Vice President & Governor of New York--Nelson Rockefeller

 

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (July 8, 1908 – January 26, 1979), sometimes referred to by his nickname Rocky, was an American businessman and politician who served as the 41st vice president of the United States from 1974 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford. A member of the Republican Party and wealthy Rockefeller family, he previously served as the 49th governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. Rockefeller also served as assistant secretary of State for American Republic Affairs for Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1944–1945) as well as under secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1954. A son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller as well as a grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller, he was a noted art collector and served as administrator of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York City.

Rockefeller was often considered to be liberal, progressive or moderate. In an agreement that was termed the Treaty of Fifth Avenue, he persuaded Richard Nixon to alter the Republican Party platform just before the 1960 Republican Convention. In his time, liberals in the Republican Party were called "Rockefeller Republicans". As Governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, Rockefeller's achievements included the expansion of the State University of New York (SUNY), efforts to protect the environment, the construction of the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza in Albany, increased facilities and personnel for medical care, and the creation of the New York State Council on the Arts.

After unsuccessfully seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968, he was appointed vice president of the United States under President Gerald Ford, who ascended to the presidency following the August 1974. Rockefeller was the second vice president appointed to the position under the 25th Amendment, following Ford himself. Rockefeller declined to be placed on the 1976 Republican ticket with Ford. He retired from politics in 1977 and died two years later.

As a businessman, Rockefeller was president and later chair of Rockefeller Center, Inc., and he formed the International Basic Economy Corporation in 1947. Rockefeller assembled a significant art collection and promoted public access to the arts. He served as trustee, treasurer, and president of the Museum of Modern Art, and founded the Museum of Primitive Art in 1954. In the area of philanthropy, he founded the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 1940 with his four brothers and established the American International Association for Economic and Social Development in 1946. 

Rockefeller was born on July 8, 1908, at 12:10 pm, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Named Nelson Aldrich after his maternal grandfather Nelson W. Aldrich, he was the second son and third child of financier and philanthropist John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and philanthropist and socialite Abigail "Abby" Aldrich. He had two older siblings—Abby and John III—as well as three younger brothers: Laurance, Winthrop, and David. Their father, John Jr., was the only son of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller and schoolteacher Laura Spelman. Their mother, Abby, was a daughter of Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich and Abigail P. Greene.

Rockefeller grew up in his family's homes in New York City (mainly at 10 West 54th Street), a country home in Pocantico Hills, New York, and a summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine. The family also travelled widely. He received his elementary, middle, and high school education at the Lincoln School in Manhattan, an experimental school administered by Teachers College of Columbia University and funded by the Rockefeller family. Nelson was known to disappear on the way to school, and was once found exploring the city's sewer system. As a child, he was the "indisputable leader" of his brothers, becoming particularly close to Laurance.

Although his parents saw potential for Nelson to succeed in life, he was a poor student. Generally in the lower third of his class, he almost failed ninth grade and had undiagnosed dyslexia. Nelson's biographer Joseph E. Persico wrote that as a child he "demonstrated a discipline that throughout life would serve him in lieu of brilliance." Although Nelson was not accepted into Princeton University, he got into Dartmouth College, arriving on campus in 1926. While in college, he met Mary Todhunter Clark at the summer home in Maine, and the two fell in love. They were engaged in autumn 1929. In 1930, he graduated cum laude with an A.B. degree in economics from Dartmouth College, where he was a member of Casque and Gauntlet (a senior society), Phi Beta Kappa, and Psi Upsilon. Rockefeller and Mary were married after he graduated, on June 23, 1930, at Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Following his graduation, Rockefeller worked in a number of family-related businesses, including Chase National Bank; Rockefeller Center, Inc., joining the board of directors in 1931, serving as president, 1938–1945 and 1948–1951, and as chairman, 1945–1953 and 1956–1958; and Creole Petroleum Corporation, the Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, 1935–1940.

Rockefeller served as a member of the Westchester County Board of Health from 1933 to 1953. His service with Creole Petroleum led to his deep, lifelong interest in Latin America and he became fluent in the Spanish language.

In 1940, after he expressed his concern to President Franklin D. Roosevelt over Nazi influence in Latin America, the President appointed Rockfeller to the new position of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA). Rockefeller was charged with overseeing a program of U.S. cooperation with the nations of Latin America to help raise the standard of living, to achieve better relations among the nations of the western hemisphere, and to counter rising Nazi influence in the region. He facilitated this form of cultural diplomacy by collaborating with the Director of Latin American Relations at the CBS radio network Edmund A. Chester.

The Roosevelt administration encouraged Hollywood to produce films to encourage positive relations with Latin America. Rockefeller required changes in the movie Down Argentine Way (1940) because it was considered offensive to Argentines. It was much more popular in the United States than in Latin America. 

In the spring of 1943, Rockefeller supported extensive negotiations and mission of North American members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce to Latin America as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs of the US State Department, establishing the Junior Chamber International after its first Inter-American Congress in December 1944 at Mexico City. After coming back from the Inter-American Congress, Rockefeller convinced his father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., to donate the land to the city of New York to build the foundations of what would later become the United Nations Headquarters.

In 1944, President Roosevelt appointed Rockefeller Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs. As Assistant Secretary of State, he initiated the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace in 1945. The conference produced the Act of Chapultepec, which provided the framework for economic, social and defense cooperation among the nations of the Americas, and set the principle that an attack on one of these nations would be regarded as an attack on all and jointly resisted. Rockefeller signed the Act on behalf of the United States.

Rockefeller was a member of the U.S. delegation at the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco in 1945; this gathering marked the UN's founding. At the Conference there was considerable opposition to the idea of permitting, within the UN charter, the formation of regional pacts such as the Act of Chapultepec. Rockefeller, who believed that the inclusion was essential, especially to U.S. policy in Latin America, successfully urged the need for regional pacts within the framework of the UN. Rockefeller was also instrumental in persuading the UN to establish its headquarters in New York City.

President Truman fired Rockefeller, reversed his policies, and shut down the OCIAA. Rockefeller had become "a discredited figure, a pariah." He returned to New York.

Rockefeller returned to public service in 1950 when President Harry S. Truman appointed him Chairman of the International Development Advisory Board. The Board was charged with developing a plan for implementing the President's Point IV program of providing foreign technical assistance. In 1952 President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Rockefeller to Chair the President's Advisory Committee on Government Organization to recommend ways of improving efficiency and effectiveness of the executive branch of the federal government. Rockefeller recommended thirteen reorganization plans, all of which were implemented. The plans implemented organizational changes in the Department of Defense, the Office of Defense Mobilization, and the Department of Agriculture. His recommendations also led to the creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Rockefeller was appointed Under-Secretary of this new department in 1953. Rockefeller was active in HEW's legislative program and implemented measures that added ten million people under the Social Security program.

Rockefeller resigned from the federal government in 1956 to focus on New York State and on national politics.^[ From September 1956 to April 1958, he chaired the Temporary State Commission on the Constitutional Convention. That was followed by his chairmanship of the Special Legislative Committee on the Revision and Simplification of the Constitution. In the state election of 1958, he was elected governor of New York by over 570,000 votes, defeating incumbent W. Averell Harriman, even though 1958 was a banner year for Democrats elsewhere in the nation. Rockefeller was re-elected in the three subsequent elections in 1962, 1966 and 1970, increasing the state's role in education, environmental protection, transportation, housing, welfare, medical aid, civil rights, and the arts. To pay for the increased government spending, Rockefeller increased taxation - for example, a sales tax was introduced in New York in 1965. He resigned three years into his fourth term and began to work at the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans.

Rockefeller supported reform of New York's abortion laws beginning around 1968. The proposals supported by his administration would not have repealed the long-standing prohibition, but would have expanded the exceptions allowed for the protection of the mother's health, or in circumstances of fetal abnormality. The reform bills did not pass. However, when an outright repeal of the prohibition managed to pass in 1970, Rockefeller signed it. In 1972, he vetoed another bill that would have restored the abortion ban. He said in his 1972 veto message, "I do not believe it right for one group to impose its vision of morality on an entire society.

Rockefeller achieved virtual total prohibition of discrimination in housing and places of public accommodation. He outlawed job discrimination based on sex or age; increased by nearly 50% the number of African Americans and Hispanics holding state jobs; appointed women to head the largest number of state agencies in state history; prohibited discrimination against women in education, employment, housing and credit applications; admitted the first women to the State Police; initiated affirmative action programs for women in state government; and backed New York's ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He outlawed "block-busting" as a means of artificially depressing housing values and banned discrimination in the sale of all forms of insurance.

Upon President Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency. On August 20, Ford nominated Rockefeller to be the next Vice President of the United States. In considering potential nominees, Rockefeller was one of three primary candidates. The other two were then-United States Ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld, whom Ford eventually chose as his Chief of Staff and later Secretary of Defense, and then-Republican National Committee Chairman George H. W. Bush, who would eventually become Vice President in his own right for two terms and President for one term.^[94]

While acknowledging that many conservatives opposed Rockefeller, Ford believed he would bring executive expertise to the administration and broaden the ticket's appeal if they ran in 1976, given Rockefeller's ability to attract support from constituencies that did not typically support Republicans, including organized labor, African Americans, Hispanics, and city dwellers. Ford also felt he could demonstrate his own self-confidence by selecting a strong personality like Rockefeller for the number two spot.^[95] Although he had said he was "just not built for standby equipment",^[96] Rockefeller accepted the President's request to serve as vice president:

It was entirely a question of there being a Constitutional crisis and a crisis of confidence on the part of the American people. ... . I felt there was a duty incumbent on any American who could do anything that would contribute to a restoration of confidence in the democratic process and in the integrity of government.

Rockefeller was also persuaded by Ford's promise to make him "a full partner" in his presidency, especially in domestic policy.^[97]

Rockefeller underwent extended hearings before Congress, suffering embarrassment when it was revealed he made massive gifts to senior aides, such as Henry Kissinger, and used his personal fortune to finance a scurrilous biography of political opponent Arthur Goldberg. He had also taken debatable deductions on his federal income taxes, and ultimately agreed to pay nearly one million dollars to settle the issue, but no illegalities were uncovered, and he was confirmed. Although conservative Republicans were not pleased that Rockefeller was picked, most of them voted for his confirmation anyway; nevertheless, a minority bloc (including Barry Goldwater, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott) voted against him. Many conservative groups campaigned against Rockefeller's nomination, including the National Right to Life Committee, the American Conservative Union, and others. The New York Conservative Party also opposed his confirmation, despite the fact that its only elected member of the U.S. Congress then, James L. Buckley, supported him. On the left, Americans for Democratic Action opposed Rockefeller's confirmation because it said his wealth posed too much of a conflict of interest^.]

The Senate had given its approval December 10, 1974, 90 to 7. The House confirmed his nomination 287 to 128 on December 19.^[102] Beginning his service upon taking the oath of office on December 19, Rockefeller was the second person appointed vice president under the 25th Amendment—the first being Ford himself. Rockefeller often seemed concerned that Ford gave him little or no power, and few tasks, while he was vice president. Ford initially said he wanted Rockefeller to chair the Domestic Policy Council, but Ford's new White House staff had no intention of sharing power with the vice president and his staff.  Wikipedia