George Cabot Lodge '50, professor of Law, last night endorsed the undeclared candidacy of Nelson A. Rockefeller for President.

"I join you in calling on Governor Rockefeller to run," he told the 500 students who crowded into Ames Courtroom for the first public meeting of a Harvard-based draft-Rockefeller movement.

Lodge--who ran against Senator Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) in 1962--said, "it will take Rockefeller's whole commitment and our whole commitment to meet the American crisis."

Lodge pointed to "our failure to understand the revolutionary process abroad" as the most significant problem facing America. Citing Rockefeller's work for the United Nations and experience in Latin American affairs, he said the New York Governor was the only candidate capable of confronting this problem.

Signatures

John R. Dellenback (R-Ore.), who is directing the Oregon draft Rockefeller campaign, spoke after Lodge and told the crowd that "tens of thousands of signatures" are being garnered on a petition circulated in Oregon to encourage Rockefeller to declare in that state's primary. Rockefeller won the Oregon primary in 1964.

Dellenback said Rockefeller was the only candidate with both the "capacity to be elected and the capacity to do the job."

John Beckett, chairman of the Rockefeller write-in campaign in New Hampshiret, said at a press conference before the meeting that Rockefeller people planned to spend $5000 for that state's primary. This compares to $250 thousand being spent by Richard Nixon.

Beckett said Governor George Romney's withdrawal from the race had given the Rockefeller group a "substantial increase of momentum."

Students for Rockefeller, a draft Rockefeller organization, sponsored the meeting. First year law student Marc Glass, a spokesman for the group, said plans call for the immediate circulation among students and faculty members of a petition urging Rockefeller to run.

The group claims a strength of 400 students representing nearly all major colleges in the Boston area.

Coordinators are already at work in a number of these, including Harvard, Radcliffe, Simmons, Tufts, Wellesley, and Wheelock.