The American Vice Presidency (71 page)

He was born in Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 8, 1908, to Abby Aldrich and John D. Rockefeller Jr. during their summer vacation there. Nelson was a lusty nine and one-quarter pounds, a hint of the stocky and rugged man he would become. As fall approached the family moved back to the Rockefeller mansion on West Fifty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, where Nelson and his siblings had Central Park as their playground.

Nelson was not a particularly studious boy, more inclined to mischief and a gregariousness that made him popular but a bit of a trial for his parents, who naturally had high ambitions for him. He finished high school in the lower third of his class and could not qualify for admission to Princeton to follow his older brother, John. Instead he went to Dartmouth, whose president, Ernest M. Hopkins, was a family friend. There he buckled down and in 1930 made Phi Beta Kappa, graduating cum laude.
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By this time he had met and courted Mary Todhunter Clark, granddaughter of George B. Roberts of Philadelphia, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The marriage, immediately after Nelson’s graduation, pleased both socially conscious families. The couple embarked on a nine-month cruise around the world, a wedding gift from the groom’s grandfather, John D. Sr., along with twenty thousand dollars in pocket money.
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Young Nelson had written to his parents that he didn’t want “just to work [his] way up in a business that another man has built” and gain control only many years later, but that’s what happened.
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While his father was building the new Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, Nelson obtained a real-estate broker’s license and set about finding business tenants for what would be the world’s largest office complex. He lured tenants by offering bargain rents, to the point that he was sued by competitors, unsuccessfully. His enterprise led his father to naming Nelson president of Rockefeller Center in 1938.

Three years earlier, Nelson had made an investment in a Standard Oil subsidiary, the Creole Petroleum Company in Venezuela, then became a
member of its board, and began to build his own fortune, along with forming a deep interest in Latin America and its art.
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During an intense inspection trip of Creole Petroleum’s facilities and the surrounding countries, Rockefeller developed a strong concern over the plight and living conditions of its workers. He went among them political-campaign style in his open and glad-handing way, which later would be a trademark of his political success at home. News of his grandfather’s death in 1937 brought him flying home, after which he lectured the top Standard Oil officials about their social responsibilities to their workers.

Rockefeller also became involved in promoting modern art, a passion of his mother. He survived an early fiasco when the celebrated left-wing Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted a huge mural for Rockefeller Center depicting a Moscow May Day scene and a likeness of the communist icon Vladimir Lenin. Amid a public protest, it had to be destroyed.
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After an apprenticeship on a junior advisory committee, in 1939 Rockefeller became president of the family’s Museum of Modern Art, known as MoMA, and navigated his way through other disputes in the tempestuous art world. “I learned my politics at the Museum of Modern Art,” he joked later.
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On return from another trip to South America in early 1940, Rockefeller met President Franklin D. Roosevelt and raised his concerns about Nazi infiltrations there. He presented elaborate plans to FDR for coordinating U.S. economic policies throughout Latin America. The president was greatly interested but had already named a dynamic New York lawyer, James Forrestal, as his eyes and ears in South America. But Forrestal was more focused on intelligence and military aspects, so a new federal position, coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, was concocted for Rockefeller.
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After Pearl Harbor, all four of Rockefeller’s brothers were in the armed services, and in August 1942 Nelson went to Roosevelt and told him, “You’re my commander-in-chief. Any time you want me in the Army, I’m ready to go.”
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The president told him he wanted him right where he was and would tell him if that changed. In 1944, Secretary of State Cordell Hull resigned in ill health and was replaced by his undersecretary, Edward Stettinius. He shook up his top subordinates, and at Roosevelt’s urging Rockefeller was made assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs.

But Rockefeller’s efforts to achieve greater regional unity among the
South American states were seen by some within the State Department as undercutting its prime focus on creating the United Nations Organization. When Roosevelt died in April 1945, Harry Truman assumed the presidency and named his old Senate colleague and friend James F. Byrnes secretary of state. In August, Rockefeller was dismissed, only thirty-seven years old, and still determined to make his mark in international affairs, particularly in Latin America.

He returned to his family’s enterprises and, in concert with his brothers, achieved generational transition of control. As a private citizen, Nelson undertook a sort of independent Marshall Plan for Latin America, creating the American International Association, focused on strengthening the region’s health, education, and agricultural infrastructure as a broad philanthropic, nonprofit undertaking. He also established the International Basic Economy Corporation, which provided shipping and heavy farm equipment at low prices to fishermen and farmers, sinking millions of his own money into the enterprise and losing it.
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In 1952, with the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower elected to the White House after a twenty-year GOP absence, Rockefeller proposed to him a sweeping government reorganization and recommended three names to head it, not listing his own. The new president bought the idea and put his brother Milton in charge with Nelson as an associate. One product of the review was the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare, created in June 1953, with Rockefeller as undersecretary. Once under the Eisenhower administration tent, Nelson got the president to name him special assistant for foreign affairs in 1954. One of his chief contributions was the “Open Skies” proposal for aerial inspections over the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce the prospect of a surprise military attack, an idea of a young Rockefeller consultant from Harvard named Henry Kissinger. Eisenhower presented it at the 1955 summit conference in Geneva to wide national and international acclaim.
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At year’s end, with only one year left in Eisenhower’s first term, Rockefeller returned to New York and formed America at Mid-Century, a special-studies project to examine future national problems. He gathered the best minds he could find, which was a distinctly Nelson Rockefeller practice.

It had become abundantly clear to Rockefeller by now that to be truly effective he had to hold the public office where the power resided. The state
Republican chairman Judson Morhouse clearly wanted Rockefeller to seek the governorship in 1958, but it was a hard sell. Many Republicans in the state doubted whether the Democratic incumbent, W. Averell Harriman, could be defeated and whether Rockefeller as a member of one of the America’s richest families could ever be elected, especially with the GOP reputation as the party of the rich. According to Rockefeller’s account of Tom Dewey, “He slapped me on my knee and laughed out loud and said, ‘Nelson, you’re a great guy but you couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in New York.’ ”
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Nevertheless, with Malcolm Wilson, a twenty-year state assembly veteran taking him on a personal tour of nearly all of the Republican-strong upstate counties, Rockefeller was nominated on the first ballot at the state convention.
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Overcoming a stilted speaking style with his ebullient, back-slapping manner, he campaigned across the state, greeting everyone on big-city and small-town streets with a robust “Hiya, fella!” expressing his appreciation for their reception with an effusive “Thanks a thousand!” as if to avoid any reference to his own fortune of millions. He was easily elected.
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As governor, Rockefeller went to work, swiftly asking for and receiving a major gasoline tax and income and other tax increases to fund his ambitious spending plans. Continuing his formula of tapping into the best available minds on any subject, he formed as many as fifty task forces in his first two years in Albany. They addressed needs in such areas as fiscal policy, labor, education, job retraining, rent control, economic expansion, and hospital and schoolroom construction.
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Rockefeller’s auspicious start encouraged press inquiries about a possible presidential candidacy in 1960. But Richard Nixon as the vice president under the hugely popular President Eisenhower had by now built a commanding lead in the polls. In the fall of 1959, when Rockefeller undertook a series of speaking engagements across the country, what he heard was not at all encouraging to his chances for the Republican nomination. On the day after Christmas he surprised the political community by making a “definite and final” announcement that he would not be a candidate for president in 1960, adding, “Quite obviously I shall not at any time entertain any thought of accepting nomination to the vice presidency.” Besides, it was clear he was having a great time as governor. He said he intended
to keep working to strengthen the party and expected to support its 1960 nominee, without mentioning Nixon.

At the same time, Rockefeller remained unhappy about what he saw as Eisenhower’s accommodating posture toward the Cold War threat from the Soviet Union, but he held his tongue because of a summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev scheduled for the spring. When an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory and the Russians flaunted their capture of pilot Francis Gary Powers, however, the summit collapsed, and Rockefeller reconsidered. He called on the Republican Party to speak out more aggressively, saying, “It would be false and frivolous, and ultimately damaging to both nation and party, to dismiss criticism of specific American conduct as a peril to our national unity.”
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Two weeks later, he issued a “call for plain talk,” saying, “I am … deeply concerned that those now assuming control of the Republican Party have failed to make clear where this party is heading and where it proposes to lead the nation.” Rockefeller said, “We cannot … proceed—nor should anyone presume to ask us to proceed—to march to meet the future with a banner aloft whose only emblem is a question mark.”
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But all he got for his warning for a lack of clear objectives was an irate Eisenhower and broad criticism within the party for doing the work of the opposing Democrats. Having decided not to contest Nixon in the Republican primaries, Rockefeller was now shooting at him from outside the tent and further alienating party stalwarts.

The battle soon shifted to the writing of the party platform in advance of the 1960 convention in Chicago. Rockefeller’s men raised other questions over the civil rights and national security planks, so while in New York, Nixon decided to intervene personally. Rockefeller agreed to meet Nixon but insisted that he come to his Fifth Avenue apartment. After dinner and a three-hour discussion, the fourteen-point “Compact of Fifth Avenue” was hammered out. Half the points dealt with national defense. Rockefeller crowed over the outcome but still did not endorse Nixon, claiming the New York delegation was going to the convention uncommitted. The platform committee’s conservatives, led by Barry Goldwater, revolted, calling the deal the “Munich of the Republican Party.”
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Eisenhower was particularly irate at the deal, which also called for a reorganization of the federal government, an idea he had planned to offer to
Congress on leaving office. On Nixon’s arrival at the convention, it fell to him personally to thrash out the differences, strengthening the civil rights plank to satisfy Rockefeller and fashioning the national defense plank to mollify the Eisenhower camp. In the end, Rockefeller had demonstrated his clout over the platform but at the price of appearing self-aggrandizing and unwittingly showcasing Nixon’s own negotiating and peace-making aptitude.

Despite all this turmoil, Nixon was easily nominated on the first ballot but lost the election to John F. Kennedy in the closest presidential election yet. Hoping to resurrect his political fortunes, Nixon ran for the governorship of California in 1962 but lost again, providing Rockefeller another crack at the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. This time he took the traditional course by entering select primaries and put all his considerable energies and financial resources into the pursuit of it.

In the meantime in 1961, Rockefeller had taken the political risk of separating from his wife of thirty years, after a fire swept the Executive Mansion in Albany in May, revealing that they were occupying separate suites. She moved to her apartment in New York, never to return.
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But the revelation did not interfere with his reelection in 1962, and in 1963 he married the just-divorced Margaretta “Happy” Fitler Murphy, a socialite and former member of his gubernatorial staff and eighteen years his junior, an event that proved to be a great detriment to his 1964 presidential bid.

In the staid Republican Party of the day, and indeed throughout the country, Rockefeller’s decision to end a marriage of more than three decades and to marry a much younger recent divorcée had the political community buzzing. Republicans in New Hampshire, voting in the 1964 kickoff primary of the season, jolted the two frontrunners, Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater, by giving the prize instead to a stealthy write-in campaign for Henry Cabot Lodge, with Goldwater second and Rockefeller a disappointing third. To recover, Rockefeller sounded a cry against a takeover of the party by the “radical right” and moved his campaign to the more liberal Oregon in May, where he bested Lodge, with Goldwater running third.

Meanwhile, the Goldwater operation was working the state conventions diligently. He and Rockefeller came into the final important primary in California in June, going all out in the state that likely would determine the nominee. Rockefeller decided there to attack his party’s right wing as
the core of the Goldwater support, charging that it sought to write off minority voters with a white, southern strategy. He subsequently said he was not attacking “responsible conservatism in our party,” but the ideological battle lines were joined.
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