The Week

James Edmondson, the performer known as Professor Backwards, was kidnapped and slain in Atlanta last week. Reported NBC: “Passers-by ignored his pleas of ‘!pleH !pleH.’ ”

“I happen to believe that Nelson Rockefeller would be a good President. I wouldn’t differ with him much and I would agree with him completely on foreign policy, which, after all, is the most important thing we do in this country. … I believe Rocky would be a damn good President now that he has ended his liberal drift. I think he’d be fine.” Pronouncing that judgment: none other than Barry Goldwater, in a recent interview over KTTV in Los Angeles. What can Senator Goldwater have in mind? First of all, he knows as well as anyone else that Nelson Rockefeller’s chances of securing the Republican nomination in 1976 rest somewhere on the scale just below Chubby Checker’s, if rather above Raúl Castro’s. Rockefeller lacked the political clout in the national Republican Party to preserve even his vice presidential future; the last and only Republican primary Rockefeller ever won was in 1964 in Oregon. New York State remains a political, economic, and legal can of worms—and the indictments that may well be forthcoming after the SEC and other investigators finish their work could include some surprising names. Some hypotheses: 1) Goldwater had nothing in mind; 2) Goldwater was continuing in his recent role as Elder Statesman, one aspect of which is an attitude of benevolence toward all and sundry; 3) Goldwater, never all that warm toward Ronald Reagan, is signaling that, in the event of a Ford collapse, he is in the market for another candidate; 4) remembering 1964, Goldwater was “stroking” Rockefeller, in the hope that if Reagan or some other candidate is nominated, Rocky will not—as once before, Goldwater of all men remembers—go completely off the reservation.

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James Edmondson, the performer known as Professor Backwards, was kidnapped and slain in Atlanta last week. Reported NBC: “Passers-by ignored his pleas of ‘!pleH !pleH.’ ”

“I happen to believe that Nelson Rockefeller would be a good President. I wouldn’t differ with him much and I would agree with him completely on foreign policy, which, after all, is the most important thing we do in this country. … I believe Rocky would be a damn good President now that he has ended his liberal drift. I think he’d be fine.” Pronouncing that judgment: none other than Barry Goldwater, in a recent interview over KTTV in Los Angeles. What can Senator Goldwater have in mind? First of all, he knows as well as anyone else that Nelson Rockefeller’s chances of securing the Republican nomination in 1976 rest somewhere on the scale just below Chubby Checker’s, if rather above Raúl Castro’s. Rockefeller lacked the political clout in the national Republican Party to preserve even his vice presidential future; the last and only Republican primary Rockefeller ever won was in 1964 in Oregon. New York State remains a political, economic, and legal can of worms—and the indictments that may well be forthcoming after the SEC and other investigators finish their work could include some surprising names. Some hypotheses: 1) Goldwater had nothing in mind; 2) Goldwater was continuing in his recent role as Elder Statesman, one aspect of which is an attitude of benevolence toward all and sundry; 3) Goldwater, never all that warm toward Ronald Reagan, is signaling that, in the event of a Ford collapse, he is in the market for another candidate; 4) remembering 1964, Goldwater was “stroking” Rockefeller, in the hope that if Reagan or some other candidate is nominated, Rocky will not—as once before, Goldwater of all men remembers—go completely off the reservation.