The low level of Rockefeller public humor is particularly distressing to his intimates. The Governor himself has demonstrated a capacity for swift and penetrating repartee at news conferences and on social occasions, and his staff includes several genuinely witty writers who could provide him with first‐class ma‐ terial if he would only relinquish his chestnuts.

THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER

WHEN Nelson Rockefeller first ran for Governor, he did not seem offended to be characterized as a “liberal.” He had served in the Democrastlc Administrationsof Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. He was a militant internationalist and a dedicated civil‐rights advocate. He supported the great Federal and state social‐insurance programs and suggested new ones. He clearly believed that government should help people do worthwhile things they could not do for themselves.

In that first campaign, he was vying with a doctrinaire liberal, Averell Harriman, for the large bloc of independent New York voters who support liberal candidates regardless of party. He had to have their votes and needed only enough conservative flavor to insure that crusty upstate Republicans would not stay home on Election Day. They didn't.

A year after his first election victory, Rockefeller made frankly political trips to a dozen states, to test the possibility of challenging Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the 1960 Republican Presidential nomination. He found that a reputation as a “liberal,” while essential in New York politics, was no help at all with party leaders in states like Illinois, Indiana and Oklahoma. Many influential Republicans in that broad land between New York and California, Rockefeller found, dislike or distrust “liberals” — or both. It was a lesson he would not forget.

Not many months after Rockefeller abandoned his 1960 Presidential hopes, he began introducing into his speeches a new theme: rejection of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” as politically meaningless He argued that imaginative solutions of pressing problems that used both public and private resources—such as Government‐guaranteed loans to hard‐pressed railroads for new commuter cars—could not be labeled “liberal” or “conservative.”

Although Rockefeller never said so, this new message seemed to imply that he no longer considered himself a “liberal,” or atleast that he did not want to be known as one. (The manager of his New Hampshire primary campaign recently said, “He's not a liberal, and before we're through, we're going to prove he's not.”)

The argument in the Rockefeller camp today isthat the Governor is “an economic conservative and a human‐rights liberal.” Humanrights liberalism takes in his dedication to the civil‐rights cause and his support for such programs as Federal aid to education and medical care for the aged.