The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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ago when the liberal movement, which gave rise to the American Labor Party and later the Liberal Party, was cresting. The solutions reached then have plagued the Democrats ever since.
Essentially, what the leaders of the new Conservative movement would like (and they have made no secret of it) is a political position in relation to the Republican party comparable to that now held by the Liberal Party in relation to the Democrats.
As things now stand, a Democratic candidate for statewide office in New York has only a remote chance of winning unless he gets a Liberal Party endorsement. [The Republicans] are opposed to letting any minority group get any similar veto power in the choice of Republican statewide candidates. For this reason their strategy with respect to the conservative movement is likely to be exactly the opposite of that used by the Democrats when they faced the liberal problem. . . . Instead of helping the Republican conservatives attain legal status, the Republican leadership can be expected to use all means at its command to prevent them from achieving this status. . . . Possible stratagems include full use of all the intricacies of the election law; first to prevent the new group from getting the signatures needed to put its candidates on the ballot, and second to prevent it from obtaining the 50,000 votes for Governor needed to achieve legal status.
The former were first officially exerted by the Republican State Executive Committee, meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in June 1962. “No Republican,” the Committee pronounced, “can be a member of a splinter party and at the same time be a Republican.” The leaders of the fledgling party, the Committee threw in, are “political pied pipers who could only betray those whom they lured into their political adventure.” At a sticks-and-stones level, Governor Rockefeller ordered his staff to do everything possible to prevent the Conservatives from garnering the fifty signatures per county required to put a party on the ballot. A district attorney from Tompkins County publicly acknowledged, at one point, that he had solicited affidavits of repudiation from voters who had signed the petition; and Rockefeller, asked to investigate, declined comment. Meanwhile, guarding the political store, New York State Republican Chairman L. Judson Morhouse sent out, on August 14, a confidential aide mémoire to all county chairmen and vice-chairmen on how to combat the preposterous charges that Governor Rockefeller was not really a conservative. The covering note was more interesting than the attached demonstration, which merely recapitulated in congested statistical form the discredited contention that Rockefeller had proved himself fiscally sound. “It”—warned Morhouse concerning the enclosure—“must be used cautiously and should not be published because we do not want to emphasize the conservative side so much that we lose some other votes.” But along about midsummer, it became apparent that the Party had surprising stamina and a no-nonsense legal adviser—and could not be stopped; whereupon Governor Rockefeller suddenly withdrew his opposition, falling back on the bravely Voltairean stance from which he had originally greeted the Conservative Party’s founding, on February 13: “The greater citizen participation we have in public affairs the better.”1010 And the big question was now: how well would the brand-new party do at the polls?
Three years later, State Chairman Daniel Mahoney called on the Governor to declare February 13, 1963, the third anniversary of the founding of the Conservative Party, “Greater Citizen Participation Day,” in “lasting commemoration” of the Governor’s noble and generous attitudes towards dissenting political opinion.” The Governor was not amused.
The Conservatives named as their candidate for Governor a forty-four-year-old Syracuse businessman, Mr. David Jaquith. Jaquith, a Princeton graduate, president of Vego Industries, a lifelong Republican, president of the Board of Education of Syracuse, had an extensive social and civic background. He campaigned against Rockefeller’s domestic policies, stressing that during his free-spending administration as Governor, expenditures had increased by 48.9 per cent and income tax collection by 55 per cent1111 over Averell Harriman’s top budget four years earlier. Against Senator Javits, the Conservatives fielded Kieran O’Doherty, the Party’s State Chairman, who roasted Senator Javits’s record as a fundamental liberal, citing his record in Congress. The Conservative Party climaxed its first campaign at a rally in Madison Square Garden which, although it began a half-hour after President Kennedy’s dramatic televised ultimatum to the Soviet Union, nevertheless produced a surprisingly large audience—upward of ten thousand people—and a great deal of enthusiasm.1212
Which figures sounded, two years later in 1964, like the Good Old Days Department. Rockefeller’s 1965 budget called for spending 94 per cent more than the Harriman Administration had spent.
An interesting essay could be written on Madison Square Garden and politics. It is the symbol of Big Time—and it is greatly feared, because the mere fact of its use is a taunt to the New York press, which can be counted on to remark the empty spaces, if there are such; and the resulting effect can be greatly demoralizing. The professionals tend to avoid Madison Square Garden as being too risky. New York conservatives have had good luck with it—SRO twice during 1964 for Senator Goldwater, and once in 1962 by the Young Americans for Freedom. But the effort required to fill the Garden is enormous, as also the expense of publicizing the event and trying to lure into it the twenty thousand needed to appease the unoccupied-seat counters. In 1962, the Conservative Party, alone among the political parties, rented the Garden. In 1965, none of the Mayoralty candidates did. The Garden, as a matter of incidental intelligence, rents for ten thousand dollars per night.
Javits won in a landslide, well over a million votes. Rockefeller, by contrast, did poorly. The State Chairman Mr. Morhouse had predicted a victory of 800,000 to 1,000,000. Instead, he won by 529,000 votes, 43,000 below his 1958 pluralty. Jaquith polled 141,000 votes which would almost surely have otherwise gone to Rockefeller. The slippage was greatly noticed around the country, and considerably affected Rockefeller’s reputation as the undeniable contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964. Homer Bigart summarized the results in The New York Times: “In New York the new Conservative Party fell considerably short of the 200,000 votes its leaders had hoped for. David Jaquith . . . candidate for Governor, polled only 118,7681313 votes, and Kieran O’Doherty, Conservative candidate for Senator, only 116,000. The party took comfort in the fact that it drew considerably more than the 50,000 votes it needed to win a permanent place on the ballot.” Indeed, Mr. Jaquith, promising that the Party would do better the next time around, observed that “only two or three voters in ten ever heard of the Conservative Party [even] in upstate New York.” Regarding this extraordinary success of Senator Javits, Mr. Jaquith remarked, with that political genius for which the Conservative Party is becoming renowned, that Javits’s re-election was “just stupidity on the part of the voters.”
118,768 was the original figure reported the day after the election. The final count, however, was 141,000.
In 1964, the Conservative Party’s principal public contender was Henry Paolucci, a professor of Political Science at Iona College, a diminutive, learned, amiable, talkative, eloquent, versatile nationalist. Senator Keating, following the Rockefeller line, had declared publicly that he would not accept the designation of the Conservative Party if offered to him; and indeed, he and Mr. Robert Kennedy were to spend much of the campaign debating whether Mr. Keating’s record in the Senate had been truly truly liberal; so that it is unlikely that Keating, even if Rockefeller had waived his objections, would have wanted the Conservative endorsement. I believe it is accurate to say that the Conservatives would have tendered it to him (a) in recognition of his anti-Communist policy statements during his term of office (particularly concerning Cuba); and provided (b), he would use his influence with Rockefeller to permit the Conservatives to nominate Goldwater’s slate of electors. Rockefeller had meted out an especially spiteful and humiliating blow to the Conservatives by refusing to permit the electors pledged to Goldwater to appear on the Conservative slate, with the ironic consequence that Goldwater, who had been diligently supported by the Conservatives over the preceding years, now that he was officially nominated by the national Republican Party, could only appear on the slate of the New York Republican Party, which was dominated by anti-Goldwaterites; but not on the Conservative Party slate. Meanwhile Goldwater had, of course, to endorse Keating (inferentially rebuking the Conservatives’ candidate, Paolucci). Add to all these technical and psychological complications the schismatic