New York's Three-Way Race For Governor: Vote Hinges on Rockefeller's Unpopularity

Six days before the gubernatorial elections, New York City was full with its usual hurly-burly and little more. Signs of political activity were scarce; only a few cars suspended in mid-town traffic sported bumper stickers, and campaign buttons were hard to spot. The most active leafleting in Times Square was being done by two girls distributing pamphlets for a dating service called "Meet a Mate" -- a superfluous effort considering the location.

But if public passions were not aroused it was not from a lack of issues. Nelison A. Rockefeller, the Republican governor seeking a third term, Frank D. O'Connor, the Democratic candidate and president of the New York City Council, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., the liberal candidate, have toted out a whole litany of big city, big industry problems. The political disputes now include crime in the streets, taxes, public housing, highway construction corruption, education and state finance.

The average voter just isn't interested. Either the polemics are too complex to entice the reader past the first few paragraphs of newspaper accounts or issues are neatly trimmed to campaign button size. No candidate seems to have connected the issues, to see them as part of a broader problem, and no one has promised sparkling solutions.

The state's ten million voters (six million of whom will show up at the polls today), except for the most stalwart in each party, will face a simple decision: how annoyed to be with Nelson Rockefeller.

The governor, during eight years in office, has been involved in a string of sour incidents. His political record is marred by two scandals with the State Liquor Authority, one in 1962-63 and the other which just broke last week; his divorce and remarriage; his crumpled presidential dreams; his veto of the $1.50 minimum wage bill last year; his absurd fall-out shelter campaign; and, of course, his broken promise not to raise taxes.

Local issues also plague Rockefeller. In Buffalo, for instance, his administration built a badly needed throughway, but put a toll bridge on it and began collecting money from commuters who, unlike their New York City counterparts, are not use to paying out dimes every time they go to work. They hate the governor in some parts of Buffalo.

Voters Won't Forget

Rockefeller has done imaginative things to rehabilitate three bankrupt railroads in the state, to improve the State University, to push medical aid--but he imposed a three per cent state sales tax which the voters won't forget. The tax, which his opponents call regressive, inspired O'Connor's campaign slogan: You Can Believe Frank O'Connor.

Rockefeller retaliated with a public relations machine slicker than a well made cue-ball. What other candidate offers reporters wine as they skip from town to town in plush bus or plusher plane? The refrain is "This is Leadership. Let's Keep it."

Rockefeller has already spent more than $4.5 million on the campaign -- over $100,000 on telephones alone -- and when the final accounts are presented to the state for inspection next year, the total could run twice as high. In the money race the Democrats are second with $1.25 million, about their usual expenditure, and the Liberals are surviving on about a third of that.

The polls, depending on whose you read, show Rockefeller and O'Connor with some 40 per cent of the vote each; Roosevelt has 12 to 18 per cent; and the Conservative candidate, Paul L. Adams, might get five per cent on a sunny day when the older people can get out to vote. But in the time it takes pollsters to canvass the state, opinions often change. Most experts currently give Rockefeller a slight lead.

Part II

FDR Jr. excels when it comes to the great American ritual of the universal arm squeeze and the indiscriminate smile. Thursday for instance he took his campaign to the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a few blocks from the spot where Barnum and Bailey's pitched tent when they made a special stop in that borough years ago. FDR Jr. pulled over on Eastern Parkway in front of a brightly lit cafeteria. Facing the building he looked out at Crown Heights proper, an old neighborhood of Italians and orthodox Jews. Behind him was Bedford-Stuyvesant, the most salvageable of the city's Negro slums. Looking toward the slum he could see sheets of paper propelled higgly-piggly by the cold wind until the trash caught in one of the low, rusted fences in front of the brick houses. The hard neon light from the cluster of stores on the cafeteria side seemed to draw people hurrying home for the week-end.

A large flat-bed truck with sound equipment moved into position, and the advance man got to work. "Meet and greet the next governor of the state of New York"--it came out like W.C. Fields doing the Annunciation.

Then his failing voice, which had that day seared nearly the entire borough, squeaked piteously and died. A young Negro took over. "Come on you people over on the other side of Eastern Parkway, come see Franklin Roosevelt. He's in the cafeteria, come on now."

Inside the cafeteria many people learned that they do truly love FDR Jr. There is nothing cheap or fickle about this, for most of the customers are older Jews and Negroes. They remember when to be poor in this country was to be part of a majestic revolution. Today they are just poor, and the sight of the tall, tall man with a heavy, almost ponderous, sad face brought them back. Slowly he moved from table to table, hearing praise for his mother and father, stopping to sign autographs for people of every age. He was especially careful with the little boys who always play in the cafeteria of old Jewish neighborhoods, where a cafeteria is the neighborhood tavern, club house, and fraternity all at once all day and night long.

"He's coming out, he's in the immediate vicinity," the advance man screeched. The bik bold buttons on his black vest flashed wildly as he squirmed in agony around the microphone, obviously hoping that violent motion would keep his phalanx from swelling shut. The Negroes who had come across the street pressed around. "How can you not vote for him?" said one woman with a marvelously comfortable voice.

It took Rockefeller some six years to learn how to walk among people in this way. O'Connor, to judge from his performance last week, will never get the hang of it.

Roosevelt must be conscious of this power and from all indications he plans to use it. After years of self-indulgence, too little thinking and barbarous political manners he plans a come-back. FDR Jr. may not take coming back to mean anything to do with the presidency. He is interested in non-oblivion, respectable non-oblivion. To qualify, he entered the race as the Liberal candidate at the request of Liberal Party boss Alex Rose, who wanted a name on the ballot that would draw votes and insure the Liberals third-party status.

Roosevelt came into the campaign roaring. Frank O'Connor, he said, had agreed to take second spot on the City ticket last year if he would be given the nomination for governor this time out. This "deal" was the apparent raison d'etre for the Roosevelt candidacy. His advance man cries "Give the people a choice. We're appealing to the independent Democrat, the Wagner Democrat (former Mayor Robert F. Wagner supports O'Connor), the voter who doesn't listen to the bosses."

FDR Jr.'s insistence forced both parties to endorse plans for an open, state-wide primary -- and therein lies the key to Roosevelt's comeback. He has shown that in many ways he is an instinctively good politician. Unlike O'Connor, who often appears haggard on the speaker's platform from lack of sleep, FDR Jr. is able to stay unruffled by dozing off as his campaign moves from one stump to the next. He has turned up some of the best issues of the campaign, including the embarrassing facts about O'Connor's anti-rent control stand in the state legislature in the early '50's and another anti-rent control remark quoted in "The Real Estate Weekly" this May. There are 1.5 million people in rent-controlled apartments in the City, making this a serious charge.

Roosevelt also lambasts his two opponents for seeking revision of the Blaine Amendment of the state constitution which blocks state aid to parochial or private schools. "Soon the parochial schools will be complaining that they don't get enough money and the public schools will be saying the same thing. Besides, when the government pays for something it likes to set the standards. The state will have a say in selecting teachers and textbooks, and then what will happen to the division between church and state?"

The professionals have noted this quickness. They will certainly be watching his performance this week. If Roosevelt takes anywhere near 20 per cent of the vote, as some of his aides predict, he will become an important contender for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in '70. Most of the present Democratic leaders have power over small areas, usually not more than a county, and though they may dream of advancement to higher office in the state ligislature, there is little chance of them entering a state-wide election. With a large number of votes from a state-wide electorate Roosevelt would have tremendous bargaining power. If he doesn't convince the Democrats to take him back -- his campaign has naturally enraged many who fear he might attract potential O'Connor supporters -- he could run in the primary which he helped create and with a fair chance of success.

In four years he will be pushing 60 and the governor's chair may seem the limit for a man of that age, given the trend of present politics. Surely that has occurred to Roosevelt. The rest is sheerest speculation.

Part III

The small cities of Westchester County, Yonkers, New Rochelle, and Mount Vernon, are all of the same mold: a squalid down-town section section with a store that sells foam rubber, another that sells lamps, another with candy and on and on. Most of the people on the streets are Negro, poor. The streets are often crowded with cars as the road system has not kept pace with the increase in population. This is not expensive, nubile Westchester. That is off in Larchmont and Scarsdale. Republican bailiwicks as secure as Eisenhower's Gettysburg farm. Even if O'Connor were vastly imaginative, which to read his programs he is not, he would still not conceive of winning Westchester, so last week, obviously on good advice, he concentrated on the cities.

With O'Connor during the tour were Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Udall came to rage at the pollution in the Hudson ("Why should we have to go out West to canoe?") and at the governor for not cleaning up the river. The politics of the Hudson River pollution are more complicated than anyone involved cares to say, and establishing a control system will be difficult. But believe it -- the river stinks. O'Connor brought reporters to the bank near a ferry landing at Yonkers earlier in the day, and all present sniffed the water, gaily colored from gasoline dumping, as it slid by under a strangely orange afternoon sun.

Kennedy came to campaign for O'Connor, realizing of course that a Democratic victory without his support would make O'Connor a competitor for party power while a victory with support -- including the help of Kennedy's upstate staff -- would put O'Connor in a subservient role at least until he could construct an Albany-based organization.

Getty Square in Yonkers is in fact a large alley. A thousand people could probably squeeze into it, but the place gets claustrophobic with half that many and it was claustrophic when the O'Connor bandwagon arrived. Around 3:45 p.m., many of those attracted by the sound equipment were school children, some from junior high school, some from elementary school. Perhaps a quarter of the 500 listeners were Negro, and it seemed that half of them were waving small American flags distributed by the Democratic Party.

The candidate for state assembly, the would-be delegate to the state's constitutional convention, the men who call Kennedy "sir," waited quietly at the back of the platform. Later the senator would read their names into the microphone and fix their morals and mentalities forever "good."

Once the hub-bub was quieted a local official introduced Kennedy, shyly, as though the very act of introduction was a mark of disrespect. The senator walked forward. A less literal age would have declared that the women, youngest to oldest, swooned when he appeared. Perhaps they did not swoon, but they did lean forward, and clap and some just laughed.