, 1964; “Police Short Cuts,” Washington Post, March 6, 1964; Edith Evans Asbury, “Police Sustained in Right to Frisk,” New York Times, July 11, 1964; Garrett Felber, Those Who Don’t Know Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 155–164.

  7. 7. In May 1965, Rockefeller signed a bill to end the use of capital punishment in New York except for the murder of peace officers in the line of duty and the murder of prison guards or inmates by a convict serving a life sentence. Rockefeller also supported an initiative to provide legal services to defendants unable to pay for a lawyer. Smith, On His Own Terms, 466; “The Nation,” New York Times, June 6, 1965.

  8. 8. Memorandum from Eliot H. Lumbard to Dr. William J. Ronan and Robert R. Douglass, August 21, 1966, folder 91, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  9. 9. In this book, the term “narcotics addiction” appears in keeping with the convention of the time; however, the American Psychiatric Association refers to this illness as substance use disorder.

  10. 10. The Kerner Commission identified violent disorders in Birmingham, Savannah, Cambridge, Maryland, Chicago, and Philadelphia in 1963 but said the violence in Birmingham was the most severe. After the uprisings in New York, there was a series of similar incidents in New Jersey, Chicago, and Philadelphia that summer. Historians Michael W. Flamm and Christopher Hayes center the New York uprisings as a pivotal moment for understanding political change in New York in the 1960s. The former examines the uprising as a major influence on the leaders who would spearhead the war on crime, the war on drugs, and the pervasiveness of law-and-order politics in the United States, while the latter explores the inequality and segregation, among other social dynamics, in the community that contributed to the Harlem uprising. Michael W. Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Christopher Hayes, The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 19–20.

  11. 11. CORE initiated a two-hundred-plus-hour investigation of Powell’s murder overseen by its assistant general counsel George Schiffer. After interviewing more than twenty witnesses, the investigators uncovered accounts that refuted the officer’s report and ultimately determined that Gilligan shot Powell needlessly. The 200-pound Gilligan said he shot Powell, who was 122 pounds, twice because the teenager continued to charge at him with a knife despite the first bullet striking his arm and entering his chest. CORE’s Report on the Gilligan Case, September 2, 1964, New York, Miscellany, February 15, 1961–February 1, 1965, Congress of Racial Equality Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252251-023-0461&accountid=14553.

  12. 12. For a history of the uprisings within the long history of police brutality in New York City, see Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 98–143; “Harlem Riots over Death of 15 Yr. Old Boy: Police Kill Man in Harlem Riots,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 20, 1964; Paul L. Montgomery and Francis X. Clines, “Thousands Riot in Harlem Area: Scores Are Hurt,” New York Times, July 19, 1964; Paul L. Montgomery, “Night of Riots Began with Calm Rally,” New York Times, July 20, 1964.

  13. 13. James Farmer, “The Riots—and CORE,” CORE-lator, July–August, 1964, CORE-lator, October, 1947—No. 112, May–June 1965, Congress of Racial Equality Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252251-049-0001&accountid=14553.

  14. 14. Statement on New York Riots, July 27, 1964, 27:39 Statement regarding New York Riots, July 1964, Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1954–1970, ProQuest History Vault, accessed September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001563-020-0249&accountid=14553.

  15. 15. Report of the Executive Secretary, July and August 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553.

  16. 16. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1964), 823.

  17. 17. R. W. Apple Jr., “Violence Flares Again in Harlem: Restraint Urged,” New York Times, July 20, 1964.

  18. 18. “LBJ Orders FBI to Harlem: Johnson Sends FBI to Probe Harlem Riots,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 22, 1964; Peter Kihiss, “City to Increase Negro Policemen on Harlem Duty,” New York Times, July 21, 1964.

  19. 19. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1960), 823–824; Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer, 214.

  20. 20. “Farmer Signs Anti-riot Statement, Declines on Demonstration Moratorium,” CORE-lator, July–August, 1964, May–June 1965, Congress of Racial Equality Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252251-049-0001&accountid=14553.

  21. 21. Statement of Civil Rights Organization Leaders, July 29, 1964, Presidential Campaign of 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001487-015-0528&accountid=14553; Report of the Executive Secretary, July and August 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553.

  22. 22. The NAACP concluded that the Rochester uprising occurred after police tried to arrest a Black teenager for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Soon after, a crowd became involved and violence ensued. Allen also noted that people involved spared the businesses of African Americans and whites who treated Black customers with respect, instead targeting white merchants who sold inferior merchandise and took the profits to the suburbs. Report of the Executive Secretary, July and August 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553.

  23. 23. New York State Archive, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Second Administration, 1963–1966, Reel 17, Subject File 1963–1966, Discrimination, MFB 16/7.

  24. 24. Report of the Executive Secretary, July and August 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553; “Laplois ‘Lake’ Ashford: Remembering and Celebrating Local Sheroes and Heroes,” Southwest Tribune, February 10, 2020, accessed September 7, 2020, http://southwesttribune.com/news/laplois-lake-ashford-remembering-celebrating-local-sheroes-heroes/.

  25. 25. Memo from Richard P. Nathan and Graham T. T. Molitor, folder 690, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  26. 26. NAACP New York State Conference of Branches, August 4, 1964, New York State Conference, 1964, NAACP Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-008-0088&accountid=14553.

  27. 27. Report of the Executive Secretary, July and August 1964, Secretary’s Report, July–December 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 28, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001417-001-0982&accountid=14553.

  28. 28. “Picket Threat Causes Transfer of Policeman Who Killed Boy,” CORE-lator, November–December 1964, CORE-lator, October 1947—No. 112, May–June 1965, Congress of Racial Equality Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252251-049-0001&accountid=14553.

  29. 29. Farmer Press Conference, September 2, 1964, Press Statements by James Farmer (Including Press Conferences, Interviews, etc.), February 30, 1963–November 15, 1964, Congress of Racial Equality Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed on September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252251-031-0838&accountid=14553.

  30. 30. The Weiss Bill, December 14, 1964, New York Miscellany, February 15, 1961–February 1, 1965, Congress of Racial Equality Papers, ProQuest History Vault, accessed September 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252251-023-0461&accountid=14553; Thomas Buckley, “Councilmen Seek Panel on Police,” New York Times, May 16, 1965; Richard Witkin, “Lindsay Proposes Adding Civilians to Police Board,” New York Times, May 21, 1965.

  31. 31. “President Forms Panel to Study Crime Problems,” New York Times, July 27, 1965.

  32. 32. For example, scholars have shown that there was no major crime wave in the 1920s and 1930s, rather a “slowly rising level,” but the perception gained popularity with a series of high-profile although unusual crimes such as the exploits of John Dillinger and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover also popularized the myth of a “crime wave” to raise the profile of his organization. Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 157–158; Ted Robert Gurr, “On the History of Violent Crime in Europe and America,” in Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979), 358–359; Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 273–274.

  33. 33. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 11.

  34. 34. Although Rockefeller’s claim that people with narcotics addiction committed half the crimes in New York City was common—it was often repeated by public figures and went largely unquestioned in the popular media—it was a figure that was difficult to verify. In an article for National Affairs, Hudson Institute cofounder Max Singer asserted that it was highly unlikely that people with illegal narcotics addiction could commit half of the property crimes in New York City. Furthermore, Singer explained that crime numbers were often exaggerated because the public was unlikely to question them if they believed there is a crime problem. He estimated that the common figure of $2 billion to $5 billion in property stolen by people addicted to heroin in the city was likely to be no more than $250 million and even that number was unlikely because it would mean that people with heroin addiction were committing almost all the shoplifting and property theft—which car theft was a third and those addicted to illegal narcotics usually avoided stealing cars—and the perpetrators most often attributed to these crimes were so called street addicts. Max Singer, “The Vitality of Mythical Numbers,” National Affairs 23 (Spring 1971): 3–9.

  35. 35. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 12.

  36. 36. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 13.

  37. 37. Hugh Morrow Interview of Alton Marshall, October 11, 1979, folder 26, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  38. 38. Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 121.

  39. 39. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 166, 172.

  40. 40. Dennis S. Aronowitz, “Civil Commitment of Narcotic Addicts,” Columbia Law Review 67 (March 1967): 407; James A. Inciardi, “Compulsory Treatment in New York: A Brief Narrative History of Misjudgment, Mismanagement,” Journal of Drug Issues 18 (1988): 553.

  41. 41. The California Civil Addict Program, which began in 1961, had survived a Supreme Court challenge the following year in Robinson v. California, where the court found that states could establish compulsory treatment programs for people with narcotics addiction who had committed a crime or threatened the “general health or welfare of its inhabitants.” The court, however, determined it was unconstitutional to imprison persons solely because there was evidence they suffered from an addiction. The Supreme Court found that addiction was an illness like the common cold and that it was cruel and unusual punishment to imprison a person for even a day because of an illness, particularly when there was no evidence that the person had purchased or taken drugs within state lines. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 266–267; M. P. Rosenthal, “The Constitutionality of Involuntary Civil Commitment of Opiate Addicts,” Journal of Drug Issues 18, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 641; FindLaw, “Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962),” 1995–2012, http://laws.findlaw.com/us/370/660.html (May 21, 2012).

  42. 42. Bernard Weinraub, “Confinement of Addicts Proposed by Rockefeller,” New York Times, February 24, 1966.

  43. 43. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 167, 12.

  44. 44. Memorandum from Edward H. Van Ness to Alton G. Marshall, December 16, 1965, folder 497, 10.3 Counsel’s Office, NAR, RAC.

  45. 45. Inciardi, “Compulsory Treatment,” 547–560.

  46. 46. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 12–13; Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1962), 1042; Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1966), 12–13.

  47. 47. David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 231–232, 238.

  48. 48. Natalie Jaffe, “A.C.L.U. Questions the Legality of Mandated Addict Treatment,” New York Times, February 27, 1966; “All Our Fight,” New York Amsterdam News, January 8, 1966.

  49. 49. John Sibley, “State Senate Votes Rockefeller Plan for Compulsory Treatment of Addicts,” New York Times, March 29, 1966.

  50. 50. John Sibley, “Forced Care for Addicts Is Approved by Assembly,” New York Times, March 31, 1966.

  51. 51. “Slow War on Narcotics,” New York Times, March 30, 1966.

  52. 52. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Rockefeller Signs Bill on Narcotics,” New York Times, April 7, 1966.

  53. 53. Inciardi, “Compulsory Treatment,” 553.

  54. 54. President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administrative Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 222.

  55. 55. Thomas P. Ronan, “Rockefeller Makes Candidacy Official,” New York Times, April 9, 1966; Sara Slack, “Harlem Hails Governor as He Launches Campaign,” New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1966; Cathy Aldridge, “Rockefeller to Run Again Negro May Be on His Slate,” New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1966.

  56. 56. Memorandum from Warren E. Gardner to Leslie Slote, August 19, 1966, folder 422, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  57. 57. Memorandum from John D. Silvera to John Wells and Eugene Rossides, June 8, 1966, folder 422, box 30, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  58. 58. “Jackie Robinson Is Appointed Aide to Rockefeller,” New York Times, February 8, 1966; “Alfred A. Duckett, 67, Dead,” New York Times, October 8, 1984.

  59. 59. Jackie Robinson, “Wishes Rocky the Big Win,” Chicago Defender, January 15, 1966.

  60. 60. Glenn Douglas, “How Rockefeller and Robinson Got Together,” Chicago Defender, February 19, 1966, 6.

  61. 61. Letter from Jackie Robinson to Rockefeller, January 12, 1966, folder 392, 35 Ann C. Whitman, Politics, NAR, RAC.

  62. 62. Martin Arnold, “Ex-Aide to Dr. King Appointed State’s Expert on Urban Negro,” New York Times, March 2, 1966.

  63. 63. During a staff meeting in August 1964, William Ronan noted that despite Rockefeller’s talk of an “urban community college in Harlem,” the state’s Department of Higher Education was not interested in implementing the program. Strategy Meeting, August 12, 1966, RAC, NAR, folder 1000, box 74, 5, Campaigns, RG 15.

  64. 64. Arnold, “Ex-Aide to Dr. King.”

  65. 65. “The State versus the Addict,” March 6, 1966, Nelson A. Rockefeller Films, RAC.

  66. 66. “The State versus the Addict.”

  67. 67. Les Matthews, “Harlemites Decry Crime in Streets, Demand Police Act,” New York Amsterdam News, March 5, 1966; “Seek Fed. Court Action on “Stop-Frisk” Bills.”

  68. 68. “Halt Dope Smuggling,” New York Amsterdam News, June 23, 1951; “A Slap at Dope!” New York Amsterdam News, March 1, 1952; Clyde Reid, “East Harlem Disagrees on Crime Decline,” New York Amsterdam News, December 4, 1954.

  69. 69. Black nationalists gained attention in this period for their activism on behalf of the Black community. Although they shared many of the same objectives as the broader community of civil rights leaders, they placed a greater emphasis on racial pride and separatism opposed to integration. Peniel E. Joseph, Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  70. 70. Memorandum from Jack Wells to Eugene T. Rossides, July 30, 1966, folder 422, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  71. 71. Memo from Wyatt Tee Walker to Rockefeller, August 11, 1966, folder 1180, 34 Diane Van Wie Papers, NAR, RAC.

  72. 72. Strategy Meeting, August 12, 1966, folder 1000, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC; Thomas P. Ronan, “Rockefeller Off and Running in His Storefront Drive,” New York Times, August 10, 1966.

  73. 73. Knight did make an attempt to avert the CORE demonstration, which he referred to as “unnecessary,” but it appears to have failed, although it is not certain who demonstrated at the event. Memorandum from Fred W. Knight to Jackie Robinson, August 8, 1966, folder 589, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  74. 74. Memorandum from Wyatt Tee Walker to Rockefeller, August 11, 1966, folder 1180, 34 Diane Van Wie Papers, NAR, RAC; Ronan, “Rockefeller Off and Running.”

  75. 75. Strategy Meeting, August 12, 1966, folder 1000, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  76. 76. Hugh Morrow Interview with William Pfeiffer, April 5, 1980, folder 44, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  77. 77. Correspondence Related to Targeting the Negro Vote, folder 422, 5 Campaign Files, NAR, RAC.

  78. 78. New York State Candidate Standing and Campaign Issues, folder 702, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC; Memo from Lloyd Free to NAR, folder 699, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  79. 79. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 309.

  80. 80. A narrator, not Rockefeller, stated, “Frank O’Connor, the man who led the fight against the New York State Thruway is running for governor. Get in your car, get down to the polls, and vote.” “1966 Campaign Commercials,” Nelson A. Rockefeller Films, RAC.

  81. 81. James M. Perry, The New Politics: The Expanding Technology of Political Manipulation (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1968), 130, 137.

  82. 82. Perry, New Politics, 135.

  83. 83. “1966 Campaign Commercials,” Nelson A. Rockefeller Films, RAC.

  84. 84. September 1966 Poll of Candidate Standing, folder 702, J.1 Politics, NAR, RAC.

  85. 85. Memorandum from Eliot H. Lumbard to Dr. William J. Ronan and Robert R. Douglass, August 21, 1966, folder 91, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  86. 86. Midtown Voters’ Association Letter, folder 422, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  87. 87. Memorandum from Eliot H. Lumbard to Dr. William J. Ronan and Robert R. Douglass, August 21, 1966, folder 91, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  88. 88. “1966 Campaign Commercials,” Nelson A. Rockefeller Films, RAC.

  89. 89. Homer Bigart, “Democrat Back Record,” New York Times, November 2, 1966.

  90. 90. Ralph Blumenthal, “Governor Warns on Street Crimes,” New York Times, November 4, 1966.

  91. 91. Martin Tolchin, “Candidates Flood the Voters with Position Papers but Reveal Few Differences,” New York Times, October 31, 1965.

  92. 92. “Special Candidate Debate,” folder 665, 21.2 Hugh Morrow Files, NAR, RAC.

  93. 93. Emanuel Perlmutter, “Lindsay to Name 4 Civilians Today for Police Board,” New York Times, July 11, 1966.

  94. 94. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 165.

  95. 95. Tamar Jacoby, “The Uncivil History of the Civilian Review Board,” City Journal (Winter 1993), http://www.city-journal.org/article01.php?aid=1151.

  96. 96. “The Rights of Civilians,” New York Times, October 10, 1966; “Success of Civilian Review Board,” New York Times, October 22, 1966.

  97. 97. Bernard Weinraub, “Kennedy Sees Peril to Civilian Control of Police,” New York Times, November 4, 1966.

  98. 98. Woody Klein, Lindsay’s Promise: The Dream That Failed (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 232.

  99. 99. “Roosevelt Says O’Connor Appeases ‘Backlash Vote,’ ” New York Times, November 1, 1966.

  100. 100. Hugh Morrow Interview of Harry O’Donnell, August 9, 1980, folder 36, Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  101. 101. Strategy Meeting, August 23, 1966, folder 1000, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC; Strategy Meeting, August 25, 1966, folder 939, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  102. 102. Strategy Meeting, September 28, 1966, folder 1001, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC; Strategy Meeting, October 4, 1966, folder 1002, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  103. 103. Strategy Meeting, September 29, 1966, folder 1001, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC; Strategy Meeting, October 4, 1966, folder 1002, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC; Strategy Meeting, August 23, 1966, folder 1000, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  104. 104. Strategy Meeting, October 20, 1966, folder 1002, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  105. 105. Memorandum from Reginald B. Jackson to William L. Pfeiffer, November 3, 1966, folder 341, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  106. 106. New York State Candidate Standing and Campaign Issues, folder 702, J.1 Politics NAR, RAC.

  107. 107. Bernard Weinraub, “Police Review Board Panel Killed by Large Majority in City,” New York Times, November 9, 1966.

  108. 108. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 174.

  109. 109. Sidney E. Zion, “ ‘Sleeper Issue’ on Police Referendum Wakes Up,” New York Times, October 30, 1966; Flamm, Law and Order, 76.

  110. 110. “Doubled, Rockefeller Says,” New York Times, November 2, 1966.

  111. 111. “Rocky and the Board,” New York Amsterdam News, October 15, 1966.

  112. 112. Michael Flamm finds that it is unclear if the CCRB and the issue of police brutality had undivided support in the Black community. He cites moderates such as King and the Harlem NAACP’s anti-crime committee as groups that thought street crime was more of a problem than police brutality. Jackie Robinson, “In Praise of 2 Brave Senators,” New York Amsterdam News, September 10, 1966, 15; Flamm, Law and Order, 80.

  113. 113. Hugh Morrow Interview with Nelson Rockefeller, August 16, 1977, folder 8, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  114. 114. Weinraub, “Police Review Board Panel.”

  115. 115. Sydney H. Schanberg, “The Men behind the Bitter Fight over Civilian Review Board,” New York Times, November 6, 1966, 87.

  116. 116. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 168.

  117. 117. Weinraub, “Police Review Board Panel.”

  118. 118. NAACP Press Release, November 11, 1966, New York City Civilian Police Review Board, 1966–1967, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed August 24, 2020https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=009056-008-0955&accountid=14553.

  119. 119. “Rockefeller’s Triumph,” New York Times, November 13, 1966, 213.

  120. 120. Hugh Morrow Interview of Harry O’Donnell, August 9, 1980, folder 36, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  121. 121. Columbia Broadcasting System Vote Profile Analysis found that O’Connor won 44 percent of the Jewish vote compared to 40 percent for Rockefeller and 12 percent for Roosevelt. Roosevelt Richard Witkin, “State Vote Heavy,” New York Times, November 9, 1966; Flora Lewis, “Errorless Campaigning Pays Off for Rockefeller,” Washington Post, November 10, 1966.

  122. 122. Smith, On His Own Terms, 493; “Tally Votes for Governor,” New York Times, November 10, 1966; “Rocky Won Negroes,” New York Amsterdam News, November 12, 1966.

  123. 123. Lewis, “Errorless Campaigning.”

  124. 124. Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991), 59.

  125. 125. “Politics: The White Backlash, 1966,” Newsweek, October 10, 1966, 27.

  126. 126. Harris Survey, October 1966, retrieved June 12, 2012 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html.

  127. 127. John Herbers, “G.O.P. Will Press Racial Disorders as Election Issue,” New York Times, October 4, 1966.

  128. 128. Herbers, “G.O.P. Will Press Racial Disorders”; David S. Broder, “Yorty and Shriver Disagree on Riots,” New York Times, August 18, 1965; Thurber, Republicans and Race, 249.

  129. 129. Homer Bigart, “Governor Spurns G.O.P. Riot Views,” New York Times, October 5, 1966; Walter Rugaber, “Romney Joins G.O.P.’s Attacks on Johnson in Racial Disorders,” New York Times, October 13, 1966.

  130. 130. Twenty-Eighth Annual State Convention, New York State Conference 1964, Papers of the NAACP, ProQuest History Vault, accessed October 2, 2020, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001504-008-0088&accountid=14553.

7. Rockefeller Republicanism’s Last Gasp

  1. 1. United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Essential Kerner Commission Report: The Landmark Study on Race, inequality, and Police Violence, ed. Jelani Cobb and Matthew Guariglia (New York: Liveright, 2021), xviii, 2; Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s (New York: Liveright, 2021), 10.

  2. 2. Mary McGrory, “A Philosophical Rockefeller Is Taking the High Road,” Evening Star, April 19, 1968; Mary McGrory, “Rockefeller and Nixon: Two Contrasting Performances,” Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors no. 519 (May 1968): 2–3; “Disappointing,” Washington Post, April 19, 1968.

  3. 3. Gerald Horne describes what he refers to as “white backlash” to the urban uprisings among moderate whites who saw the violence as undermining their faith in racial liberalism and civil rights legislation. In response to the Kerner Commission’s criticism of the media’s coverage of urban uprisings, ASNE began to examine its failure to diversify newsrooms. In 1970, the organization elected its first Black board member John H. Sengstacke, the editor and publisher of the Chicago Defender. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 280–283; Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 153–188; Ben A. Franklin, “Washington Turmoil Subsides,” New York Times, April 8, 1968; Paul Alfred Pratte, Gods within the Machine: A History of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1923–1993 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 134–136.

  4. 4. Michael A. Cohen, American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 188–191.

  5. 5. Memoranda from George Hinman, folder 153, 35 Ann C. Whitman, NAR, RAC; Memoranda from Jack Wells to Nelson Rockefeller, folder 153, 35 Ann C. Whitman, NAR, RAC; Hugh Morrow Interview of Theodore Braun, November 6, 1979, folder 2, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Hugh Morrow Interview of Joseph Canzeri, August 21, 23, 1979, folder 3, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Hugh Morrow Interview of George Hinman, October 10, 1979, folder 10, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Hugh Morrow Interview of Jack Wells, August 14–15, 1979, folder 23, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1968), 983–984.

  6. 6. Lewis L. Gould, 1968: The Election That Changed America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 67; “Transcript of Governor Rockefeller’s News Conference on Entering G.O.P. Race,” New York Times, May 1, 1968.

  7. 7. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Governor Opens Session; Says Vitale Needs Demand a Tax Rise of $500-Million,” New York Times, January 4, 1968; “Excerpts from Rockefeller’s 10th State of the State Message to the Legislature,” New York Times, January 4, 1968; New York (State), Restoring Credit and Confidence: A Reform Program for New York State and Its Public Authorities: A Report to the Governor (Albany: The Commission, 1976), 114; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 63–64.

  8. 8. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Governor Offers a $6-Billion Plan to Rebuild Slums,” New York Times, February 28, 1968; Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 256–310.

  9. 9. Steven V. Roberts, “Governor Insists City Must Yield,” New York Times, March 8, 1968; “Governor’s Noncompromise,” New York Times, April 3, 1968.

  10. 10. Cary Reich Interview of Wyatt Tee Walker, circa early 1990s, folder 303, CRP, RAC; “Vietnam War,” Martin Luther King Jr. Encyclopedia, updated for digital publication, accessed on June 22, 2023, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/vietnam-war.

  11. 11. John Sibley, “Rockefeller Plan for Slums Voted,” New York Times, April 10, 1968; “Wrong Kind of Memorial,” New York Times, April 11, 1968; Smith, On His Own Terms, 521–526.

  12. 12. Hugh Morrow ASNE Speech Draft 1, April 10, 1968, folder 2303, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Memo from Andrew von Hirsch to Hugh Morrow, April 10, 1968, folder 2303, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  13. 13. Hugh Morrow ASNE Speech Draft 1, April 10, 1968, folder 2303, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  14. 14. Memo from Andrew von Hirsch to Hugh Morrow, April 10, 1968, folder 2303, 33, Speeches, RG 15.

  15. 15. “The Making of a Just America,” April 18, 1968, folder 2303, 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  16. 16. Robert B. Semple Jr., “Nixon Vows Vietnam Silence to Aid Peace Move,” New York Times, April 20, 1968.

  17. 17. Relman Morin, “Poor-Aid Promises Irk Nixon,” Washington Post, April 21, 1968.

  18. 18. “A Gifted Professional,” Washington Post, April 21, 1968.

  19. 19. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 234.

  20. 20. George Lardner Jr. “Rocky, Ignoring Security, Campaigns in Watts Crowd,” Washington Post, June 13, 1968.

  21. 21. Rockefeller also returned to the Washington Press Club after Kennedy’s assassination and delivered a speech that received far better reviews than his earlier appearance. For more on this stage in the campaign, see Smith, On His Own Terms, 532–535; Leroy F. Aarons, “Rockefeller Seeks Kennedy Mantle,” Washington Post, June 12, 1968; Marquis Childs, “Rocky Battling against Long Odds,” Washington Post, June 12, 1968.

  22. 22. James Reston, “New York: Rockefeller Comes Out of His Trance,” New York Times, June 12, 1968.

  23. 23. Louis Harris, “Rockefeller Gaining with Non-Republican Voters,” Washington Post, July 2, 1968.

  24. 24. A week before the GOP convention in Miami, 46 percent of respondents to a Harris survey said Rockefeller did not have a better chance of winning in November compared to other Republicans, while 37 percent said he did. Gallup Poll (AIPO), July 1968, retrieved July 14, 2016 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University; Harris Survey, July 1968, retrieved July 14, 2016 from the iPoll Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University.

  25. 25. “Middling conservative” is a label conceived by political scientist Clinton Rossiter, who in 1955 defined “the contemporary right” as consisting of four categories: “the lunatic right,” “ultraconservatives,” “middling conservatives,” and “liberal conservatives.” Historian David Greenberg writes that Rockefeller, along with other figures such as Earl Warren, fell into the last category. David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003), 6–7.

  26. 26. The number of Black delegates—fifteen in 1964—rose to twenty-six. Elia Kazan, “Face to Face with the G.O.P.,” New York Magazine, August 26, 1968, 20, 22.

  27. 27. Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 50.

  28. 28. In 1962, the words “Families with” were added because many people believed the program discouraged marriage. Susan W. Blank and Barbara B. Blum, “A Brief History of Work Expectations for Welfare Mothers,” Future of Children 1, no. 1 (Spring 1997), accessed October 25, 2012, http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/docs/07_01_02.pdf; and “The Social Security Act of 1935,” accessed October 25, 2012, http://www.ssa.gov/history/35act.html.

  29. 29. Governor’s Conference on Public Welfare, Arden House 1967, Ad Hoc Steering Committee, Report from the Steering Committee of the Arden House Conference on Public Welfare, Appointed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller; Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the New York State Board of Social Welfare (Albany: n.p., 1968).

  30. 30. Peter Kihiss, “Conference Assays Causes of the Welfare Problem,” New York Times, November 6, 1967; “Welfare Industrialists,” New York Times, November 6, 1967.

  31. 31. Governor’s Conference on Public Welfare, Report.

  32. 32. “Welfare Industrialists,” New York Times, November 6, 1967; Wilbur J. Cohen and Robert M. Ball, “Social Security Amendments of 1967: Summary and Legislative History,” Bulletin, February 1968, 3–19; Max Frankel, “President Signs Bill to Increase Pensions of Aged,” New York Times, January 3, 1968.

  33. 33. City-Wide was founded in April 1966 as a collaboration between previously established welfare rights organizations including the Brooklyn Welfare Recipients Leagues, Strycker’s Bay Neighborhood Council, Mobilization for Youth, and fifty other local organizations. For more on Washington, see Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1–4, 14, 26, 133–135; Peter Kihiss, “Governor Picks 12 Leaders to Seek Welfare Solutions,” New York Times, November 4, 1967; Premilla Nadesen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005).

  34. 34. Domestic Research Staff to Rockefeller on the Negative Income Tax, May 29, 1968, folder 27, G DNA, NAR, RAC.

  35. 35. Domestic Research Staff to Rockefeller on the Negative Income Tax, May 17, 1968, folder 27, G DNA, NAR, RAC; Domestic Research Staff to Rockefeller on the Negative Income Tax, May 29, 1968, folder 27, G DNA, NAR, RAC.

  36. 36. NAR Speakers Kit, Welfare & Poverty, July 10, 1968, folder 27, G DNA, NAR, RAC.

  37. 37. Robert B. Semple Jr., “A ‘Crisis of Spirit’ in U.S., Nixon Says,” New York Times, February 4, 1968.

  38. 38. Tom Wicker, “In the Nation: A Coalition for What?” New York Times, May 19, 1968; Positions on the Issues, 1968, folder 1717, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC; Arlen J. Large, “The Braintrusters,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 1968.

  39. 39. Domestic Research Staff to Rockefeller on the Negative Income Tax, May 29, 1968, folder 27, G DNA, NAR, RAC.

  40. 40. Positions on the Issues, 1968, folder 1717, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC; Warren Weaver, “Four Hearties of the Good Ship G.O.P.,” New York Times, November 27, 1966.

  41. 41. “Excerpts From the Republican Platform Proposed by Committee on Resolutions,” New York Times, August 5, 1968.

  42. 42. Warren Weaver Jr., “Rockefeller Bars Relief Residency,” New York Times, March 9, 1961; “Rockefeller, Mahoney Lock Horns,” New York Herald Tribune, March 9, 1961.

  43. 43. Press Release of Bill Veto, March 22, 1960, folder 7, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  44. 44. Transcript of Press Conference, March 23, 1960, folder 7, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  45. 45. Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–11.

  46. 46. James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1900–1985 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

  47. 47. “Newburgh Manager Vows Fight to Keep New Welfare Curb,” New York Times, June 22, 1961; “State Calls Newburgh Code Illegal,” New York Times, June 23, 1961.

  48. 48. The New York Amsterdam News refuted the idea that the community’s African Americans were all recent migrants. It reported that people of African descent had resided in Newburgh since Dutch and English burghers settled there in the seventeenth century. Thom Blair, “The Newburgh Story,” New York Amsterdam News, July 22, 1961.

  49. 49. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 129; Blair, “The Newburgh Story.”

  50. 50. “Newburgh Welfare Rules,” New York Times, June 24, 1961.

  51. 51. Warren Weaver Jr., “Governor Scores Newburgh’s Code,” New York Times, July 14, 1961.

  52. 52. The New York Amsterdam News reported in July 1961 that the “crisis” may have been part of an attempt to clear out the Black neighborhoods, which were slated for razing as part of a development plan that had been awarded federal urban renewal funds. Blair, “The Newburgh Story”; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 130.

  53. 53. “Panel in N.Y. Asks Welfare Reform,” New York Times, February 4, 1963; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 128–130.

  54. 54. Weaver, “Governor Scores Newburgh’s Code”; Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 283.

  55. 55. The Harlem meeting was also attended by leaders such as Constance Motley of the NAACP. Keith R. Johnson, “State Senate Passes Welfare Compromise,” New York Herald Tribune, March 22, 1961; Charles N. Quinn, “N.Y. Relief Residence Bill Is Voted,” New York Herald Tribune, March 24, 1961; Douglas Dales, “Governor Favors Bill on Welfare,” New York Times, April 8, 1961; Charles N. Quinn, “Welfare Bill Is Signed by Rockefeller,” New York Herald Tribune, April 15, 1961; “Rockefeller Meets with Harlemites,” New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1961, 1; Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, April 7, 1961, folder 146, 25 Public Relations, NAR, RAC.

  56. 56. Moreland Commission on Welfare, Public Welfare in the State of New York (Albany: Executive Chamber, 1963), 1–9; “Panel in N.Y. Asks Welfare Reform,” 4; “The State and Welfare,” New York Times, February 16, 1963.

  57. 57. Moreland Commission on Welfare, Public Welfare, 16–18; Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 283.

  58. 58. “Goldwater Hails Newburgh Plan as Welfare Ideal for All Cities,” New York Times, July 19, 1961.

  59. 59. Governor Rockefeller Commercial, taped January 18, 1964, folder 123, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  60. 60. Poverty Meeting, March 17, 1964, folder 122, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC; Robert A. Caro, Passage of Power: The Lyndon Johnson Years (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 547.

  61. 61. Marjorie Hunters, “Antipoverty Bill Wins Final Vote in House, 226–184,” New York Times, August 9, 1964.

  62. 62. Strategy Meeting, August 19, 1966, folder 1000, 5 Campaigns, NAR, RAC.

  63. 63. Hugh Morrow Interview of Alton Marshall, October 11, 1979, folder 26, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  64. 64. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Governor Proposes Curb on Spending,” New York Times, January 9, 1969.

  65. 65. James Reston, “Nelson Rockefeller on Fiscal Crisis,” New York Times, January 10, 1969.

  66. 66. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 204.

  67. 67. By 1972, one in every six residents of New York City was on the welfare rolls. Most welfare recipients in the state—70 percent in 1973—resided in New York City, exacerbating the traditional upstate-downstate divide in the state. The New York Times reported that there were whole neighborhoods in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx, and East Harlem where half of all the residents were on welfare. Sol Stern, “The Screws Are on the Welfare System,” New York Times, October 22, 1972; Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 205.

  68. 68. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 284.

  69. 69. David A. Andelman, “Welfare Residency Law: Vetoed by Rockefeller in 1960, Advocated by Him in 1971,” New York Times, March 29, 1971.

  70. 70. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 284.

  71. 71. Sydney H. Schanberg, “In New York, the Ax Is Heaviest on Welfare,” New York Times, April 6, 1969; Peter Kihiss, “Despite Talk of ‘Cuts,’ State Spending Is Up 16%,” New York Times, April 2, 1969.

  72. 72. Vincent Butler, “N.Y. Holds Its 1st State Primary Tuesday,” Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1970.

  73. 73. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Shirley’s Little Game,” Boston Globe, June 18, 1970; “The Primary Elections,” Newsday, June 25, 1970.

  74. 74. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 340; David L. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 376–377; Herbert E. Alexander, Money in Politics (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1972), 27.

  75. 75. Richard Reeves, “This Is the Battle of the Titans?” New York Times, November 1, 1970.

  76. 76. Poll Data about Gubernatorial Candidates, folder 63, J.3 Oscar M. Ruebhausen, NAR, RAC; Richard Reeves, “Is That Really Nelson Rockefeller Crawling to Richard Nixon?” New York Magazine, October 18, 1971, 62–63; Smith, On His Own Terms, 563–566.

  77. 77. Governor Rockefeller Campaign Spots, 1970, Audiovisual Materials, 39 1945–1976, NAR, RAC.

  78. 78. Excerpts of Meeting between Governor Rockefeller and Labor Leader, October 27, 1970, Audiovisual Materials, 39 1945–1976, NAR, RAC; Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 349.

  79. 79. Reeves, “Is That Really Nelson Rockefeller?” 70; Endorsement: Judge Samuel Liebowitz [sic] Endorses Nelson A. Rockefeller: “Law & Order,” October 21, 1970, Audiovisual Materials, 39 1945–1976, NAR, RAC.

  80. 80. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 345.

  81. 81. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 345.

  82. 82. Wyatt Tee Walker Memo to Rockefeller, December 30, 1969, folder 1180, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC.

  83. 83. Emma Harrison, “Goldberg Assails Welfare Critics, Presses 4-Point Remedy,” New York Times, November 30, 1961.

  84. 84. “A ‘Crisis’ Seen,” New York Times, June 3, 1970.

  85. 85. “Goldberg-Paterson,” New York Amsterdam News, October 24, 1970.

  86. 86. “Rockefeller for Governor,” New York Times, October 25, 1970.

  87. 87. “Tally of Votes for Governor and Other Statewide and County Offices,” New York Times, November 5, 1970; Richard Reeves, “4-Term Governor,” New York Times, November 4, 1970; Steven R. Weisman, “Roman Catholics Gave Backing to Conservatives,” New York Times, November 5, 1970.

  88. 88. William Nack and Edward Hershey, “Ethnic Shifts Felt in State Votes on LI,” Newsday, November 6, 1970.

  89. 89. “Tally of Votes for Governor,” New York Times, November 10, 1966; “Tally of Votes for Governor and Other Statewide and County Offices”; Reeves, “4-Term Governor.”

  90. 90. “Tally of Votes for Governor and Other Statewide and County Offices,” 41; Hugh Morrow Interview of Joseph Canzeri, August 21, 23, 1979, folder 3, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Hugh Morrow Interview of Fiorvante (Fred) Perrotta, March 11, 1980, folder 46, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Smith, On His Own Terms, 574; Reeves, “Is That Really Nelson Rockefeller?”

  91. 91. Hugh Morrow Interview of Fiorvante (Fred) Perrotta, March 11, 1980, folder 46, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; “Tally of Votes for Governor and Other Statewide and County Offices.”

  92. 92. Hugh Morrow Interview of Fiorvante (Fred) Perrotta, March 11, 1980, folder 46, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Hugh Morrow Interview of Joseph Canzeri, August 21, 23, 1979, folder 3, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC; Karl E. Meyer, “New York’s Buckley Rewrote the Rules,” Washington Post, November 5, 1970.

  93. 93. Sullivan, New York and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, 114–125; Maurice Carroll, “Conservatives Eye ’73 Mayoral Race,” New York Times, November 6, 1970; Meyer, “New York’s Buckley Rewrote the Rules.”

  94. 94. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Unity, Freedom and Peace: A Blueprint for Tomorrow (New York: Random House, 1968), 3.

  95. 95. Rockefeller, Unity, Freedom and Peace, 7.

  96. 96. Rockefeller, Unity, Freedom and Peace, 7, 13.

  97. 97. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg, 379.

  98. 98. Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President,” 333.

8. The Twilight of Rockefeller-Era New York

  1. 1. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1973), 20–22; Memorandum from Hugh Morrow to Nelson Rockefeller, January 15, 1973, folder 354, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  2. 2. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 132.

  3. 3. Press Conference with Nelson Rockefeller, January 22, 1973, folder 886, 21.4 Morrow Transcripts, NAR, RAC.

  4. 4. Press Conference with Nelson Rockefeller, January 22, 1973, folder 886, 21.4 Morrow Transcripts, NAR, RAC.

  5. 5. Hugh Morrow Interview of Gene Spagnoli, February 7, 1980, folder 38, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  6. 6. While the term “addiction” was common in the lexicon of the 1960s, drug researchers often avoided it by the early 1950s because of the stigma associated with it. By the 1970s, researchers preferred to use terms such as “drug abuse” and “chemical dependency” rather than addiction. Researchers often considered addiction to be a public health problem, but few beyond scientific circles saw it as anything other than a crime or disease. Nancy D. Campbell, Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 3–4.

  7. 7. Khalil Gibran Muhammad examines the criminalization of African Americans in urban spaces dating back to the nineteenth century. He shows how crime statistics during the migration of Africans Americans in the Progressive Era were used to associate blackness to criminality and pathology, a linkage that would long outlive the era and continue into the twenty-first century. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  8. 8. Richard Severo, “Narcotic Unit Assailed by Ohrenstein and Ottinger,” New York Times, April 22, 1969; Richard Severo, “Addicts and the State,” New York Times, April 21, 1969; “7 Addicts Escape from State Agents of Narcotics Center,” New York Times, April 19, 1967.

  9. 9. Bernard Weinraub, “Confinement of Addicts Proposed by Rockefeller,” New York Times, February 24, 1966.

  10. 10. The NACC’s emphasis on incarceration took place within the context of deinstitutionalization or transinstituonalization when asylums were replaced with community-based facilities. The 1960s and 1970s were an era when state facilities to treat mental illness and other health problems like addiction were in flux. While historian Anne E. Parsons’ counters the argument that people who suffered from mental illness ended up in an asylum-to-prison pipeline, she notes that many Americans sought out alternatives to prisons while also losing faith in rehabilitation. “The United States,” explains Parsons, “progressively relied on imprisoning its citizens as the main response to social disorder through its war on crime and war on drugs and the increased policing and surveillance of African American communities.” Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinsitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 4–5, 98–122.

  11. 11. Inciardi notes that even voluntary civil commitment cases were often locked in cells that were patrolled by ex–prison guards. He also says that in the era of a nascent prisoners’ rights movement, all commitments were “subject to beatings and solitary confinement for disciplinary infractions.” Inciardi, “Compulsory Treatment,” 553.

  12. 12. Richard Severo, “Addicts and the State: Aim Unfulfilled,” New York Times, April 21, 1969; “Guards Get Clubs after Addicts Riot,” New York Times, June 24, 1968.

  13. 13. Richard Severo, “How to Treat Addicts,” New York Times, February 23, 1971.

  14. 14. “Albany Is Shifting Its Narcotics Chief to Youth Division,” New York Times, June 17, 1971; Letter from Milton Luger to Nelson Rockefeller, June 21, 1971, folder 338, 21.2 Hugh Morrow Series, NAR, RAC.

  15. 15. Inciardi, “Compulsory Treatment,” 556.

  16. 16. During the NACC’s first three years, methadone maintenance programs received $6 million compared to $15 million for drug-free treatment facilities and $90 million for the agency’s rehabilitation program. John M. Martin, Stephen M. David, and Barbara Lavin, A Political History of the New York State Narcotic Addiction Control Commission, 1976–September, 1972 (Bronx: Institute for Social Research, Fordham University, 1972), 30–34.

  17. 17. Frank Lynn, “State to Reduce Help to Addicts,” New York Times, April 23, 1971.

  18. 18. Paul L. Montgomery, “Democrats Study Cutback in State Narcotic Control,” New York Times, December 12, 1971.

  19. 19. Peter Kihiss, “30% of the Drug Addicts in State-Ordered Treatment Programs Drop Out,” New York Times, August 7, 1972.

  20. 20. Martin, David, and Lavin, Political History, 2.

  21. 21. James M. Markham, “Critics Find State’s Program for Addict Care Is in Disarray,” New York Times, September 18, 1972.

  22. 22. Inciardi, “Compulsory Treatment,” 554.

  23. 23. Martin, David, and Lavin, Political History, 13–14.

  24. 24. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1971), 39; Governor Rockefeller Commercial, January 18, 1964, folder 123, 17 Issue Books, NAR, RAC.

  25. 25. Eileen Shanahan, “Jobless Rate Up to 6% in Nation,” New York Times, January 9, 1971; “City Notes Unemployment Rise, but Look for Economic Growth,” New York Times, January 11, 1971; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 147

  26. 26. Of the over one million people living on welfare in New York City, it was reported that at the time of the story, five thousand people were living in one hundred different welfare hotels around the city. Hainsworth said she would prefer to live in her own apartment; her main complaint about the Waldorf was that it was far from her children’s school district and she had to travel to Brooklyn to find food she could afford. John Blau writes that although seemingly counterintuitive, under normal circumstances, the city saved money by using welfare hotels in emergencies, rather than increase the $400-a-month-maximum housing allowance for all recipients. “Night at the Waldorf,” Sumter Daily Item, January 19, 1971; “Welfare Family Found Living at Waldorf,” Eugene Register-Guard, January 21, 1971; “Five Live on Welfare at Waldorf,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1971; “Family on Welfare Living at Waldorf,” Associated Press, January 21, 1971; “New York Welfare Row Grows,” Boston Globe, January 22, 1971; Fred Powledge, “Waldorf Rate Was Practically a Bargain,” New York Times, January 31, 1971; “Emma Lee Walks 2 Blocks to Bathe,” Boston Globe, January 31, 1971; Richard Reeves, “Who Really Runs New York City?” New York Magazine, January 3, 1972, 27; John Blau, The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 158–159.

  27. 27. Frank Lynn, “Governor Weighs Drastic Changes to Curb Welfare,” New York Times, March 10, 1971.

  28. 28. Rome-Utica Town Meeting, March 21, 1969, folder 626, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  29. 29. News Conference of Nelson Rockefeller, March 15, 1971, folder 1018, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  30. 30. Michael G. Long, ed., First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson (New York: Times Books, 2007), 306–308.

  31. 31. “N.A.A.C.P. Demands Legislators Meet,” New York Times, October 27, 1969; “NAACP Hits Cuts in Budget,” New York Amsterdam News, April 10, 1971.

  32. 32. Thomas P. Ronan, “Rockefeller Urges Year’s Residency in Welfare Cases,” New York Times, March 28, 1971; “Special Message Recommending Complete Reorganization of the State Welfare Program,” March 29, 1971, Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1971), 229.

  33. 33. Ronan, “Rockefeller Urges Year’s Residency.”

  34. 34. Francis X. Clines, “The Welfare Tangle: Governor Seeks to Cut Both Abuses and Taxes, but Critics See Little Savings,” New York Times, March 29, 1971.

  35. 35. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1971), 40.

  36. 36. Frank Lynn, “$100-Million in City Aid Cut by Leaders in Albany,” New York Times, March 28, 1971.

  37. 37. Francis X. Clines, “Rockefeller Signs Bills Reforming Welfare System,” New York Times, April 8, 1971.

  38. 38. Remarks of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller at the Presidents’ Club, April 5, 1971, folder 1024, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC.

  39. 39. “City Is Studying ‘Incentive’ Relief Plans,” New York Times, October 10, 1971.

  40. 40. Kornbluh, Battle for Welfare Rights, 165.

  41. 41. John Darnton, “State Confirms It Has Dropped ‘Brownie Points’ Welfare Plan,” New York Times, November 5, 1971

  42. 42. Willie Hamilton, “State Inspector Scores Flagrant Abuses in Local Welfare Program,” New York Amsterdam News, November 20, 1971.

  43. 43. Social Security Amendments of 1971, United States Senate, 92nd Cong. 2162 (1971) (Statement of Nelson A. Rockefeller, Governor of the State of New York).

  44. 44. Social Security Amendments of 1971.

  45. 45. “Is Welfare Out of Control?” New York Times, March 14, 1972; “Working for Welfare,” New York Times, September 2, 1972.

  46. 46. “6% Eligible Given Training or Jobs,” New York Times, September 6, 1972; Peter Kihiss, “17% on Welfare Held Ineligible,” New York Times, October 11, 1973.

  47. 47. Memo from Morrow to Rockefeller, March 2, 1972, folder 338, 21.2 Hugh Morrow Series, NAR, RAC.

  48. 48. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Rockefeller Signs Bill on Narcotics,” New York Times, April 7, 1966.

  49. 49. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1973), 20–22.

  50. 50. Rockefeller hoped to extend the authority of the NACC to give it the authority to make civil commitments for the use of amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, hashish, and other hard drugs. He also called for the expansion of drug rehabilitation programs for inmates in state correctional facilities. This was to accommodate the governor’s other proposal that drug users who were deemed uninterested in rehabilitation to be sent to prison rather than a NACC rehabilitation center. Rockefeller also wanted to increase the security in certain NACC facilities. Public Papers of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1973), 22–27, 42–43.

  51. 51. Alan Chartock, “Narcotics Addiction: The Politics of Frustration,” in Governing New York State: The Rockefeller Years, ed. Robert H. Connery and Gerald Benjamin (New York: Academy of Political Science, 1974), 241.

  52. 52. Persico, Imperial Rockefeller, 141–143.

  53. 53. Memorandum from Nelson Rockefeller to Hugh Morrow and Ron Maiorana, January 9, 1973, folder 354, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  54. 54. Rockefeller’s associate William Fine, the president of Bonwit Teller, went to Japan to study the nation’s drug policies, either of his own accord or at the suggestion of Rockefeller, depending on the account. William Kennedy, “Rocky Is 64, Going on 35,” New York Times, April 23, 1973; Kohler-Hausmann, “ ‘The Attila the Hun Law,’ ” 88; Persico, Imperial Rockefeller, 144.

  55. 55. Hugh Morrow Interview with Gene Spagnoli, February 7, 1980, folder 38, Q Hugh Morrow Series, NAR, RAC.

  56. 56. William Raspberry, “Rockefeller, Heroin and Rat-Burning,” Washington Post, January 8, 1973; William Raspberry, “Rockefeller’s Stand on Drugs: Would It Do Any Good?” Washington Post, January 10, 1973.

  57. 57. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 269; David Burnham, “Disparities Found in Sentencing of City’s Big Pushers,” New York Times, December 2, 1971; Chartock, “Narcotics Addiction,” 241.

  58. 58. Martin, David, and Lavin, Political History, 32.

  59. 59. “Stiff Drug Terms Backed in a Poll,” New York Times, April 26, 1970.

  60. 60. The poll collected data from 692 respondents, 517 of whom were Democrats. Memorandum from Jim Cannon to Nelson Rockefeller, February 12, 1973, folder 944, 34 Diane Van Wie, NAR, RAC.

  61. 61. Gallup’s national poll found that 13 percent of respondents in a national poll cited crime as the worst problem in their community. Crime was considered the worst problem followed by issues related to transportation at 11 percent. George Gallup, “67% Back Life Terms for Hard Drug Sellers,” Washington Post, February 11, 1973; “Public Supports Drug-Pusher Law,” New York Times, February 11, 1973; Gallup Poll (AIPO), December 1972, retrieved March 15, 2017 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University.

  62. 62. George Gallup, “Crime Is Rated Worst Urban Problem,” Washington Post, January 16, 1973.

  63. 63. Rockefeller Remarks before the Association of Districts Meeting, February 6, 1973, RAC, NAR, Folder 894, Box 80, Series 21.4, Morrow Transcripts, RG 15; Lesley Oelsner, “Governor to Seek Death Sentences,” New York Times, June 21, 1973, 13; “Rockefeller Says He Would Not Veto Death Penalty Bill,” New York Times, September 12, 1973.

  64. 64. Frank Lynn, “Rivals for Governor Cite Drug Issue,” New York Times, September 19, 1970.

  65. 65. S. J. Micciche, “The Campaign: Nixon Claims He’s Winning War on Crime,” Boston Globe, October 16, 1972; “Nixon to Ask for Harsher Laws to Deal with Narcotics Traffic,” New York Times, October 18, 1972.

  66. 66. William E. Farrell, “A Tough Program by Lindsay,” New York Times, February 18, 1973.

  67. 67. Chartock, “Narcotics Addiction,” 246.

  68. 68. William E. Farrell, “Legislators Fire Questions at Governor on Drug Plan,” New York Times, January 31, 1971; William E. Farrell, “Legislators Seek a Compromise on Governor’s Drug Penalties,” New York Times, February 24, 1973.

  69. 69. Memorandum from Morrow and Maiorana to NAR, January 9, 1973, folder 354, 21.2 Hugh Morrow Series, NAR, RAC.

  70. 70. Kennedy, “Rocky Is 64.”

  71. 71. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 272.

  72. 72. William E. Farrell, “Revised Narcotics Measure Is Voted 80–65 in Assembly,” New York Times, May 4, 1973.

  73. 73. William E. Farrell, “Governor Signs His Drug Bills and Assails the Critics Again,” New York Times, May 9, 1973.

  74. 74. Farrell, “Revised Narcotics Measure.”

  75. 75. David Burnham, “New State Penal Law Takes Effect on Friday,” New York Times, August 30, 1967.

  76. 76. Sydney E. Zion, “State Penal Bill Widely Criticized,” New York Times, June 5, 1965.

  77. 77. General Social Survey 1973, February 1973, retrieved March 13, 2017 from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University.

  78. 78. Lesley Oelsner, “A Study Shows Leniency Is the Rule in City Court,” New York Times, September 26, 1972.

  79. 79. Lesley Oelsner, “Wide Disparities Mark Sentences Here,” New York Times, September 27, 1972.

  80. 80. Arnold H. Lubasch, “Major Disparities in U.S. Sentencing Here Are Found in a Study,” New York Times, January 14, 1973.

  81. 81. New York (State), Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, Its Causes, Control, & Effect on Society (Albany: The Committee, 1973), 8.

  82. 82. Robert D. McFadden, “State Study Deplores System of Justice,” New York Times, January 16, 1972.

  83. 83. New York (State), Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, 19–20.

  84. 84. “The Politics of Drugs,” New York Times, January 9, 1973.

  85. 85. New York (State), Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, 51–52.

  86. 86. “The Politics of Drugs.”

  87. 87. Hugh Morrow Interview of Sol Neil Corbin, November 30, 1979, folder 50, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  88. 88. C. Gerald Fraser, “Harlem Response Mixed,” New York Times, January 5, 1973; Steven Lee Myers, “Benjamin W. Watkins, 73, Dies: Podiatrist and Harlem Leader,” New York Times, August 27, 1995.

  89. 89. Letter from Dr. Benjamin W. Watkins to Nelson Rockefeller, February 5, 1973, folder 354, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  90. 90. Fraser, “Harlem Response Mixed.”

  91. 91. Amanda Nash, “Charlayne Hunter-Gault (b. 1942),” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last edited February 25, 2021, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/charlayne-hunter-gault-b-1942/; Charlayne Hunter, “Fear Is Steady Companion of Many Harlem Residents,” New York Times, June 3, 1971.

  92. 92. Hunter, “Fear Is Steady Companion.”

  93. 93. Charlayne Hunter, “Police Seek ‘Bridges’ to Harlem,” New York Times, July 20, 1971.

  94. 94. Farrell, “Legislators Fire Questions at Governor”; New York (State). Legislature. Senate. Standing Committee on Codes, Questions [to] and Answers [from] Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller: Following Testimony at Joint Hearing, Senate and Assembly Codes Committees by Members in State Legislative Building, Albany, New York on January 30, 1973 (Albany: n.p., 1973), 62–65.

  95. 95. Martin, David, and Lavin, Political History, 19; John Sibley, “State Senate Votes Rockefeller Plan for Compulsory Treatment of Addicts,” New York Times, March 29, 1966; John Sibley, “State Tries New Answer to Riddle: How to Cure Addiction,” New York Times, April 3, 1966.

  96. 96. “Action on Albany Front: Black Legislators Ready,” New York Amsterdam News, January 13, 1973.

  97. 97. Galiber had a well-known position on narcotics, which included early support of methadone maintenance programs, the legalization of some drugs, and opposition to mandatory sentencing laws. David Stout, “Joseph L. Galiber Dies at 71: Political Power for 3 Decades,” New York Times, November 22, 1995; William E. Farrell, “Governor’s Bill on Drug Traffic Voted by Senate,” New York Times, April 28, 1973; New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, A Look at the History of the Legislature, 1917–2014 (Albany: New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, 2014), 21.

  98. 98. New York (State). Legislature. Senate. Standing Committee on Codes, Questions [to] and Answers [from] Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, 51–52.

  99. 99. For scholarship that focuses on African American responses to the disproportionate impact of harsher sentencing on Black communities see Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 162–173; Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2015); James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

  100. 100. The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption (New York: George Braziller, 1973), I; Michael F. Armstrong, They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1.

  101. 101. Knapp Commission Report, 4, 91–92, 112–113, 67; Schneider, Smack, 108–115; Armstrong, They Wished They Were Honest, 1–2.

  102. 102. Armstrong, They Wished They Were Honest, 82.

  103. 103. Examples from the Chicago Defender and the Los Angeles Sentinel include Emily F. Gibson, “Is Methadone a ‘Cure’ for Heroin Addiction?” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 25, 1973; E. Duke McNeil, “Drug Laws Can’t Cope,” Chicago Defender, September 4, 1973. The Baltimore Afro-American published a skeptical editorial on September 15, 1973: “N.Y. Dope Law,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 15, 1973.

  104. 104. Raspberry, “Rockefeller, Heroin and Rat-Burning.”

  105. 105. “Rockefeller and Narcotics,” New York Amsterdam News, January 13, 1973.

  106. 106. “A Warning,” New York Amsterdam News, August 11, 1973.

  107. 107. “The New Drug Law,” New York Amsterdam News, September 1, 1973.

  108. 108. When Jones died in October 1992, the New York Times identified him in an obituary as a “former New York State judge who helped Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller shape the anti-drug law of 1973.” H. Carl McCall, “Living with the New Drug Law,” New York Amsterdam News, September 8, 1973; Maurice Carroll, “Governor Picks 16 Judges to Act on New Drug Laws,” New York Times, August 28, 1973; Wolfgang Saxon, “Howard Jones, Rockefeller Aide for Drug Control, Is Dead at 69,” New York Times, October 14, 1992.

  109. 109. Charlayne Hunter, “Reform Proposed in Fight on Crime,” New York Times, October 14, 1973.

  110. 110. Hugh Morrow Interview of Sol Neil Corbin, November 30, 1979, folder 50, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  111. 111. Cary Reich Interview of Wyatt Tee Walker, circa early 1990s, folder 303, CRP, RAC.

9. Rockefeller Unmoored

  1. 1. “A Crowd Jeers Rockefeller Cut,” Baltimore Sun, March 8, 1969; Agis Salpukas, “Quip by Governor Draws Protests,” New York Times, March 8, 1969; Joseph Novitski, “Wealthy Suburbs Feeding the Poor,” New York Times, March 23, 1969; “Poverty Thrift Shop Off Well in Westbury,” Newsday, May 28, 1969.

  2. 2. Salpukas, “Quip by Governor”; “Negro Woman Says Rocky Insulted Her,” Washington Post, March 8, 1969.

  3. 3. For more on white Americans’ aversion to federal spending, see David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Michelmore, Tax and Spend.

  4. 4. Jackie Robinson Letter to Nelson Rockefeller, April 10, 1969, folder 249, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  5. 5. Nelson Rockefeller Letter to Jackie Robinson, April 25, 1969, folder 249, 21.2 Hugh Morrow General Files, NAR, RAC.

  6. 6. New York (State), Attica, the Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica: Plus 64 Pages of On-the-Scene Photographs (New York: Praeger, 1972), xiv–xv, 79–82, 104–105; Tom Wicker, A Time to Die (New York: Quadrangle, 1975), 7, 6.

  7. 7. Michael T. Kaufman, “Attica Demands Presented to Correction Chief in July,” New York Times, September 19, 1971; Wicker, A Time to Die, 6–9; “Two Men from Cell Block D,” Time, September 27, 1971.

  8. 8. Klein, Empire State, 689; New York (State), Attica, xii; Wicker, A Time to Die, 15–16.

  9. 9. Fred Ferretti, “Men from Harlem and Bed-Stuy Guarded by ‘Farmers,’ ” New York Times, September 12, 1971; Wicker, A Time to Die, 6.

  10. 10. For a first-person account of life in the prison and the rebellion, see Richard X. Clark, The Brothers of Attica (New York: Links Books, 1973); Thompson, Blood in the Water, 7–17.

  11. 11. New York (State), Attica, xii; Wicker, A Time to Die, 15–16; Thompson, Blood in the Water, 55–59.

  12. 12. Wicker, A Time to Die, 320–321.

  13. 13. New York (State), Attica, 370–374; Fred Ferretti, “Like a War Zone,” New York Times, September 14, 1971.

  14. 14. Thompson, Blood in the Water, 179, 607.

  15. 15. New York (State), Attica, 473, 373; Thompson, Blood in the Water, 187.

  16. 16. The McKay Commission found that all of the hostages who were shot were in the center of the yard. The inmates who were killed and wounded were located in many parts of the yard. Nelson Rockefeller allowed the Goldman Committee, which included Clarence B. Jones, editor of the New York Amsterdam News, Black clergy, Donald Goff, a New York penal expert, and New York legislators to enter Attica Correctional Facility to safeguard the rights of the inmates after observers were denied access to the prison. New York (State), Attica, 374; Eric Pace, “Attica Inmates Tell of Running ‘Gantlet,’ ” New York Times, September 19, 1971; Wicker, A Time to Die, 287–288.

  17. 17. New York (State), Attica, 430.

  18. 18. William E. Farrell, “Rockefeller Sees a Plot at Prison,” New York Times, September 14, 1971.

  19. 19. New York (State), Attica, 446, 458–459; Wicker, A Time to Die, 308; “Walter Dunbar Appointed State Probation Director,” New York Times, June 27, 1973.

  20. 20. Fred Ferretti, “Autopsies Show Shots Killed 9 Attica Hostages, Not Knives,” New York Times, September 15, 1971.

  21. 21. Fred Ferretti, “The Attack: Forty Dead; One Hundred Questions,” New York Times, September 19, 1971.

  22. 22. William E. Farrell, “Rockefeller Asks Panel on Inmates,” New York Times, September 15, 1971.

  23. 23. William E. Farrell, “Governor Defends Order to Quell Attica Uprising,” New York Times, September 17, 1971; “Transcript of the President’s New Conference on Foreign and Domestic Matters,” New York Times, September 17, 1971.

  24. 24. Rockefeller made an incomplete call to the White House at 8:55 a.m. He called the president again at 11:30 a.m., but John Ehrlichman took the call. President Richard Nixon’s Daily Diary, September 13, 1971, accessed October 2, 2016, http://nixontapes.org/chron2.html; White House Audio Tape, President Richard M. Nixon and White House, John Ehrlichman, September 13, 1971, accessed October 2, 2016, http://nixontapes.org/chron2.html.

  25. 25. “Transcript of the President’s New Conference on Foreign and Domestic Matters,” New York Times, September 17, 1971.

  26. 26. Richard Reeves, “Is That Really Nelson Rockefeller Crawling to Richard Nixon?” New York Magazine, October 18, 1971.

  27. 27. Ferretti, “Men from Harlem and Bed-Stuy.”

  28. 28. Historian Garrett Felber characterizes New York officials’ response to the uprising as part of a larger trend at the federal level to dismiss urban uprisings as the result of spontaneous incidents rather than a response to structural racism. Everette Hodge Letter to Nelson Rockefeller, June 23, 1969, folder 242, 21.2 Hugh Morrow Series, NAR, RAC; Felber, Those Who Don’t Say, 155.

  29. 29. New York (State), Attica, xiv–xv, 79–82, 104–105.

  30. 30. Mary McGrory, “The Governor and the Convicts,” Boston Globe, September 18, 1971.

  31. 31. Town Meetings—Special Arrangements, folder 62, 13 Jerry A. Danzig, NAR, RAC.

  32. 32. Thomas Poster, “Rocky Tells Why He Shunned Attica,” New York Daily News, April 7, 1972.

  33. 33. Binghamton Town Meeting Transcript, December 11, 1972, folder 1194, 25 Press Office, NAR, RAC; William Kennedy, “Rocky Is 64, Going on 35,” New York Times, April 29, 1973.

  34. 34. Connery and Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York, 273.

  35. 35. David Bird, “Rockefeller Sees Heroin ‘Drying Up,’ ” New York Times, September 8, 1973; M. A. Farber, “Both Sides Proceeding Cautiously,” New York Times, September 9, 1973.

  36. 36. Peter Kihiss, “209 Convicted under Strict Drug Law,” New York Times, November 10, 1974.

  37. 37. Francis X. Clines, “Panel on Choices for U.S. Is Named,” New York Times, November 18, 1973.

  38. 38. New York (State). Legislature. Senate. Standing Committee on Codes, Questions [to] and Answers [from] Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller: Following Testimony at Joint Hearing, Senate and Assembly Codes Committees by Members in State Legislative Building, Albany, New York on January 30, 1973 (Albany: n.p., 1973).

  39. 39. James Cannon, Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 298; Yanek Mieczkowski, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 69.

  40. 40. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Rules and Administration, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to Be Vice President of the United States, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1974), 923–976; Stanley Johnson, “Rockefeller Apologizes to Goldberg,” Washington Post, October 13, 1974; Linda Charlton, “Ronan Says Rockefeller Made Loans as a Friend,” New York Times, November 19, 1974.

  41. 41. US Congress, House, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to Be Vice President of the United States, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1974), 207–208, 673–674.

  42. 42. With a relationship dating back to at least 1965, Rangel described Rockefeller as a close ally who advocated for him being seated on the Committee on Ways and Means and who helped obtain support for his appointment as vice president. Charles B. Rangel and Leon Wynter, And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007), 132, 137, 143, 202.

  43. 43. US Congress, House, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 296–297, 331, 1007–1008, 300.

  44. 44. Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 181; US Congress, Senate, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 454–455; US Congress, House, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 452–453.

  45. 45. US Congress, Senate, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 455.

  46. 46. Angela Davis testified in her role as cochairperson of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. US Congress, Senate, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 348–356.

  47. 47. US Congress, House, Hearings on the Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 171, 240–242.

  48. 48. Robert Shogan, “Conservatives Angry at Ford, Divided over Action,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1975.

  49. 49. Robert Shogan, “Options Weighed by Conservatives,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1975.

  50. 50. “G.O.P. Looks like the Democrats: Deeply Divided,” New York Times, March 9, 1975; R. W. Apple, “The Dilemma of the Republicans: Minority Is Torn by Centrists Battling Conservatives,” New York Times, March 10, 1975.

  51. 51. John Robert Greene, The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 59.

  52. 52. Harold Henderson, “Howard Hollis ‘Bo’ Callaway,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified March 26, 2019, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/howard-hollis-bo-callaway-1927-2014/.

  53. 53. James N. Naughton, “Ford’s ’76 Manager Bars Giving Aid to Rockefeller,” New York Times, July 10, 1975; Jules Witcover, “Ford Aide Calls Rockefeller a Liability,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1975; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Reagan 13, Ford 0,” Washington Post, April 20, 1975.

  54. 54. Witcover, “Ford Aide.”

  55. 55. Memo from Joseph Persico to Nelson Rockefeller, August 19, 1975, folder 501, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  56. 56. Robert T. Hartmann, Palace Politics: An Inside Account of the Ford Years (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 354.

  57. 57. Press Release, August 25, 1975, folder 500, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  58. 58. Remarks of the Vice President, Columbia, SC, August 27, 1975, folder 501, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Remarks of the Vice President at the Lace House, August 27, 1975, folder 502, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Remarks of the Vice President, Mobile, AL, August 26, 1975, folder 500, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Remarks of the Vice President, Dallas, TX, September 12, 1975, folder 511, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC; West Virginia Reception, Charleston, WV, October 16, 1975, folder 536, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Press Conference, Mobile, AL, August 26, 1975, folder 500, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  59. 59. Remarks of the Vice President at the Lace House, August 27, 1975, folder 502, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  60. 60. Remarks of the Vice President, Mobile, AL, August 26, 1975, folder 500, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC; Jon Margolis, “Rockefeller Adopts a Southern Accent,” Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1975; Cohen, American Maelstrom, 222–227, 234–235; Carter, The Politics of Rage, 473.

  61. 61. Memo from Joseph Persico to Nelson Rockefeller, August 19, 1975, folder 500, 15 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

  62. 62. Margolis, “Rockefeller Adopts a Southern Accent”; B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “Rockefeller in the South: Problem Said to Remain,” New York Times, August 29, 1975.

  63. 63. Michael Turner, The Vice President as Policy Maker: Rockefeller in the Ford White House (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), 232; “Rockefeller: Get Cheats Off Welfare,” Chicago Defender, August 28, 1975.

  64. 64. Ayres, “Rockefeller in the South.”

  65. 65. Louis M. Bean, “Rockefeller and 1944,” Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1975, 28.

  66. 66. William F. Buckley, “Will Rocky Lead Us out of Welfare?” Newsday, September 4, 1975; George F. Will, “As the Winds Blow, So Goes Rockefeller,” Baltimore Sun, September 5, 1975.

  67. 67. “Midday ‘Live’—Nelson A. Rockefeller Book,” circa 1976, AV 12090, Rockefeller Family Papers, Sound and Video Recordings, 1964–1982, RAC.

  68. 68. Don Wright, “Hi There—Rockefeller’s the Name,” Newsday, September 4, 1975.

  69. 69. Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 328; Greene, Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, 159–160; Hartmann, Palace Politics, 365–369.

  70. 70. David Broder, “Callaway Calms South, but GOP Struggle Shapes Up,” Boston Globe, August 27, 1975.

  71. 71. Hartmann, Palace Politics, 366.

  72. 72. Hugh Morrow Interview of Steven Rockefeller, June 27, 1980, folder 48, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

Epilogue

  1. 1. According to Lucas’s speech, the National Black Republican Council became official in 1973 after he was appointed a member of the executive committee of the Republican National Committee that same year. Republican Party and Raleigh E. Milton, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Republican National Convention Resulting in the Nomination of Gerald R. Ford, of Michigan, for President, and the Nomination of Robert Dole, of Kansas, for Vice President (Washington, DC: Republican National Committee, 1976), 1–32.

  2. 2. Lucas, who was selected by the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush, against the wishes of the Black committee members he led, was an ally of Reagan who went on to advocate for “colorblind” policies in the 1980s. Party leadership had chosen a conservative African American to hail the party’s racial inclusion who was to the right of most of the African Americans the party had courted since Nixon’s advocacy of Black capitalism. For more on the diversity of thought among Black Republicans and the relationship between the GOP and Black nationalists see Farrington, Black Republicans, 196–223; Fergus, “Black Power, Soft Power,” 148–192.

  3. 3. Republican Party and Milton, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Republican National Convention, 31–33; Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 245–249.

  4. 4. Historian Heather Cox Richardson shows that by the 1870s white Republicans rejected African Americans’ calls for additional legislative protections—namely civil rights protections—because they argued that such efforts encouraged dependency. By 1874, explains Richardson, Republicans argued that African Americans were looking to the government to award them with rights that other Americans had earned individually. Republican Party, M. A. Clancy, and Wm. Nelson, Proceedings of the Republican National Convention Resulting in the Nomination for President and Vice-President of Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler (Concord, NH: Republican Press Association, 1876), 24–27; Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, 122–156

  5. 5. Republican Party, Clancy, and Nelson, Proceedings of the Republican National Convention, 24–27; David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 574–579.

  6. 6. “Rockefeller Sharing Art,” New York Times, March 6, 1978.

  7. 7. Nelson A. Rockefeller Memorial Service, February 1979, Rockefeller Family Papers, Sound and Video Recordings, 1964–1982, AV 12096, RAC; Marc D. Charney, “Rev. Williams Sloane Coffin Dies at 81,” New York Times, April 13, 2006; Kenneth Gross, “2,700 Mourn Rockefeller,” Newsday, February 3, 1979; William F. Buckley Jr. “Paying Our Respects, with Stylish Grace, to Nelson Rockefeller,” Newsday, February 6, 1979.

  8. 8. Initially, reporting on Rockefeller’s death was muddied by the timing of his demise late on a Friday night and misstatements by his longtime adviser Hugh Morrow who said he died at work in his Rockefeller Center office, rather than his private office where he was accompanied by a young female assistant. For a full account of the confusion surrounding Rockefeller’s death see Smith, On His Own Terms, 709–719. “Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller,” Washington Post, January 28, 1979; “Nelson A. Rockefeller,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1979; “Trying to Cast a Party in the Rockefeller Mold,” Newsday, January 28, 1979; “The Rockefeller Gift,” New York Times, January 28, 1979.

  9. 9. Francis X. Clines, “Rockefeller’s Zest for Life Dominated Public and Private Endeavors,” New York Times, January 28, 1979.

  10. 10. Linda Greenhouse, “For Nearly a Generation, Nelson Rockefeller Held the Reins of New York State,” New York Times, January 28, 1979.

  11. 11. Warren Weaver Jr., “Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller: Remembered,” New York Times, January 28, 1979.

  12. 12. Hugh Morrow Interview of Gene Spagnoli, February 7, 1980, folder 38, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  13. 13. Hugh Morrow Interview of Sol Neil Corbin, November 30, 1979, folder 50, Q Hugh Morrow Interviews, NAR, RAC.

  14. 14. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn, eds., The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2014), 83–84, 119.

  15. 15. Travis, Western, and Redburn, The Growth of Incarceration, 83–84, 119; D. F. Weiman and C. Weiss, “The Origins of Mass Incarceration in New York State: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Local War on Drugs,” in Do Prisons Make Us Safer? The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom, ed. S. Raphael and M. A. Stoll (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009); Mason B. Williams, “How the Rockefeller Laws Hit the Streets: Drug Policing and the Politics of State Competence in New York City, 1973-1989,” Modern American History 4, no. 1 (March 2021): 67–90.

  16. 16. New York State Legislature, Assembly, Standing Committee on Codes, Public Hearing on the Rockefeller Drug Laws—20 Years Later (Albany: M. F. Emsing, 1993), 6–7.

  17. 17. Loren Siegel, Robert A. Perry, and Corinne Carey, The Rockefeller Drug Laws: Unjust, Irrational, Ineffective (New York: New York Civil Liberties Union, 2009), 11–12; Bureau of the Census, General Population Characteristics Part 34 New York (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), 7, 29.

  18. 18. Beginning in the early 1970s, mandatory minimum sentences and three-strike policies related to drug offenses led to a dramatic increase in the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which limited judicial discretion, paired with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that, among other changes, introduced harsher sentences for crack vs. powder cocaine contributed to disproportionately longer sentences for African Americans in federal prisons. Before the 1986 law, Blacks’ federal drug sentences were 11 percent higher than whites, four years after enactment that number increased to 49 percent. By 2021, across state and federal prisons, Black men were six times and Latino men were 2.5 times more likely than white men to be incarcerated. Ashley Nellis, “Mass Incarceration Trends,” The Sentencing Project, January 25, 2023, accessed October 15, 2023, https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration-trends/#50-years; Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 703–734; Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 126-140; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  19. 19. “The Politics of Drugs,” New York Times, January 9, 1973.

  20. 20. Todd S. Purdu, “Rudolph Giuliani and the Color of Politics in New York,” New York Times, July 25, 1993.

  21. 21. New York State Legislature, Assembly, Standing Committee on Codes, Public Hearing on the Rockefeller Drug Laws—20 Years Later, 11–12.

  22. 22. New York State Legislature, Assembly, Standing Committee on Codes, Public Hearing on the Rockefeller Drug Laws—20 Years Later, 26–30.

  23. 23. Edward J. Maggio, “New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, Then and Now,” New York State Bar Association Journal, September 2006, 30–34.

  24. 24. Michelle O’Donnell, “Pataki Signs Bill Softening Drug Laws,” New York Times, August 31, 2005.

  25. 25. Jeremy W. Peters, “Paterson Is Said to Seek Narrower Overhaul of Drug Laws,” New York Times, March 11, 2009.

  26. 26. Speeches, April 22, 1960–June 21, 1960, folder 150, Series 33 Speeches, NAR, RAC.

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