On the Slow Road

At his press conference last week, Gerald Ford reaffirmed his "strong support" for Vice President-designate Nelson Rockefeller. But later, when asked whether he would still nominate Rockefeller if he had it to do over, Ford replied uncertainly: "I think I would."

The President's hesitation may have derived from the sheer bulk of the information concerning Rockefeller's private business dealings rather than from any specific sense of wrongdoing. Last week the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Rules Committee began to wend their way through 2,300 pages of FBI reports on Rockefeller's past. At the same time, Rockefeller released details of $507,656 in loans that he has made over the past 17 years to friends, associates and members of his family--all in addition to the $2 million in previously disclosed gifts.

The new material seemed interesting chiefly for what it revealed about the thoroughness of the Rockefeller bookkeeping. It showed, for instance, that Rockefeller had made a $15,000 loan to his wife Happy in October 1973, and that she has since repaid $2,500.

Plain Purchase. The potentially most troublesome of the transactions involved loans totaling $84,000 in January and April 1957 to Robert B. Anderson, the former Navy Secretary, who at the time was a private businessman. Rockefeller loaned the money to Anderson to buy stock in the International Basic Economy Corp., a Rockefeller-controlled company with large investments in Latin America. According to Anderson, he sold the IBEC stock back to Rockefeller on June 6, 1957, at the price he had paid for it, after President Eisenhower had picked Anderson to become Secretary of the Treasury. Said Anderson last week: "It was just a plain stock purchase." However, congressional investigators are also looking into more complicated business dealings involving the two men that year.

Prolongation of the controversy has cost Rockefeller some support in both the Congress and the nation at large--and has delayed unconscionably the vital task of arranging the succession. Most members of the Senate Rules and House Judiciary committees seemed to agree last week that they had found no disclosures sufficiently serious to block Rockefeller's confirmation as Vice President. But the hearings could easily drag on until January, by which time Rockefeller would face the new, and perhaps more hostile, Congress.

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