Rockefeller influence in the White House began in 1894 with the election of William McKinley. But it was not until the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that it became a deciding factor in determining policy. In many ways, the New Deal was a Rockefeller deal.*
* Although it is generally believed that the New Deal was designed to help business and the stock market quickly recover from the depression, its effect was to prolong the depression for several years.
We now know that this resuIt was deliberately contrived; among other reasons, the Rockefellers wanted a depressed stock market so they could buy up shares cheaply. (It is worth noting that the "New Deal deaIt most kindly with the Rockefeller interests.
For detailed information see Chapter III of the author"s book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, and Antony Sutton"s Wall Street and F.D.R.) ""Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day, but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, unalterable through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.""
-Thomas JeffersonThe main Rockefeller agent was Harry Hopkins, who had been financed by the Rockefeller - foundation for more than a decade when he ran the Organized Social Service. Hopkins was to become Franklin D.
Roosevelt"s alter ego, even to the point of living in the White House. He was the second most powerful man in America during the war years.
As Walter Winch.e.l.l reported at the time, Hopkins acknowledged his debt to the Rockefellers when he was appointed Secretary of Commerce, by offering the post of a.s.sistant Secretary to Nelson. William Rusher tells us in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner of September 7, 1975: Nelson Rockefeller was recruited for the New Deal by FDR"s confidante, Harry Hopkins, back in the 1930 "s.... He apparently wasn"t even a Republican by 1940, let along a conservative. In that year, at any rate, as World War II approached America, FDR did him the handsome favor of giving him a soft civilian berth in the White House where he remained straight through to V-J Day.
The fact that Nelson"s name was number ten on the local draft board list, when he fortuitously -landed- his job with the New Deal, may explain why the young Rockefeller was so willing to abandon a plush family position to join the Washington bureaucracy.
The New York Times of May 20, 1960, reveals that after his appointment -Rockefeller became a Roosevelt intimate, spending secret holidays with the President at Shangri-la (now Camp David). . . ."
Twenty years later, Nelson reminisced to Newsweek that" this country hasn"t had a sense of purpose and direction since Roosevelt."In that 1962 interview, the future Vice President dismissed conservative Republicans, saying they were " like cattle that aren"t going anywhere."
In the Dwight D. Eisenhower (CFR) administration, Nelson helped to create and served as a.s.sistant Secretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare,which now takes an even larger portion of the Federal Budget than does defense. But the job of running a government is so immense that the Rockefellers must delegate most of -the work to friends, a.s.sociates, hirelings and agents.
Eisenhower"s first Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (CFR), was a Rockefeller cousin. Dulles"
successor was Christian Herter (CFR), who had the good sense to marry into the Standard Oil fortune.
Herbert Brownell (CFR) was a Rockefeller employee when Eisenhower tapped him to be Attorney General. Brownell subsequently selected hundreds of federal judges, district attorneys, US Marshals, and White House staffers.
Seventeen other key figures at the top of the Eisenhower Administration were supplied by the Rockefellers" CFR.
Soon after his election as President, John F. Kennedy (CFR) followed Rocky"s advice and named Dean Rusk of the CFR to be his Secretary of State. Rusk, whom Kennedy had never met, took a leave of absence as head of the Rockefeller Foundation to accept the post.
Kennedy"s appointment for Under Secretary of State was Chester Bowles, a fellow CFR member who has been a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a director of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Democrat Kennedy then named Standard Oil executive Alexander Trowbridge (CFR) as a.s.sistant Secretary of Commerce, and President Johnson later promoted him to Secretary of Commerce.
President Kennedy also named Roswell Gilpatrick (CFR), a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Virtually every top position in the administration of JFK and LBJ was held by a member of the CFR. Richard Nixon appointed Nelson Rockefeller"s attorney John Mitch.e.l.l as Attorney General, and Mitch.e.l.l ran the President"s campaign for re-election and became his chief advisor on domestic policy. Nixon"s first Vice President was the ill-fated Spiro Agnew, who had been national chairman of the Rockefeller for President Committee in 1968 and an outspoken opponent of Nixon until Rocky approved his White House role.
Chief advisor to both Nixon and Ford on foreign policy, of course, is the ubiquitious Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who left a staff position with the CFR to join the Nixon Administration. For ten years Kissinger had been Nelson Rockefeller"s personal foreign policy advisor. Altogether Richard Nixon staffed his Administration with over 115 CFR members. (The complete list is contained in the author"s Richard Nixon: The Man Behind The Mask.) The vast majority of these remain in the Ford-Rockefeller (or is it vice-versa?) regime.
Years ago, Nelson Rockefeller reportedly demanded, and received, the privilege of naming his men to top administrative posts on all important Republican committees-including the vital National, Senatorial, Congressional, and Policy committees. The effect on the Republican Party is all too (perfectly) clear. It has been reliably estimated that over the years the Rockefellers have placed at least five thousand persons in important positions at the highest levels of the federal government. The Rockefeller influence and authority now runs the top Civil Service bureaucracy, thereby transcending the administrations of mere Republicans and Democrats.*
Having a big stake in an internationalist foreign policy, the Rockefellers always make sure that the Secretary of State and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are "their boys". Marshall, Acheson, Dulles, Herter, Rusk and Kissinger have all labored to turn the backward Soviet Union into a creditable power to force the Great Merger, while at the same time fighting wars to make the world safe for Standard Oil. The CIA has served as the State Department"s and Standard Oil"s enforcement arm, destroying genuine anti-communist movements around the world.* (Chile seems to be the one exception. Apparently the Rockefellers did not care to lose their holdings in that nation.) The CIA was created and staffed by Rockefeller relative Allen Dulles.
* Indeed, Ford"s most important early appointment was Edward Levi as Attorney General. Levi was the first Attorney General in modern history who had never met the President who appointed him. It is well known in Washington political circles that Levi, from the Rockefeller -endowed University of Chicago, and not a Republican, was Nelson"s choice. The new Attorney General has a reputation of being about as conservative as Mao"s Red Guard.
American foreign policy has meant billions of dollars for the Rockefellers. It has been paid for in many cases by the blood of our soldiers and in every case by the sweat of our taxpayers. In his Reminiscences John D. Rockefeller informs us: "One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department in Washington. Our amba.s.sadors and ministers and consuls have aided to push our way into new markets to the utmost corners of the world.- Washington reporter jack Anderson put it this way in 1967: ". . . the State Department has often taken its policies right out of the executive suites of the oil companies. When Big Oil can"t get what it wants in foreign countries, the State Department tries to get it for them. In many countries, the American Emba.s.sies function virtually as branch offices for the Oil combine ... The State Department can be found almost always on the side of the ,seven sisters", as the oil giants are known inside the industry. . .
.- The more things change, the more they remain the same.Just as the Rockefellers make sure their capos are running" our-perenially disastrous foreign policy, you can bet your last devalued dollar that the Rockefeller Mafia controls the national and international money game.
* The Rockefellers occasionally lose a property to nationalization- at least temporarily - through madcap coups, but such instances are remarkably rare.
Here is where Rockefeller influence in the World Bank comes in handy. In the Political Economics of International Oil, Michael Tanzer admits that, although the World Bank favors active government partic.i.p.ation in virtually every other area, oil is a major exception: ". . . the general policies of the Bank strongly tend to favor minimizing the public sector"s role. . . . The World Bank too has refused to lend money for any government oil operations in underdeveloped countries. In addition, the Bank has also played an active, albeit subsurface, role in trying to dissuade underdeveloped countries from using their own capital for oil exploration. , . ."
The Rockefellers have made the Treasury Department virtually a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Eisenhower"s Secretary of the Treasury was Robert Anderson (CFR). Kennedy -switched- to Douglas Dillon (CFR and a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund). Henry Fowler (CFR) was the House of Rockefeller"s rep heading the Treasury during the LBJ era. And in the year of our Ford, William Simon (CFR) runs the temple for the CFR money changers.
While Secretary of the Treasury is a significant position, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is infinitely more important. The Federal Reserve is a mystery wrapped in an enigma for most Americans.
Yet it is critical to the Rockefeller manipulations of the economy.
The Rockefellers were instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve System. It was designed at a secret meeting in 1910 at Jekyl Island off the coast of Georgia. Rockefeller agent Frank Vanderlip admitted many years later in his memoirs: "Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive indeed as furtive -as any conspirator ...
I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyl Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System."
Out of the Jekyl Island meeting came the Monetary Commission Report and from it, the Aldrich Bill.
Warburg had urged that the proposed legislation be designated simply, the - Federal Reserve System, 11 but Aldrich insisted his name appear as the bill"s chief sponsor. This proved to be a serious mistake; the legislation was so obviously a project of the international bankers that it could not be pushed through Congress.
A new strategy had to be devised. The Republican Party was too closely identified with Wall Street. The conspirators recognized that the only way to establish a central bank was to disguise the proposal, and have it promoted by Democrats as a means to strip Wall Street of its power!
The opportunity to do this came in 1912 when the Jekyl Island conspirators induced Teddy RooseveIt to run on a third party ticket to split the Republican vote. The resuIt was that the underdog Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won. Wilson paid off like a slot machine that has just rung up three bars.** A more comprehensive account of the creation and operation of the Federal Reserve is told in the author"s book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy.
In order to support the fiction that the Federal Reserve Act was a -people"s bill," the Insider financiers put up a smoke-screen of opposition to it. It was strictly a case of Br"er Rabbit begging not to be thrown into the briar patch ,Both Aldrich and Vanderlip denounced what was actually their own bill. Nearly twenty-five years later, frank Vanderlip admitted:"No walthough the Aldrich Federal Reserve Plan was defeated when it bore the name Aldrich nevertheless its essential points were all contained in the plan that finally was adopted.
Taking advantage of Congress" desire to adjourn for Christmas, the Federal Reserve Act was pa.s.sed or December 22, 1913, by a vote of 298 to 60 in the House and in the Senate by a majority of 43 to 25.
After the vote, Congressman Charles A. Lindberg Sr. father of the famous aviator, told Congress: " This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth ...When the President signs this act the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized. . .
This is the Aldrich Bill in disguise.
The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. .
The Federal Reserve Act was, and still is, hailed as a victory of "democracy" over the "money trust."
Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole central bank concept was engineered by the very group it was supposed to strip of power.
How powerful is our central bank" ?
The Federal Reserve controls our money supply and interest rates, and thereby manipulates the entire economy creating inflation or deflation, recession or boom, and sending the stock market up or down at will. The Federal Reserve is so powerful that Congressman Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Banking Committee, maintains: "In the United States today we have in effect two governments ... We have the duly const.i.tuted Government ... Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Const.i.tution."
Neither Presidents, Congressmen nor Secretaries of the Treasury direct the Federal Reserve. In the matters of money, the Federal Reserve directs them!
How successful has the Federal Reserve System been? It depends on your point of view. Since Woodrow Wilson took his oath of office, the national debt has skyrocketed from $1 billion to over $500 billion. Interest paid to the international bankers holding that debt is staggering; at $27 billion annually, it is now the third largest item in the Federal Budget. And it is climbing steeply, as inflation pushes up the interest rate on government bonds, while the government runs grotesque deficits every year.
Under the brilliant expertise of these Rockefeller-CFR money managers, the dollar has lost three-fourths of its purchasing power since 1940. And the pace is accelerating. Soon your paper dollar, now totally divorced from gold and silver by Rockefellers" agents, will not be worth a plugged nickel. It"s all right for the Rockefellers, they don"t have to live on a fixed income or a pension.
America is being set up today for another 1929 style debacle. To think that the Crash of 1929 was an accident or the resuIt of stupidity defies all logic. The international bankers who promoted the inflationary policies and pushed the propaganda which pumped up the stock market represented too many generations of acc.u.mulated expertise to have blundered into the Great Depression. As Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, commented: It [the Depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence ... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.
It was the game of boom and bust, using economic crisis to consolidate political power at the top where it can be most easily controlled.
The major cause of the economic collapse was the deliberately created credit inflation by the Federal Reserve. In six years it had inflated the money supply by sixty-two %, inducing market speculations and unwise investments by middle Americans who were being set up for a shearing. When the shearing came, the sheep took a realistic look at their economy and panicked. Optimism was replaced by economic despair; despair produced a willingness to accept a major expansion of government controls over the economy.
Now, the Rockefellers are sharpening their shears to give the sheep of the world another tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. But this time may be the last time. In 1929, America was a long way from total government. The next depression will be used as the excuse for complete socialist-fascist controls at home and the creation of a World Superstate internationally.
Just as the Rockefellers use the Export-Import Bank as a tool to loot the capital and credit-starved American economy and its over-taxed citizenry, so they also use the UN"s World Bank as yet another siphon in the U.S. Taxpayer"s wallet.
A key lieutenant in fleecing American workers has beer Eugene Black (CFR), a director of the Rockefeller"s Chase Manhattan Bank. For fifteen years Black was (successively) executive director, president, and then chairman of the executive directors of the World Bank. It is an amazing - coincidence- how officers of the Rockefeller"s Chase Manhattan Bank keep turning up as officials of the World Bank.
The current head of the World Bank is the notorious Robert Strange McNamara, who did more than any American since Benedict Arnold to betray America"s defenses. If you have not guessed that McNamara is a member of the CFR, you haven"t been reading carefully enough. Not surprisingly, Mr. McNamara is eager to multiply the World Bank"s loans to finance socialism. As he puts it: "The rich nations could easily contribute more than they have done to the poor nations. "He continues: We in the US can do far more to cure our own national problems. And just as we can do more to correct those conditions, so we can do more to contribute to the economic development of the developing nations. It"s simply a question of getting a proper order of priorities.
And in line with CFR policy, McNamara is already pushing the World Bank to begin pumping out your money to the Communist bloc. As Chairman McNamara puts it: "We"re quite willing to receive approaches by any Eastern European or other Communist bloc members not now members of the bank.- Through their Council on Foreign Relations, the Family Rockefeller has controlled the executive branch of government, especially the Departments of State and Treasury. Public opinion is manufactured by the CFR"s ventriloquists in the ma.s.s media. But, Congress still plays a key role in governing the United States. The House of Rockefeller has formed two organizations specifically to influence Congress. They are Common Cause and the National Committee for an Effective Congress.
The National Committee for an Effective Congress was formed by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948 to elect - progressive- (read fascist-socialist) Senators. The organization makes no pretense at being a gra.s.s-roots group. The average donation by the limousine liberals to the NCEC in 1972 was $13,000.
Members of the NCEC believe the selection of Congressmen is too important to be left to the local voters.
Since 1948 they have helped change the composition of Congress by pa.s.sing the hat around Wall Street to ensure that "their kind- of Congressman was elected in Montana, Iowa, Tennessee and West Virginia."Their kind includes such ultra-liberals as Senators Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, Alan Cranston, Frank Church, Clifford Case, Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Eagleton, and George McCovern -all of whom have been supported by the Wall Street internationalists of the NCEC; and all of whom can be counted on to vote for more and more fascist-socialist government.
In the past, the National Committee for an Effective Congress has concentrated on bankrolling compliant Senators. But in 1974, the megabuck liberals began financing" their kind - of candidates for the House of Representatives. During the election that year, the NCEC worked to eliminate opponents of the Rockefeller"s " New World Order." The result was a mighty leap to the left in the House, as dozens of veteran Conservatives went down to defeat.
For the 1974 campaign, the NCEC hired professional campaign managers for 49 Democrat candidates around the country. Thirty-five of them won and promptly became the much heralded -Freshman Democratic Caucus.- Having eliminated most of the old-line Republicans, in 1976, according to the Washington Post"s David Broder, the NCEC will concentrate on electing Liberal Republicans who can work with Nelson Rockefeller. Candidates who convince the multi-millionaire internationalists of the National Committee for an Effective Congress that they are willing to represent them, rather than their const.i.tuents, can receive unlimited thousands of dollars. It will come in the form of "services" - free publicity from the ma.s.s media, free "research," free polling to determine the "image" which the candidate needs to project, free attacks on opponents, free mailings and literature on appropriate"issues."Above all, the candidate can expect free workers who will not only manage his campaign, but will proceed to manage him when he gets to Congress.
The Rockefeller front entrusted with the task of creating popular support for the Insiders" takeover is an organization called Common Cause. Common Cause masquerades as"the people"s lobby," but nothing could be further from the truth.
Common Cause was launched in the early 1970"s with all of the hoopla of a million-dollar advertising campaign planned by P. T. Barnum. Full-page newspaper ads and slick direct-mail pieces announced that something called Common Cause would be neither Republican nor Democrat, but a -people"s lobby, representing all Americans against the "rich and powerful."It should be sued for false advertising.Chairman of Common Cause is an establishmentarian with impressive credentials, John Gardner. As Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the mid -1960"s, Gardner pushed federal money and programs at everything that moved. In the area of federalized health care alone, HEW programs initiated under Gardner included Medicare, Medic aid, federal staffing of community mental health centers, federal planning of public health services, and scores of other socialist fascist programs costing billions. But Gardner now heads an Establishment -financed -people"s lobby- to destroy the - special interests- dominating politics.
Of course no huckster worth his salt is anxious for the public to become aware of the sting. So John Gardner has removed a few of his more revealing credits from the biography he prepares for Who"s Who In America. Among those positions which he has expunged from the record are his seat on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. After all, it might be embarra.s.sing while calling publicly for emasculating the power of the big banks and their fat trusts if people found out you are currently serving at the pleasure of the controllers of Chase Manhattan Bank. Some suspicious souls might doubt your sincerity. The giant oil producers are another"target-of Gardner"s Common Cause. Naturally he no longer lists his position on the board of directors of Sh.e.l.l Oil, which is the world"s second-largest oil company.
Buried deep in the records of the Senate Clerk is a lobbyist"s report filed by Gardner showing receipts for the last quarter of 1970. The largest donor was John D. Rockefeller III, who anted up twenty-five thousand dollars; David Rockefeller gave ten thousand dollars; Martha Rockefeller provided another ten thousand; Chase Manhattan Bank gave five thousand dollars; kindly Amory Houghton Jr. of the Rockefeller Foundation provided ten thousand; Nelson Rockefeller gave a guarded five hundred dollars; J. Richardson Dilworth, the family"s financial advisor, gave five hundred; A. Meyer, senior partner in Lazard Freres and Company, the Rothschild"s US Bank, provided ten thousand dollars; A. E. Friedman, a partner in the Rockefeller-allied Kuhn, Loeb and Company, gave a thousand; and, the list of the Establishment"s super-rich goes on and on and on.
Notice that this was the "up-front" money-the big cash that made Common Cause possible. It was the Rockefellers and their allies who supplied the seed money, the money used to buy the advertis.e.m.e.nts in all those magazines and newspapers and to pay for the mailing to 2.5 million Americans soliciting those fifteen-dollar memberships in Common Cause. Without the Rockefellers there would have been no kickoff, no quarter of a million members whose dues allow the organization"s spokesmen to claim that the Rockefellers supplied only a small %age of money raised. But how many people out in k.u.mquat Corners would fall for the Gardner snake on routine if they knew that he was fronting for Daddy Rockabucks? About as many as attend submarine race at Boise.
Common Cause claims a membership of 350,000 and operates on an annual budget of $6.3 million.
Ironically, in the yearly report required by law of lobbyists it now find itself in the position of declaring the highest expenditure of any lobby on Capitol Hill. The Rockefeller anti-lobby is now the biggest of the bunch.
The ma.s.sive coverage given Common Cause by the Establishment journals is indicated by the fact that during 1974 the New York Times News Service, alone, carried over one hundred articles about Common Cause. That is a major article about Common Cause every 3.5 days. When you consider the hundreds of key newspapers across the country that subscribe to the New York Times News Service, and remember that the other major news services have also carried a similarly large number of stories puffing Common Cause, you readily see why the impact of its every move is enormous.
The other major triumph of the Rockefellers" Common Cause is the -campaign reform- act of 1974. In its recruiting brochure, Common Cause proclaims that 11 members of Common Cause have led the citizens" effort to change the way our nation finances political campaigns.- There are many dangerous implications to the law. Howard Phillips reports in Human Events for November 2, 1974, that under this legislation"a candidate whose views are at variance from the dominant political establishment is limited in how much he may spend or cause to be expended in his own behalf." Meanwhile, Phillips says, the problems of candidates challenging the Liberal Establishment" can be seriously increased through "non-political expenditures made by issue-oriented"
Liberal organizations [like NCEC or Common Cause] which put forth large sums to advance their viewpoints, although escaping any spending limitations under the act (because, technically, the money is not spent "against" the candidate with which they disagree).
This is what Common Cause calls -opening up the system." It is a dodge to allow the Rockefellers and their friends who control Common Cause to raise and spend vast sums to defeat their opponents while limiting the ability of those opponents to raise funds.
Now that the Rockefellers have the kind of Congress they want, they mean to keep it that way. They know that a Liberal Establishment which controls the ma.s.s media can give its favorite candidate vast amounts of free publicity which, in the past, anti-Establishment candidates could only match with money. They believe that they have now closed that potential source of opposition. Common Cause advertises that it is a "new force on the American political scene."What it is ... is a Rockefeller political front. And it is dangerously powerful. As Congressman F. Edward Hebert declared in an NBC interview on February 5, 1975: The American people better wake up to what this outfit is doing because they can destroy the country. The new Congressmen are not running Congress, Common Cause is running Congress.
Who elected them?
That is a good question, Congressman Hebert. And the answer is: The same Insiders who -elected- Nelson Rockefeller Vice President of the United States.
Chapter Thirteen.
Was Nixon Watergated ?
Nelson Rockefeller has admitted that his goal in life since he was a child has been to be President of the United States."After all" he admitted, "when you think of what I had, what else was there to aspire to?"
He has a point there.
Newsweek of September 2, 1974 tells us: "Ever since his boyhood meeting with Teddy Roosevelt, it ""After all, when you think of what I had, what else [other than the Presidency ] was there to aspire to? ""
-Nelson Rockefellerseems, "Nelson Rockefeller had been propelling himself toward the Oval Office. Nothing less would suit his ambition. . . "
But the road to the White House for Nelson has been, if you will pardon the expression, rocky. He has had to settle for an un-elected and politically engineered Vice Presidency, a position at which he had previously turned up his nose several times.
Nelson"s first attempt at the Presidency came in 1960, shortly after his election as governor of New York Richard Nixon had been Vice President for eight years, however, and had spent much of the time making speeches for the COP. In 1960, he collected his political, IOUs from the majority of party activists and Rockefeller had no chance of getting the nomination. Where Rocky found he could not win the actual nomination. He moved to dictate policy from behind the scenes. A meeting was thus arranged between Rockefeller and Nixon on the Sat.u.r.day before the Republican Convention opened in Chicago.
The Republican Platform Committee had been meeting for an entire week, laboriously pounding out a platform reflecting the views of party members from all fifty states The Watergate Caper, the coup d"etat that knocked President Nixon out of the White House, was carefully engineered by the two agents for the House of Rockefeller shown above. It is now known that Henry Kissinger (left) was responsible for creating the Plumbers squad in the first place, while the instant General," Alexander Haig (right), made sure that the most incriminating evidence on the tapes was given in advance to the men investigating his boss!
Together, the two men forced a bitter and dejected Nixon to resign, thus paving the way (finally!) to get a Rockefeller into the White House without risking an election Rocky would surely lose.
But, at the meeting between Nixon and Nelson at Rockefeller"s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City, Nixon accepted everything Rockefeller dictated. The Platform Committee"s sweat-stained doc.u.ment was ashcanned and, presto Chicago, Rockefeller"s Liberal platform was subst.i.tuted.
Goldwater dejectedly called Nixon"s surrender to Rockefeller" the Munich of the Republican Party.- Republicans everywhere understood the significance of the new Rockefeller-Nixon alliance. Nixon had traded his independence for approval by the House of Rockefeller.
The truth is that Nixon had the nomination in the bag; there was no need for him to crawl to Rockefeller to win it. Nixon knew this, but he also knew who held the ultimate power behind both political parties.
Certainly there was never any love lost between Richard and Rocky. They have detested each other for years. Newsweek of September 2, 1974, tells us: "The Nixon Presidency was a painful period for the proud governor. Privately, friends say, Rockefeller despised the self-made man from Yorba Linda. . . .
Rocky, the man born to economic royalty, must have deeply resented having to operate through this Sammy Click-type character who looked like a used car salesman, but had clawed his way to the White House. But the two men needed each other. Nelson"s influence in the COP is immense at the top, but is almost non-existent among voters at the gra.s.s roots.
After forcing Nixon"s humiliating surrender, Rockefeller virtually sat out the 1960 campaign and allowed New York to go for Kennedy. Nixon surprised most observers by quietly accepting the defeat that had been arranged for him, refusing even to protest the vote fraud in Texas and Illinois which deprived him of the election.*
* This story is described at length in Richard Nixon: The Man Behind The Mask by this author.
Richard Nixon returned to California to practice law but remained at the beck and call of his jealous and hostile boss in New York. One indication of their real relationship was the Joe Sh.e.l.l affair. Sh.e.l.l was a long-time California State a.s.semblyman who planned to oppose Democrat inc.u.mbent Pat Brown for the governorship in 1962. Early in the year, he received a call from Rockefeller, asking whom he would support at the 1964 convention if he were elected. The conservative a.s.semblyman told Rockefeller that under no circ.u.mstances could he support the ultra-liberal New Yorker. One week later, Sh.e.l.l"s office received a call from Rockefeller"s New York office with the news that Richard Nixon would oppose Sh.e.l.l in the COP gubernatorial primary-even though Nixon had previously a.s.sured Sh.e.l.l that he had absolutely no interest in being Governor of California.
The important point here is that Nixon was not interested in the job until he received orders from his boss in New York. Nixon had everything to lose and virtually nothing to gain by running against an inc.u.mbent Democrat governor in a state with an overwhelming Democrat registration plurality.
Following an incredibly inept campaign, in which his chief target was Nelson"s old bugaboo, the -radical right," not Bungling Brown"s record, Nixon lost the race. His political career appeared to have come to an end.