The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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statesmanship required the repression of Robert Kennedy, for anti-dynastic and other reasons.
Of considerable professional political interest were the questions not only of how would Paolucci fare against Keating and Kennedy, but also of how many lesser candidates would win on account of Conservative Party support, or lose on account of Conservative opposition. Although Rockefeller’s ban on Republican association with the Conservative Party had effectively bound the major candidates, his hold on lesser candidates was beginning to weaken. No doubt the quite unexpected appearance by Republican State Senate Majority Leader Walter J. Mahoney at the Conservatives’ Second Anniversary Dinner in the fall of 1963 had had the desired effect of sending out the word to Republican office-holders that, as a matter of practical politics, the choice would be theirs to make in 1964 whether to accept or decline co-sponsorship by the Conservatives. Senator Mahoney, among the world’s most urbane men (and effective public speakers), had said at the dinner, most amiably, in effect, that if you can’t lick them (as the Republican Party had tried to do), join them.
In the summer of 1964, at the famous post-nomination Republican unity session in Hershey, Pennsylvania, at which Rockefeller submitted to the discipline of shaking hands with Candidate Goldwater, Rockefeller called a press conference to observe that the Conservative Party “has entered candidates against regular and incumbent Republicans in 58 separate contests for Congress, the State Senate, and the State Assembly,” and is therefore “a major obstacle to Republican unity in New York State,” incompatible with the spirit of Hershey.
Daniel Mahoney, the Conservative State Chairman, pounced on Rockefeller’s statement as a
misleading and incomplete summary of the Conservative Party’s actual role in Congressional and State legislative contests this year.
More than half of the Conservatives’ independent races [he explained] are taking place in safe Democratic districts in New York City. Many of these independent candidacies resulted from a Republican rejection, prompted by the Republican State leadership, of Conservative Party endorsement which [had been] offered to Republican candidates. In several important races, notably the Nassau County race, and the 1st and 5th Congressional Districts, the Conservative Party declined to enter candidates in close races where we would clearly have provided the margin of victory for a liberal Democrat, despite a Republican rejection of our offer of endorsement.
Only in comparatively rare cases is the Conservative Party opposing incumbent Republicans. “For example, the Conservative Party is opposing only two incumbent Republican Congressmen, liberals John Lindsay and Ogden Reid, and five incumbent State Senators. The Liberal Party, whose endorsement President Johnson will accept with the blessing of the Democratic State leadership, is opposing six incumbent Democratic Congressman and eight incumbent State Senators.
Furthermore, the Conservative Party has endorsed 59 Republican candidates for Congress and the State legislature, including 42 incumbents.
Notwithstanding the prevailing confusion, Paolucci polled 203,369 votes, an increase of 75 per cent over the senatorial vote polled by the Conservatives in 1962. (Kennedy beat Keating by 650,307 votes.) Paolucci’s vote in New York City was 122,967 votes.
In six Assembly races, the Conservative Party vote either changed the outcome or came within five or ten votes of doing so. Thirty-two members of the New York State legislature were elected with Conservative Party endorsement, as well as Congressman McEwen from the upstate 31st District.
Earl Mazo, replacing Homer Bigart as The New York Times’ postelection coroner, commented somberly that “an official canvass showed the two-year-old Conservative Party had polled as well in major contests on November 3rd as the Liberal Party, which was founded twenty years ago. . . . Their polling strength is being studied by Democratic and Republican leaders to evaluate the potential impact of the recognized minor parties in future elections.” The results of that study have not been made public.
The official Republican opposition to the Conservative Party of New York has centered on the thesis that ideological quarrels should be transacted within the Party, as Governor Rockefeller put it in the midsummer of 1962. The Conservatives have countered that the GOP under Rockefeller has been notoriously insensitive to the existence of reasoned conservatism within the Party1414 and that the probable reason why this is so is the special pressures exerted by the Liberal Party, combined with the collapse of any organized educational effort to lure New York City voters away from dogmatic liberalism—deficiencies which the Conservatives explicitly seek to mend. It is not generally realized that the Republican Party of New York has a highly authoritarian tradition, and that it is very difficult for the dissenter to make his voice heard. Thomas Dewey, for instance, on the eve of the Chicago Convention of 1952, threatened all but public execution for any New York delegate who voted for Taft over Eisenhower. The State GOP is firmly dominated by two or three top Republican office-holders—Rockefeller primarily, and Javits, and now Lindsay—who are impatient of democratic Republicanism.
Which Governor Rockefeller denounced, on July 14, 1963, in the most sundering terms, as “every bit as dangerous to American principles and American institutions as the radical left”—a thunderbolt he did not trouble to direct only at supporters of, let us say, Robert Welch, but at supporters, in general, of Senator Goldwater. The conservatives, Rockefeller went on, “utterly reject the fundamental principles of our heritage,” and desire to “subvert the Republican Party itself.” Perhaps overcome by the general momentum, he went on to anathematize, while he was at it, the Kennedy Administration as responsible for the “unprincipled opportunism [that] has captured the Democratic Party.”
“At the State level,” Daniel Mahoney observed on January 30, 1965, “the Republican Party is simply the Rockefeller Party, as Governor Rockefeller demonstrated when he named his appointments secretary State Chairman of the Party last week. And now John Lindsay has proposed that the Republican Mayoral nominee should control the selection not only of the Republican citywide ticket, but of every Republican legislative and City Council candidate in New York City. Our election law presumes to entrust these nominations to enrolled Republicans voting in their local primaries, but Mr. Lindsay is prepared to waive this archaic arrangement.” It is an interesting conjecture, on which I shall in due course be dwelling, that the effect of the Republicans’ closed shop is not only to discountenance a useful bloc of Republican voters but to discourage a potential flow of voters whose background is Democratic, and who might well view the Conservative Party as a way-station to a remodeled Republican Party.
But the final historical responsibility of the Conservative Party of New York will be to answer the question raised in an editorial in The New York Times (October 31, 1962). “The Conservatives,” it grumbled, “in running a splinter ticket against the Republicans are pursuing a willfully destructive course. With their wrongheaded mischief-making the worst thing that could happen to them would be to succeed.” The reasoning is that as the Conservative Party of New York strengthens, so the Republican Party’s strength will diminish, and thus also will diminish the number of office-holders who do service to Conservative ideals. That reasoning—it is curious, of course, that the identical arguments are not raised to urge the liquidation of the Liberal Party—is correct if the big officeholders of the Republican Party in New York State are indeed furthering such ideals. If, on the other hand, such calipers as the ADA’s are at all useful for measuring, at least by contemporary political standards, the differences between conservative and liberal policies (and if not the ADA’s, whose?), then Mr. Javits, Republican, with his hundred-percent ADA record is hardly furthering those ideals; and if fiscal husbandry and a resistance to bloc-pressures are conservative, then Mr. Rockefeller is hardly satisfying those ideals: and so with Mr. Lindsay. The Conservative Party becomes a party of nose-spiters only as it moves, which it has yet to do, against moderate Republicans who in their public careers have stood up against incontinent liberalism. There are the sectarians within the Conservative Party, one must suppose: but they have not made any apparent headway in converting their Party into a utopianist affair, mindless of the here and now. Meanwhile, in microcosm, the Republican Party’s dilemma in New York is as it is nationwide—only a little more so because New York, alas, is New York. There are those who wish it were slightly otherwise, and the year the Voting Rights