ROCKEFELLER, Nelson Aldrich

(b. 8 July 1908 in Bar Harbor, Maine; d. 26 January 1979 in New York City), governor of New York throughout the 1960s who sought and failed to receive the Republican nomination for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968; the scion of the enormously wealthy Rockefeller family.

The second son and third of six children born to philanthropists John Davison Rockefeller, Jr., and Abby Greene Aldrich, Rockefeller grew up with tremendous wealth, power, and prestige as the grandson of the richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller, and of U.S. senator Nelson Aldrich, who represented Rhode Island as a Republican. He attended the Lincoln School, a progressive coeducational institution in New York City, then graduated from Dartmouth College (1926–1930) with a B.A. cum laude in economics. Rockefeller married Mary Todhunter Clark, a Philadelphia socialite, on 23 June 1930; the couple had five children and divorced in 1962.

Although he knew he would inherit a trust fund of $40 million, Rockefeller was no playboy. He joined the family office in 1931, obtained a real estate broker's license, and began to sell space in the new Rockefeller Center, then the world's largest office complex. Taught from birth that wealth carries an obligation to help others, Rockefeller made his first contribution to public life by serving under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. As coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, he attempted to ward off the threat of Nazism by providing Latin Americans with economic assistance. In 1944 he became the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, but his aggressive approach led to conflict with his superiors, and Rockefeller resigned a year later. Determined to help other families benefit from capitalism as his had, he created the American International Association for Economic and Social Development to prevent the spread of Communism in Latin America by using private U.S. funds to improve public health, education, and agriculture. Named by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 to reorganize the federal government, Rockefeller recommended the creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and served as its undersecretary from 1953 to 1954. Rockefeller left HEW to serve as Eisenhower's special assistant on cold war strategy, a post he held until his nomination as secretary of defense was blocked in 1955 because of his reputation for heavy spending.

With his federal government career curtailed, Rockefeller looked to his home state of New York and won election as its governor in 1958. He eventually served four terms over fifteen years, from 1959 to 1973. Charismatic, hardworking, and able to relate to people at all rungs on the social ladder, he saw every problem as solvable, but his optimistic spending contributed to New York's financial troubles in the 1970s. Intent on keeping a friendly business climate in the state by lowering business taxes, Rockefeller paid for the expansion of New York government and the accompanying 300 percent jump in the state budget during his tenure by raising individual taxes. He continually argued that the federal government should provide greater subsidies to larger states. To defend his controversial fiscal policies and to measure public opinion, Rockefeller began an innovative ten-year practice in 1961 of holding a series of town meetings around New York.

As socially liberal as he was free-spending, Rockefeller often seemed more like a New Deal Democrat than a Republican. He revitalized Albany, the capital of New York, by building a vast governmental complex; he funded the construction of hospitals and roads, advocated civil rights, supported rent control, and promoted treatment for narcotics abusers rather than strict criminal penalties (a position that changed in the 1970s because treatment failed to have much effect). One of his most creative programs, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) of 1968, built low-and middle-income housing by mixing four dollars of private capital with one dollar of government aid. Able to override local zoning laws, much to the anger of many New Yorkers, it was the nation's most powerful state agency for urban housing construction. Rockefeller used his personal contacts with the Wall Street financial community, particularly his brother David, head of Chase Manhattan Bank, to keep the agency solvent. After he left office, the UDC defaulted on its loans. Rockefeller's greatest legacy to the state may be the expansion of the state university system, which increased from 38,000 students on 28 campuses to 246,000 students on 71 campuses by the time he left office.

Rockefeller's personal life occasionally made headlines during the 1960s. In 1961 his youngest son, Michael, disappeared on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea. The family's prominence made the disappearance headline news around the globe. Rockefeller immediately flew to assist in a fruitless search for the remains of the young man, who was possibly attacked by crocodiles or, more likely, killed in a racially motivated attack by cannibals.

As governor of the most populous and powerful state in the country, Rockefeller instantly became a major figure in the Republican Party upon his 1958 election; moderate Republicans bandied his name about as a candidate for the presidency in 1960. An ambitious man, Rockefeller had designs on the office and made a nationwide exploratory tour in 1959, but the qualities that made him a successful governor did not make him a good national candidate. Rockefeller typically relied on his staff to conduct massive amounts of research. In 1960 he gave up his pursuit of the nomination, reporting that the "people who were running my campaign said it was hopeless." He simply lacked the fierce determination that propelled other men, like Richard Nixon, to ignore the naysayers. The downing of a U-2 spy plane over Russia in May 1960 prompted Rockefeller to threaten to split the party at the convention by making himself available for a draft unless his advocacy of increased defense spending and stronger support for civil rights were reflected in the Republican Party platform. This blackmail did not endear Rockefeller to party leaders, and his actions hurt him when he again flirted with the nomination in subsequent years.

Rockefeller's presidential campaigns were also constrained by his governorship; unlike the eventual 1960s Republican presidential nominees Nixon and Barry Goldwater, he had a state to run. He did not have the luxury of spending years courting the party faithful, nor, as he acknowledged in his twilight days, would he have been content to sit on the sidelines gathering support while others ran the country. Rockefeller also had to attract diverse, multiethnic urban voters to maintain political power in New York, and the programs that appealed to such an audience did not necessarily meet with the approval of southern or western white suburbanites. Key state and local Republicans around the country preferred a more conservative leader.

In 1964 Rockefeller had an excellent chance of winning the presidential nomination, but his personal life cast too dark a shadow. He had fallen in love with Margaretta "Happy" Fitler Murphy, eighteen years his junior and a married mother of four young children. Both Rockefeller and Happy divorced their spouses; they married on 4 May 1963. Before his remarriage, Rockefeller had been ahead of Goldwater in the polls, but his actions cost him this lead. To add further insult, Goldwater partisans came up with the slogan "We want a leader, not a lover." Rockefeller managed to win the Oregon primary in May 1964, but the first of two sons that Happy bore him arrived with unfortunate timing a week before the California primary. With Rockefeller's morality again on center stage, California voters gave Goldwater the win.

In 1968 a staff analyst told Rockefeller he could not be nominated for the presidency, and he intended to sit out the campaign. Accordingly, he publicly withdrew in March 1968, but he reentered the race at the end of April after appeals from moderates and the business community. Having entered too late to mount a serious challenge to the frontrunner, Richard Nixon, and having antagonized many leading Republicans, Rockefeller's only hope lay in a massive groundswell of support. He spent lavishly on national television advertising to raise his opinion polls, but he could not overcome Nixon's lead.

Despite his differences with Nixon, Rockefeller loyally supported the president. A hawk and a strong anti-Communist, he supported Nixon's Vietnam policy and acted as the president's emissary to Latin America in 1969. Continuing to yearn for the presidency, he renominated Nixon at the 1972 convention in an attempt to better position himself for the 1976 campaign. Chosen as Gerald Ford's vice president when Nixon and Agnew resigned in disgrace, Rockefeller was sworn in on 19 December 1974 and found himself marginalized in the White House and in his own party. He retired from politics in 1975. On a Friday night in 1979 he met privately with a female staff worker in his New York City townhouse and suffered a fatal heart attack, fueling considerable speculation about the exact circumstances of his demise. His cremated remains were buried in the Rockefeller Family Cemetery, near the family's Westchester County estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

A liberal and a believer in an activist government, Rockefeller fell out of step with the increasingly conservative Republican Party of the 1960s. Although a much-ad-mired and enormously popular governor who helped millions of New Yorkers with innovative policies, he failed in his lifelong ambition to become president because he did not appeal to voters in the South and West who dominated the Republican ranks.

Rockefeller's private and governmental papers are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, near Tarrytown, New York. He authored a number of books, including The Future of Federalism (1962); Unity, Freedom, and Peace (1968); and Our Environment Can Be Saved (1970). Biographies of Rockefellerinclude James Desmond, Nelson Rockefeller: A Political Biography (1964); Robert H. Connery and Gerald Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (1979); Joseph E. Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1982); and James F. Underwood and William J. Daniels, Governor Rockefeller in New York: The Apex of Pragmatic Liberalism in the United States (1982). James Poling's The Rockefeller Record: A Political Self-Portrait (1960) is a collection of his public utterances. The dominant Rockefeller of his generation, he is covered heavily in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976). Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans: From 1952 to the Present (1989), summarizes Rockefeller's presidential runs. An obituary is in the New York Times (27 Jan. 1979).

Caryn E. Neumann