Nelson Rockefeller is one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century to have never been elected to the presidency, much less win the nomination of his party for the presidency. The grandson of both John Rockefeller Sr., founder of Standard Oil and conservative Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, Rockefeller was born into a life of privilege and public service. After college, Rockefeller worked for the Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil, learning Spanish and beginning a lifelong admiration of Latin America and its culture. Warning President Franklin Roosevelt of the threat of Nazi influence over Latin America during the early 1940s, Roosevelt created a position specifically for Rockefeller during the Office of Inter-American Affairs, where Rockefeller spent World War II.
Towards the end of the war, Rockefeller was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs, and was vital in creating a regional alliance with the other countries in the Americas. Following Roosevelt's death, Rockefeller served in the United States' delegation to the creation of the United Nations (UN) in San Francisco and was the impetus for the placement of the UN's headquarters in New York, persuading his father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., to donate the land on which it was built.
Although he was shortly after fired by President Truman, Rockefeller returned to public service later under Truman and would remain there for the remainder of Truman's tenure and Dwight Eisenhower's first term, being appointed as the assistant secretary in the newly-created Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Following his time as the number two at HEW, Rockefeller served as Special Adviser to the President on Foreign Affairs, where he would meet future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and begin to bring the German-born academic into Republican circles.
Rockefeller left the Eisenhower administration in 1956 to chair the committee that revised New York State's constitution. Following this, Rockefeller bucked nationwide trends and defeated incumbent W. Averell Harriman to become governor of New York, instantly becoming a potential presidential candidate. Rockefeller's first bid was run in a tepid manner, as Vice President Richard Nixon had effectively sewn up the Republican nomination to succeed Eisenhower. Following Nixon's narrow defeat, Rockefeller became the presumptive front-runner for 1964. In the mean time, he won re-election to a second term in 1962 and had begun to make his mark on New York, growing his state's budgets on massive infrastructure projects and large increases in funding for education, welfare, housing and the arts.
The Republican presidential nomination in 1964 was, in retrospect, Rockefeller's best hope to win the party nomination and thus the presidency. However, Rockefeller's liberal Republicanism was at odds with the post-Eisenhower Republican Party, which had begun to move towards conservatism in contrast to the increasing social liberalism of the Democratic Party. In addition, Rockefeller had divorced his wife of three decades in 1962 and remarried a younger woman, something that many in the period before the era of widespread divorce considered to have irreparably compromised his presidential ambitions. Rockefeller's campaign, like his later campaign in 1968, was undercut by his failure to court the delegates that would actually decide the party nominee, which allowed conservative forces loyal to Goldwater to make the Arizona senator the nominee.
The inability of Rockefeller and the "Eastern Establishment" to prevent Goldwater from winning the nomination (and subsequently losing in a landslide to President Johnson) foreshadowed the formerly-prominent liberal Republican wing of the party's slow slide to extinction. State issues, including large budget problems, bloated welfare rolls and an increasingly ungovernable New York City (whose mayor, John Lindsay, Rockefeller was on poor terms with) marked the turning point in Rockefeller's governorship, as the proactive governor was increasingly forced to scale back his ambitions to solve the state's growing list of problems.
Rockefeller initially backed Michigan Governor George Romney as the liberal Republican candidate in 1968, but following Romney's implosion after saying he had been "brainwashed" by the Johnson administration over Vietnam, Rockefeller threw his hat into the ring after Romney's withdrawal. However, former Vice President Nixon had carefully sewn up enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot. Rockefeller rejected the entreaties of President Johnson (to switch parties and run for the Democratic nomination) and Vice President Humphrey (to join him on a "national unity" ticket) and supported Nixon in the fall campaign. After Nixon's second defeat, Rockefeller rejected Humphrey's offer of the position of Secretary of Defense, with an eye on the nomination in 1972.
The intervening years would severely damper Rockefeller's chances. His push towards extremely strict drug laws, which were applauded by national conservatives, soon resulted in an explosion in the state's already-strained prison system. When the Attica prison in upstate New York subsequently exploded into a riot and hostage situation in 1971, Rockefeller controversially ordered the National Guard to retake the prison, which ended in the deaths of several hostages and dozens of prisoners. His fourth and final electoral victory, in 1970, was also much closer, with Democratic candidate Howard Samuels coming within 120,000 votes (of the 6 million cast) of defeating Rockefeller.
The 1972 campaign was also not one Rockefeller would fare well in. With California Governor Ronald Reagan copying Richard Nixon"s "Southern Strategy" and the moderate and liberal Republican vote split between Rockefeller, Washington Governor Daniel J. Evans and Illinois Senator Charles Percy (alongside favorite son bids from Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes and Massachusetts Governor John A. Volpe), Rockefeller could not translate his charisma and name-recognition into the position of anti-Reagan candidate until too late. Learning from the Goldwater debacle, Rockefeller campaigned strongly for Reagan, but again the Republicans failed to take the White House.
Having failed in his fourth bid for the presidency and having finally grown tired of the governor's office, Rockefeller waited until a politically advantageous time to resign and give his loyal long-time deputy, Malcolm Wilson, a leg-up heading in the 1974 campaign. Stepping down in 1973, Rockefeller spent two years laying the groundwork of his fifth and final presidential campaign and spent that time working to sort out family matters in the extended Rockefeller clan, including beginning a fractious battle with the next generation of Rockefellers over the generational transition.
Generational transition in the Republican Party was also apparent in the 1976 primary campaign
—Congressman George Bush, 16 years Rockefeller's junior and wholly in the new mainstream of the party, easily outpaced the older man who many felt would be more at home in the Democratic Party. Rockefeller, admitting when he was beat, dropped out, leaving Bush the presumptive nominee to face President Muskie, ending his time in electoral politics.
Passed over in the Bush Administration for the position of Secretary of State over inquiries about his conduct in the Attica debacle and potentially tricky questions about his complicated financial situation (the position instead going to Nixon), Rockefeller instead acted as the new president's unofficial envoy on to Latin America for the first year and a half of Bush's presidency. The strain of travel on the increasingly unhealthy Rockefeller resulted in Bush ending his services in mid-1978, fearing that the former governor would collapse, or die, in a meeting with a Latin American leader. It was a wise decision, as Rockefeller would suddenly drop dead during an art expo in New York in late 1979, suffering a massive heart attack.
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