Nelson rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (Bar Harbor, Maine, July 8, 1908 – New York, January 26, 1979) was an American politician and Vice President of the United States between December 19, 1974 and January 20, 1977.
Member of the Rockefeller Clan
Born in Bar Harbor, Maine, into one of the richest and best-known families in the country, engaged in business and politics. He is the paternal grandson of John Davison Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and considered the richest man in the world at the time, and maternal grandson of Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich. Companies such as ExxonMobil or Chevron Corporation would later descend from the Standard Oil company.
He and his siblings were raised to carry on the family tradition and pursue careers in business or politics. His older brother, John, would dedicate his life to philanthropy. His brother Winthrop would move to Arkansas, where he would become the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. David Rockefeller, would be president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and one of the referents of the American social and economic life of the last century. Laurence, another of the brothers, would marry the heiress of the former president of the Northern Pacific Railway. Nelson would decide on politics.
His nephew Jay Rockefeller, son of John, was governor of West Virginia from 1977 to 1985, and a Democratic Party senator from the same state from 1985 to 2015, expanding the clan's influence beyond the Republican Party. Also another of his nephews, Winthrop Rockefeller Jr., was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the governorship of Arkansas in the 2006 elections.
His son, Michael Clark Rockefeller, disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern New Guinea.
Family as a platform
Nelson Rockefeller graduated in 1930 from Dartmouth College and began working in various family businesses and philanthropic organizations. At the age of 29 he was president of the Rockefeller Center. He used that position as a launching pad for a future political career.
He was fluent in Spanish, as his family owned more than 90% of the oil in Latin American countries such as Venezuela, where he became a member of the board of directors of the Creole Petroleum Corporation, a Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil that during the second half of the 1940s it became the largest oil-producing company in the world.
He traveled through different countries of the continent conducting cultural research on pre-Columbian art and promoting the values of democracy through his organization. He was known for being a patron of the arts in Latin America.[citation required] For example, it was he who, during his time in Colombia, commissioned the Master muralist Santiago Martínez Delgado to make the largest oil canvas in Latin America, for the then New York Bank of Bogotá (today Citibank).[citation required]
He was also president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1940s. The Monte Sacro hacienda (Venezuela), which he visited regularly with his family, was considered his second home outside the United States.
First steps in politics
His political career began when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed him director of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, a position he held between 1940 and 1944 and whose main function was to promote Roosevelt's policies in Latin American countries in order to counteract the influence of Nazi Germany in the region.
Between 1944 and 1945 he was assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius for Latin American and Western Hemisphere Affairs. After World War II ended, he headed the International Development Advisory Board, as part of President Harry Truman's Four Point Program to give economic assistance to foreign countries.
During the Eisenhower Administration he was head of the President's Committee on Government Reorganization (1953-1958), Under Secretary for Health, Education, and Welfare (1953-1954), and Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs (1954-1955).
Rockefeller participated in the creation of the American International Association and in the group of financiers who devised the construction of the World Trade Center in New York.
Governor of New York (1959-1973)
In 1956, he left his posts in the federal administration to begin preparing his candidacy for the Republican Party for governor of New York, and thus make the leap to elected office for the first time. In November 1958 he defeated Democratic Governor Averell Harriman to become the 53rd Governor of New York State. He was reelected three more times in 1962, 1966, and 1970.
In his years as governor, Nelson Rockefeller became a figurehead for liberal Republicans (liberals is interpreted as leftists in the United States) and the great baron of the Republican Party on the East Coast. He carried out a successful management that combined social measures such as the increase in taxes for the construction of social interest houses and the reorganization of public transport or the state education system, turning the University of New York into the largest public center of higher education in the country, with law and order measures such as the strict and revolutionary laws penalizing the sale and possession of drugs. The toughest in the country.
On September 9, 1971, he had to deal with an inmate riot at Attica State Prison. The rioters had taken 38 prison officials hostage. Rockefeller ordered National Guard troops and the NYPD to storm the prison to free the hostages and end the riot. The result was 40 people dead, including 11 of the hostages. The events undermined the popularity of the governor who was strongly criticized by Democrats and the press.
1964 Presidential Campaign
A tremendously charismatic and popular man, unlike other Republican politicians Rockefeller always maintained excellent relations with the press. From the beginning of his political career, he showed ambition to reach the White House one day and had all the influences and contacts that any candidate requires. He made a somewhat low-key first run in the 1960 presidential race, but he had still barely been governor for a year and it soon became apparent that he had no chance of wresting the Republican nomination from then-Vice President Richard Nixon.
The 1960 attempt served as evidence for Rockefeller that he was there and would try again. He was the clear front-runner for the 1964 Republican nomination. He represented the party establishment and had the entire apparatus at his disposal. He was a liberal Republican who in New York had collaborated with the unions or had demonstrated in favor of the Act of Civil Rights (Civil Rights Act). This earned him the distrust of the most conservative sectors of the party that aligned themselves around the candidacy of the senator for Arizona, Barry Goldwater.
The New York Times said in 1964 that Rockefeller had as much chance of losing the nomination as of going bankrupt. But what seemed like an open road without problems soon turned into an ordeal. Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton joined the shortlist of candidates splitting the liberal and moderate vote between himself and Rockefeller.
Rockefeller suffered the first setback in the New Hampshire primary, a must-win state. To everyone's surprise, the winner turned out to be former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who had not even formally submitted his candidacy. Rockefeller won places like West Virginia and Oregon, but soon Senator Goldwater began racking up victories in Illinois, Texas, Indiana, and Nebraska. William Scranton placed first in the Pennsylvania boarding school.
It all came at the expense of the primaries of the great state of California, which provided a significant number of delegates for the convention. Shortly before the important appointment, the story of Governor Rockefeller's adultery and subsequent divorce broke out in the media and this destroyed his image in the eyes of many of the heavyweights of the party who had supported him up to that moment. Barry Goldwater won the California primary, and Nelson Rockefeller decided to drop out of the race.
1968 Presidential Campaign
Despite the failed attempt in 1964, he did not lose hope of reaching the presidency and ran for president again in 1968. With Goldwater's nomination four years earlier, the Republican Party had shifted to the right and Rockefeller was no longer much of the influence he had previously had on the apparatus. He was no longer the favorite. The favorite was a Richard Nixon who had made a strong comeback and had a vast electoral organization in the crucial states. Other candidates included the governor of Michigan, George Romney, and the newly elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan.
Nixon easily won the New Hampshire primary, with Rockefeller coming in second. This made him the clearest alternative to Nixon, whom he defeated in the Massachusetts primary in April. But at no time was he able to put the great Nixon machine, inherited from his previous campaign in 1960 and Goldwater's in 1964, in real trouble. Nixon won 692 delegates and Rockefeller 277. Once again, his attempts to reach to the White House they had failed by not being able to win their party's nomination. He would never run for president again.
US Vice President (1974-1977)
Following the fall from grace of President Nixon, the Rockefeller Republicans saw their chance to vindicate themselves and gain weight in the party and administration. They managed to get the new president, Gerald Ford, to appoint Nelson Rockefeller to the vice presidency. Democrats controlled Congress by a large majority, and there were few Republicans who could pass the approval of a Congress so hostile to the president. Ford used Rockefeller to appease the Democrats and seek their cooperation. But the appointment angered conservative Republicans.
He was sworn in as vice president on December 19, 1974. During his term, the official residence of the vice president was moved to the United States Naval Observatory. He complained on numerous occasions that President Ford did not give him enough decision-making power and had to settle for leading initiatives like Whip Inflation Now.
He directed the Presidential Commission on CIA Activities within the United States created in 1975 to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies within the United States. In historiography it is sometimes referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.
In the 1976 presidential election, Nelson Rockefeller would be sabotaged by the right wing of the Republican Party. After a tough contest in the primaries, in which President Ford failed to secure the nomination to the last breath, the most right-wing elements rallied around Ronald Reagan's candidacy felt strong enough to impose their own conditions on the electoral platform.. Ford came to the Kansas City convention with 1,187 delegates. Reagan came up with 1,070.
Rockefeller, fearful of being left out of the ticket, sent his friend Henry Kissinger as a negotiator to the convention center in a desperate attempt to hold his ground. But Reagan's delegates made it clear from the outset that they would never accept Rockefeller as a vice-presidential candidate, nor the liberals' second choice, former Attorney General Elliot Richardson. Ford's people, for their part, refused to accept Senator Jesse Helms.
In the end the issue was resolved with the election of Senator Bob Dole as number two on the ticket. Dole was a war veteran and agricultural expert who could be acceptable to both parties. Incumbent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was thus denied the opportunity to run for re-election and, whatever happened in the election, would be out of the game on January 20, 1977.
Shortly before leaving office, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Death with controversy
Retired from politics, he died on January 26, 1979 of a heart attack. It was officially reported that he had died while working in his Manhattan office. But it soon emerged that his death had occurred at his Maine home, while he was having sex with his 27-year-old secretary Megan Marshak. The secretary took time to call the medical services and then it was too late to be able to revive him.
His ashes are entombed in Pontico Hills, New York. It is estimated that at the time of his death Nelson Rockefeller had a personal fortune of $1 billion.