Paul Adams, RIP.

Paul Adams, RIP

In 1966, New York's fledgling Conservative Party nominated Dean Paul L. Adams, vice president of Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, to be its candidate for governor. "He was a thoughtful, quiet man," J. Daniel Mahoney would write later in Actions Speak Louder: The Story of the New York Conservative Party, "who had a thorough grasp of the entire conservative position and a gift for articulating that position with ease and clarity. There was not an ounce of flamboyance in his nature." Against him New York's well-established Liberal Party put up Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., and it spent a quarter of a million dollars to the Conservatives' $44,000 in the course of the campaign. When incomplete returns indicated that FDR Jr. had come in ahead of Adams, the Liberal Party took out an ad in the New York Times to do a little crowing: "We polled approximately 520,000 votes," it said, "the largest in our history. We also maintained our hold on our traditional Column C [in New York, the column a party occupies on teh ballot depends on its showing in the last gubernatorial race]. Had we lost Column C to the Conservative Party, it would have been a blow to liberal-minded people throughout the nation and front-page news everywhere." Three weeks later the blow fell. The final official count showed that Dean Adams had outpolled FDR Jr.--in liberal New York--by 2,789 beautiful votes. (Nelson Rockefeller was, of course, the overall winner.) The Conservative Party, now on the map, would, four years later, see its candidate seated in the United States Senate. It holds Column C to this day. Paul Adams died last week of cancer.