Were it possible to choose a precise date when government began to shrug off its obligations to the future, it could be October 7, 2010, when Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, cancelled the Hudson River commuter train tunnel, a project that had been in the works for years and on which six hundred million federal dollars had been spent, with much more committed. Christie’s decision very likely headed off more debt for New Jersey, but it will look wretchedly shortsighted to rail commuters of the future. It probably baffled anyone who is old enough to remember another regional governor, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.
As Rockefeller recedes into the recent, unremembered past, he seems an increasingly improbable figure, his surname perhaps more associated with a song lyric (“I’ll be rich as Rockefeller / Gold dust at my feet / On the sunny side of the street”) than with the man who, between 1959 and 1973, transformed New York into a laboratory for the ambitions and occasional excesses of government. He was a Republican, yet a missing link in the Republican Party of today: a moderate and occasional liberal who believed that every problem has a solution, and who could say, “If you don’t have good education and good health, then I feel society has let you down.” Such views took on more heft coming from the son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who built Rockefeller Center, and the grandson of that “malefactor of great wealth” John D. Rockefeller, Sr., a founder of Standard Oil and eventual philanthropist, who was once the richest man in the world. New York has had its share of rich leaders—most recently, the billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg—but never anyone like Rockefeller.
This third-generation Rockefeller was not exactly larger than life, but he often acted as if he were. He had a passion, and a gift, for running big enterprises, which he demonstrated as a mostly successful governor, though these talents were of no help during the two miserable years that he spent as Vice-President, under Gerald Ford, or in his amateurish attempts to seek the Presidency. He was a generous supporter of cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, which was co-founded by his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. (Her own philanthropic outlook was summed up when she told one of her sons, “Your father will do so much more good with money than the United States will ever do, that it is a crime to let it change hands.”) His pursuit of women led him into two marriages and many affairs—liaisons that biographers would treat lightly were they not so entwined with his public life and all too public death.
In a long, exceedingly detailed, and often enthralling biography, “On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller” (Random House), the historian Richard Norton Smith has written what will probably stand as a definitive Life. His book also may be regarded as a continuation of Cary Reich’s splendid 1996 biography, “The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958,” which Smith praises and from which he benefitted. (Reich died, of pancreatic cancer, at forty-eight, while working on a second volume.) Reich and Smith devoted a combined twenty years to the man whom headline writers called Rocky, someone so wealthy that at times he had little sense of what it must be like to desire something and not be able to get it. He once said, “Wasn’t it wonderful of Grandfather to make all this lovely money?”
One thing that Rockefeller did with all that lovely money was surround himself with art in his offices and his homes, which included the family estate in Pocantico Hills, overlooking the Hudson River. He eventually took possession of a mansion there called Kykuit, built in 1913 for the senior Rockefeller. His co-op apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue grew over the years from fourteen to thirty-two rooms, and visitors were bound to notice Picasso’s “Girl with Violin,” an inner staircase decorated by Fernand Léger, a fireplace framed by an Henri Matisse painting of a female quartet, and lamps and andirons by Alberto and Diego Giacometti. When Meade H. Esposito, a cigar-smoking Brooklyn Democratic pol, saw the apartment, he looked around and said to his host that it was “fucking obscene,” an observation that, on Rockefeller’s urging, Esposito repeated for the benefit of Happy Rockefeller, the Governor’s second wife.
More than a third of Smith’s narrative is devoted to Rockefeller’s pre-gubernatorial years, including a section on his parents, John (known as Junior) and Abby. It tracks not only Nelson, born in 1908, but also, to a limited degree, his five siblings (one of whom, David, is still alive) and the next generation, including Nelson’s son Michael, who disappeared in 1961, on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea. Reich, who ends his book with Rockefeller’s first electoral victory, offers rich detail about such subjects as Nelson’s years at the progressive Lincoln School, in Manhattan, where his relationship with a classmate, a “frisky, alluring ash-blonde” who had “a formidable reputation as the class flirt,” was a rare instance of adolescent rebellion, and an occasion for parental alarm. Nelson, though, never resisted his familial obligations. He was at Dartmouth when his mother urged him to take an active role in the modern-art museum she wanted to establish (“Wouldn’t it be splendid! It will be ready for you to be interested in when you get back to N.Y. to live”), and, at thirty-one, he became the president of moma, a contentious institution and, Smith writes, “his smoke-filled room.” At Rockefeller Center, which opened its doors in 1939, Nelson was hired to bring in tenants and, to his lifelong embarrassment, he oversaw a mural painted on tiles by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Rivera’s political sympathies were not those of the Rockefellers, and a battle ensued: Rivera was determined to include, among other mischievous images, the head of Lenin, and Nelson, probably acting on orders from Junior, told the artist that “your thrilling mural” had to be Lenin-less. Rivera refused; the mural was immovable; in the end, it was carted off, in pieces.
It must have been something of a relief for Nelson to try his luck in Washington, where he knew people who knew people. At times, Reich wrote, he “exhibited the relentless drive of the self-made man: he was every bit the go-getter, a patrician Sammy Glick,” and in 1940, using connections to reach President Roosevelt, he was put in charge of political and economic issues affecting prewar Latin America. Rockefeller did not fare well under F.D.R.’s successor, Harry Truman, and in 1952, after General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President, he was so determined to find a suitable role for himself that he paid for a government-reorganization study, after which Ike assigned him the task of bringing more order to the Executive Branch. He courted Ike shamelessly. Eisenhower was a golfer, and Rockefeller installed a one-hole course on an estate that he’d bought, on Washington’s Foxhall Road. He also acquired the chairs and table that Eisenhower used when he was planning the Normandy invasion, and sent them to him as a gift. Ann Whitman, who worked for both Eisenhower and Rockefeller, said that Rockefeller never “consciously displayed wealth—it was just there.”
The job he most wanted—Cabinet rank in the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—went to Oveta Culp Hobby, a Texas newspaper publisher, but Rockefeller was content to be under-secretary, in which role his energetic immersion was unflagging. It went well enough until Eisenhower moved him to the State Department, in 1955, as a special assistant for Cold War strategy. There his ear for collegiality was made of pure tin. You get a sense of that in the papers of C. D. Jackson, a gossipy Time Inc. executive and Rockefeller’s predecessor at State. In a semi-gleeful memo to Henry Luce, Jackson reported that Eisenhower “was extremely disappointed at the way Nelson, for all his external sweetness, had managed to antagonize everybody—‘literally everybody,’ ” and was not pleased by “Nelson’s technique of large staffing for no apparent worthwhile reason.”
The “large staffing” referred to Rockefeller’s personal, portable Brain Trust, one that for the rest of his life included experts in many fields—among them Henry Kissinger, whom Smith introduces as “a brooding thirty-two-year-old German émigré and Harvard University instructor,” and Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born “father of the hydrogen bomb.” (Eisenhower remarked, a little cruelly, that Rockefeller was “too used to borrowing brains instead of using his own.”) Rockefeller nettled Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, especially in the weeks leading up to a four-power summit in Geneva, in the summer of 1955, during which Rockefeller kept urging Eisenhower to propose mutual “open skies” inspections with the Soviet Union. The proposal, which Dulles hated, came out of a seminar paid for by Rockefeller and was therefore, as Smith writes, “literally beyond Dulles’s reach.” In Dulles’s papers, one can read his complaint that “there is growing evidence that [Rockefeller] is going into business in rather a big way,” and that Rockefeller at one point had forty-seven people on his payroll. Rockefeller had a way of dealing with these tensions: on a trip to London, Smith writes, he went shopping—he loved shopping—and bought Henry Moore’s “Seated Family” as “emotional compensation.”
In a contest with Dulles, Rockefeller was bound to lose, and he returned to New York in 1956, partly out of frustration. But he’d also come to realize that the best path to getting his way was to win political office and run a real administration rather than pay for a private imitation of one. Two years later, he was running for governor, facing long odds and another rich man, W. Averell Harriman, who, like Rockefeller, had Presidential ambitions. Rockefeller outspent Harriman, but his real advantage turned out to be a natural buoyancy, a talent for appealing to voters far from the world of the Rockefeller brothers. All of this he managed despite severe dyslexia: his spelling was atrocious, and he transposed words, letters, and numbers, sometimes leaving aides to figure out what he meant with a message intended for, say, “Mr. Joe N. Lie,” of the People’s Republic of China. Through press agentry and luck, his political gifts were captured in an appearance, on a rainy October day on New York’s Lower East Side (Louis J. Lefkowitz, running for New York State Attorney General, was at his side), where reporters watched the wealthy fifty-year-old gobbling blintzes, corned-beef sandwiches, and hot dogs. The appearance got prominent treatment in the Times, and represented a giant leap into the image-making future of American celebrity politics. Rockefeller won by nearly six hundred thousand votes, ten per cent of those cast, a victory even sweeter in a year when Republicans nationwide lost thirteen Senate seats and forty-eight House seats. The showing turned him into a potential Presidential candidate. After all, four Presidents—and several runners-up—had once been governors of New York.
The Times reporter R. W. Apple, Jr., who once dated a Rockefeller daughter, said, “If somebody said two words to label Nelson Rockefeller as a politician, I would use task force. He loved task forces.” At H.E.W., he’d shown that he loved organizational problems—the more charts and graphs the better. As a new governor, Smith writes, he “convened more than forty study groups”— task forces to look at everything from increasing milk consumption and pilot safety to the state’s electric-power needs.
Smith, the author of an excellent biography of Thomas E. Dewey, another New York governor and Presidential candidate, knows the state well and appreciates Rockefeller’s accomplishments. During his tenure, the State University of New York system grew from thirty-eight thousand students and “an undistinguished jumble” of twenty-nine schools to nearly a quarter of a million students on sixty-four campuses. (Enrollment today is about half a million.) The state added fifty-five state parks, more than a hundred hospitals and nursing homes, and two hundred water-treatment plants, and undertook a billion-dollar highway-construction program. Health and welfare programs expanded, and the new Department of Environmental Conservation, which predated the federal Environmental Protection Agency, took on such issues as vehicle emissions, mercury in waterways, and pesticides.
Smith approvingly quotes Neal Peirce, who, in “The Megastates of America” (1972), called Rockefeller “the most remarkable and innovative of the postwar governors,” though Smith acknowledges that some programs, especially Medicaid, exceeded the state’s ability to pay for them. Spending since 1959 quadrupled, to $8.6 billion annually, taxes went up, and so did unsecured debt, all of which would have gone still higher if Rockefeller had persuaded the legislature to pay for fallout shelters in homes and public buildings. He was fixated on the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack, and took his own survival seriously enough to install shelters under the Executive Mansion, in Albany, and at his homes in Maine, Pocantico Hills, and Manhattan.
Rockefeller was reëlected three times, running uninspiring campaigns, during which he was fond of invoking “the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God,” a phrase that eye-rolling reporters abbreviated as BOMFOG. He was helped by facing opponents with worthy credentials but little political talent (among them Robert Morgenthau and the former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg) and by the willingness of voters to forgive his intermittent pursuit of the Presidency, the job he desired most—“one of the few things beyond Rockefeller’s purchasing power,” Smith observes.
Smith doesn’t add much to all that’s been said and written about the dying embers of Rockefeller’s Presidential hopes. Each increasingly unlikely attempt came in the middle of a four-year gubernatorial term, and Rockefeller never had a realistic idea of what was required to be nominated, such as winning actual delegates. His best chance was undoubtedly in 1960—John F. Kennedy thought so, too—but he wavered so much about challenging Vice-President Richard Nixon for the nomination that Eisenhower warned that he could become an “off again, on again, gone again, Finnegan.” Four years later, in San Francisco, the post-Eisenhower conservative wing hooted him down before nominating Barry Goldwater, a scene that Smith vividly re-creates in the book’s prologue. In the late winter of 1968, with Nixon once more the front-runner, Rockefeller’s unrealistic candidacy was promoted by, among others, the columnist Walter Lippmann, who despaired of the looming choice between Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and saw Rockefeller as someone “tried and proved and tempered in the hottest fires of modernity.” But Republicans, who convened that year in Miami Beach, were not about to get behind a big-spending liberal like Rockefeller, and, in any case, political pros could already see that the Party’s future belonged to Governor Ronald Reagan.
By the time Rockefeller won the governor’s race for the fourth time, in 1970, his optimism was less evident. He was becoming uncomfortably testy (he got into a shoving match with the New York State Assembly leader) and stubborn, traits that probably contributed to his response to a 1971 uprising and hostage-taking by inmates at the Attica penitentiary. A four-day standoff was followed by a storming of the prison that left forty-three dead, making it the bloodiest prison riot in American history. Many believed that the bloodshed could have been averted if Rockefeller had heeded pleas to visit Attica. But by then Rockefeller’s attitudes were veering rightward. He formed a distressingly limited view of the nation’s narcotics problem, which, in 1973, led to the “Rockefeller drug laws,” legislation that mandated prison terms of fifteen years to life for possessing or selling even small amounts of “hard” drugs. The statutes have gradually been repealed (in 2009, Governor David Paterson eliminated mandatory minimum sentences), but their effects are still felt in New York’s overpopulated prisons.
A year before the end of his term, Rockefeller abruptly resigned. He said he wanted to head yet another task force, this one portentously named the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans. His rationale was a little mysterious, but he certainly was weary, possibly bored, and may have been suffering post-Attica syndrome. Also, while Nixon was being battered by the Watergate scandal, Rockefeller might have been contemplating another try for the White House.
Rockefeller always said that he never wanted to be vice-president of anything—that he wasn’t standby equipment—but, soon after Nixon resigned, in August, 1974, he was offered the job by President Ford. It got off to a bad start during the Senate confirmation hearings (there was insatiable curiosity about Rockefeller’s fortune), and became worse after he was sworn in. He found himself outmatched in office politics, regularly blocked by two young White House chiefs of staff: Donald Rumsfeld, a former congressman whom Rockefeller saw as “a very bright, able manipulator and maneuverer, but not an administrator,” and Rumsfeld’s successor, Dick Cheney, “just a shadow” of Rumsfeld. Nor did Rockefeller show much respect for tradition when the Senate, over which he presided, changed the rule on cloture. He quickly became an executive without much power or responsibility, surrounded by courtiers who didn’t wish him well—the worst of fates for a man like Rockefeller. His inexperienced Washington staff included a twenty-two-year-old Californian named Megan Marshack, a tall, somewhat profane former intern with AP Radio, who was described by co-workers, Smith writes, as “cherubic and matronly, caring and obsequious.” Her obvious closeness to the Vice-President she called Nelson did not go unnoticed.
Reporters who covered Rockefeller in the nineteen-fifties suspected that his socially correct marriage to the Philadelphian Mary Todhunter (Tod) Clark, whom he married in 1930 and with whom he had five children, had become chilly and distant. “It wasn’t that he used women,” a member of Rockefeller’s entourage later said. “It was more that he liked them. You’d be out with him for a day, and fifty women would try to grab . . . I mean it was just constant. He was like Joe Namath.” But no one then wrote about such things.
Smith (like Reich) dwells on two of these women, Nancy Hanks and Joan Ridley, although Smith’s descriptions go a little off the rails. Rockefeller got to know Hanks (“Appreciated for her fresh-faced, unmolded quality, she exuded a sensuality all the more potent for its freckled innocence”) when he was at H.E.W. Hanks, whose later Washington career included the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts, soon began spending so much time on Foxhall Road that she even mended Nelson’s socks. Joan Ridley (“An erotic Janus, alternatively channeling June Allyson and Kim Novak”) got to know Rockefeller in 1946 when she worked in Room 5600—the Rockefeller family office on the fifty-sixth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Ridley and the journalist Tom Braden, whom she married, had eight children (Braden’s memoir, “Eight Is Enough,” led to the 1977 ABC television series of the same name), and, as each child was born, Smith delicately notes, there were “rumors fed by their friend’s hospital room visits, sometimes in advance of the proud father, that coincided with the birth of Joan’s children.”
Margaretta Fitler (Happy) Murphy was eighteen years younger than Nelson and, in Smith’s characterization, “a classic 1950s wife who scarcely understood her own groping for something beyond the inbred gentility of her surroundings,” not unlike “Mad Men” ’s Betty Draper. They were married in 1963, but their affair probably began well before Nelson and Tod announced their separation, in 1961. It was especially awkward because the Rockefeller and Murphy families had been friends and neighbors. This time, “whispered speculation” bubbled up—Smith once more reaches into his quiver of tact—as “members of the Rockefeller inner circle discerned a startling visual resemblance” between the Governor and one of the Murphys’ four children. Nelson and Happy’s first child was born three days before the 1964 California primary, and, while it cannot be proved that this affected the outcome, the messiness of the Rockefellers’ personal lives, which included a nasty custody battle between Happy and her ex-husband, troubled voters, who decisively chose Goldwater and effectively finished Rockefeller’s chance for the nomination.
Rockefeller understood then, and later, that the Party’s base didn’t trust him, and when Ford informed him that he wanted to replace him on the 1976 ticket he felt wounded but didn’t argue. (Ford chose Senator Bob Dole as a running mate, and lost to Jimmy Carter.) When Rockefeller left Washington, in 1977, Megan Marshack left, too. She worked for him in Room 5600 and at 13 West Fifty-fourth Street, a Beaux Arts-style town house where Nelson’s parents and grandparents had once lived and which later served him, in Smith’s words, as “think tank, trysting place, mess hall, and art storage facility.” He helped Marshack buy her own lodgings, three doors west, at the Regent House apartment building.
On January 26, 1979, Rockefeller asked Marshack to meet him at 13 West Fifty-fourth, to continue their work on a book about his mother’s folk-art collection, now the core of a museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. At 11:16 p.m., a 911 call was placed by a woman. (“It’s death! It’s immediate, please.”) The police reported that, when they arrived at West Fifty-fourth Street, they saw the seventy-year-old former Vice-President on the floor, dressed in a suit and tie. Yet a paramedic, who was also dispatched, saw something else entirely: in a room with scattered papers, cartons of Chinese takeout, and a bottle of Dom Pérignon was “an apparently lifeless man, nude, bluish in color. . . . He had thrown up his last meal, complicating efforts to insert a plastic oxygen tube into his lung. Traces of his vomit clung to Megan’s outfit.”
Rockefeller was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital and pronounced dead at 12:20 A.M., after which a family spokesman inexplicably announced that he had actually been stricken at 10:15 p.m.—a full hour before the 911 call—and that he’d been at Rockefeller Center with only a security guard present. In a city where reporters like Jimmy Breslin, Anna Quindlen, and Bob McFadden were on the loose, such falsehoods couldn’t endure. The Times, in what the former Rockefeller speechwriter Joseph Persico called “tabloidal ardor,” discovered that the distress call had been made by a friend of Marshack’s, a TV journalist named Ponchitta Pierce, who lived at the Regent House. One theory had it that Marshack called Pierce in a panic, then tried to revive Rockefeller with CPR and attempted to dress him. In a somewhat ghoulish addendum, Smith introduces another resident of the Regent House: the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, an aficionado of the macabre and a Marshack confidant, who later relished telling people about her struggle to force shoes onto the dead man’s swollen feet. Yet, for all the contradictions about time, place, and wardrobe, Rockefeller’s longtime personal assistant, Joe Canzeri, believed that what actually happened wasn’t all that complicated: “He died in the saddle, in Megan’s arms.”
The circumstances of Rockefeller’s death briefly overshadowed his life, and Smith in his final chapter gives it close, perhaps too close, attention. Otherwise, he conscientiously follows Rockefeller’s career and enthusiasms down every available path, doing so in such detail that the recapitulations of old rivalries and legislative battles sometimes become a little numbing. Despite that, and despite occasionally ill-judged prose (“By the second week of May, Lodge’s lead was melting faster than the snowpack in the Cascade Range”), “On His Own Terms” succeeds as an absorbing, deeply informative portrait of an important, complicated, semi-heroic figure who, in his approach to the limits of government and to government’s relation to the governed, belonged in every sense to another century.
Rockefeller also emerges as something else: an architect manqué, a would-be master builder, fascinated by the art he could not make and the buildings he wanted to design. These frustrated urges took shape in the expansion of the SUNY system, and in his vision of the future of the house and grounds of Kykuit—now a designated site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But they found their most memorable outlet in Albany, in what was first called the South Mall, an outsized complex consisting of government buildings and an egg-shaped performing-arts center. The designated architect was a longtime Rockefeller retainer, Wallace Harrison, but Rockefeller was certainly the creative force. Like Ibsen’s Halvard Solness, he seemed almost to believe that he could will the project into being. John Egan, Rockefeller’s coördinator of utilities, told Joseph H. Boyd, Jr., and Charles R. Holcomb, for their memoir of the Rockefeller era, “Oreos and Dubonnet” (2012), that “the real architect” was Rockefeller: “Conceptually, every bit of the project was his idea. . . . When our fellows came back from New York, we held our breath, because we knew there was going to be something new. . . . Something was going to change.” In the end, that landscape-altering vision of government hubris and resolve took eighteen years to finish, razed a neighborhood, and never progressed smoothly or cheaply; one Rockefeller decision—to wrap the whole thing in Georgia and Vermont marble—may well have caused a year’s delay. Originally budgeted at two hundred and fifty million dollars, the project ended up costing at least two billion. The state’s Office of General Services calls it “a unique architectural masterpiece,” but the novelist and Albany native William Kennedy came closer in calling it “one of the most perfectly designed perpetual opportunity machines in the history of boondoggery.” Rockefeller never lost faith. “They used to laugh,” he said, when his father built Rockefeller Center. “They’ll come to like this place.” He may turn out to be right.
Rockefeller saw the completed project for the first—and last—time on October 6, 1978, three months before he died. He had come to Albany for its renaming, joining Governor Hugh Carey, a Democrat who had been elected in 1974 and had announced in his first State of the State address that “the times of plenty, the days of wine and roses, are over.” One might wish that Smith had provided more detail about the ceremony, but few paid attention even then. Perhaps it is enough to know that Carey announced that the South Mall would henceforth be known as the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, and that Rockefeller was able to get a good last look at what he had wrought and had said, “My God, it’s beautiful. It’s all come together.” ♦
