On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller

by Richard Norton Smith Narrated by Paul Michael

Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE BOSTON GLOBE, BOOKLIST,*AND*KIRKUS REVIEWS ¿*From acclaimed historian Richard Norton Smith comes the definitive life of an American icon: Nelson Rockefeller-one of the most complex and compelling figures of the twentieth century.
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Fourteen years in the making, this magisterial biography of the original Rockefeller Republican draws on thousands of newly available documents and over two hundred interviews, including Rockefeller's own unpublished reminiscences.
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Grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, Nelson coveted the White House from childhood. “When you think of what I had,” he once remarked, “what else was there to aspire to?” Before he was thirty he had helped his father develop Rockefeller Center and his mother establish the Museum of Modern Art. At thirty-two he was Franklin Roosevelt's wartime coordinator for Latin America. As New York's four-term governor he set national standards in education, the environment, and urban policy. The charismatic face of liberal Republicanism, Rockefeller championed civil rights and health insurance for all. Three times he sought the presidency-arguably in the wrong party. At the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964, locked in an epic battle with Barry Goldwater, Rockefeller denounced extremist elements in the GOP, a moment that changed the party forever. But he could not wrest the nomination from the Arizona conservative, or from Richard Nixon four years later. In the end, he had to settle for two dispiriting years as vice president under Gerald Ford.
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In On His Own Terms, Richard Norton Smith re-creates Rockefeller's improbable rise to the governor's mansion, his politically disastrous divorce and remarriage, and his often surprising relationships with presidents and political leaders from FDR to Henry Kissinger. A frustrated architect turned master builder, an avid collector of art and an unabashed ladies' man, “Rocky” promoted fallout shelters and affordable housing with equal enthusiasm. From the deadly 1971 prison uprising at Attica and unceasing battles with New York City mayor John Lindsay to his son's unsolved disappearance (and the grisly theories it spawned), the punitive drug laws that bear his name, and the much-gossiped-about circumstances of his death, Nelson Rockefeller's was a life of astonishing color, range, and relevance. On His Own Terms, a masterpiece of the biographer's art, vividly captures the soaring optimism, polarizing politics, and inner turmoil of this American Original.
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Praise for On His Own Terms
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“[An] enthralling biography . . . Richard Norton Smith has written what will probably stand as a definitive Life. . . . On His Own Terms succeeds as an absorbing, deeply informative portrait of an important, complicated, semi-heroic figure who, in his approach to the limits of government and to government's relation to the governed, belonged in every sense to another century.”-The New Yorker
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“[A] splendid biography . . .*a clear-eyed, exhaustively researched account of a significant and fascinating American life.”-The Wall Street Journal
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“A compelling read . . . What makes the book fascinating for a contemporary professional is not so much any one thing that Rockefeller achieved, but the portrait of the world he inhabited not so very long ago.”-The New York Times
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“[On His Own Terms] has perception and scholarly authority and is immensely read

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

[An] enthralling biography . . . Richard Norton Smith has written what will probably stand as a definitive Life. . . . On His Own Terms succeeds as an absorbing, deeply informative portrait of an important, complicated, semi-heroic figure who, in his approach to the limits of government and to government’s relation to the governed, belonged in every sense to another century.”—The New Yorker
 
“[A] splendid biography . . . On His Own Terms is a clear-eyed, exhaustively researched account of a significant and fascinating American life.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“A compelling read . . . What makes the book fascinating for a contemporary professional is not so much any one thing that [Nelson] Rockefeller achieved, but the portrait of the world he inhabited not so very long ago.”—The New York Times
 
“Richard Norton Smith spent fourteen years researching this life of Rockefeller. [On His Own Terms] has perception and scholarly authority and is immensely readable.”—The Economist
 
“With a keen eye for richness of detail, a gift for recounting the sweep of his subject’s life and the mastery of a prose artist, [Richard Norton Smith] offers a complete portrait, one that neither exaggerates Rockefeller’s accomplishments nor downplays his faults. And he depicts Rockefeller—‘allergic to inactivity’ as a man whose breadth of interests and depth of determination continue to astound—in all his contradictions. . . . Inspired in conception, incisive in execution, On His Own Terms displays the artistry of its author and the significance of its subject.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“A nightmare for political handlers, the man who claimed ‘a Democratic heart with a Republican head’ poses no small challenge for a biographer. But after a decade of exhaustive research, Smith delivers a compelling portrait of a man who defied the simplifying ideologies of his age. . . . Complete and balanced, a biography of exceptional substance.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Richard Norton Smith has brought us a gripping, magisterial, deeply researched life of one of the most intriguing figures in American political history. In Smith’s vivid rendering, Nelson Rockefeller is exuberant, talented, conflicted, apparently unstoppable, and then, ultimately, poignant amid the frustration of his Ozymandian ambitions. Along with the tale of Rockefeller’s life, On His Own Terms also brings us a timely, knowing close-up view of what used to be called—at its zenith, which now seems so long ago—the ‘Rockefeller wing’ of the Republican party.”—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989 and The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945
 
“The amount of first-class scholarship Richard Norton Smith undertook to write about Nelson Rockefeller is utterly remarkable. This is one of the greatest cradle-to-grave biographies written in the past fifty years. It’s never dull and always joyfully lucid. Highly recommended!”—Douglas Brinkley, author of Cronkite and The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

“No one knows more about the American presidency than Richard Norton Smith. In On His Own Terms, readers will marvel, laugh, and delight in Smith’s long-awaited biography of almost president Nelson Rockefeller. In history writing at its best, Smith’s insightful account of the struggle for the soul of the Republican Party fifty years ago sounds at many moments uncannily contemporary.”—Ronald C. White, Jr., author of A. Lincoln: A Biography
 
“Perhaps no American in public life has had as varied a career as Nelson Rockefeller—art collector, real estate developer, Latin America policy czar, presidential candidate, and governor of New York for fifteen turbulent years. Richard Norton Smith brings Rocky back to life in all his ebullience. Warning: This is, appropriately, a long book and one that’s impossible to put down.”—Michael Barone, American Enterprise Institute, senior political analyst, Washington Examiner, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics

DECEMBER 2014 - AudioFile

Narrator Paul Michael is a good companion for the long haul; he helps keep this lengthy, detailed biography interesting and enjoyable. His voice is likable, and he handles pacing, the matching of tone to sense, and the intelligent shaping of sentences with an easy facility. His reading is sober without being drab and avoids theatricality, something welcome in serious nonfiction, especially at this length. Though his impersonations of Henry Kissinger are unconvincing, he makes generally adept use of chances to “do a voice.” A minor failing is his pronunciation of foreign words and names. While mostly correct, they’re delivered with a hesitation that makes them sound awkward. Still, his skilled reading keeps this long life story engaging. W.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2014-09-17
Presidential library director and C-SPAN in-house historian Smith (The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1997, etc.) delivers a monumental biography of the charismatic vice president and four-term governor of New York.Grandson and namesake of the two most hated men in Progressive-era America, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-1979) was determined "to succeed despite his name" and to "polish the Rockefeller legacy like fine silver" through public service and the socially responsible use of the immense wealth and influence at his disposal. Rockefeller was the last of the titans of progressive Republicanism. "He had long believed that his country, like his family, must justify its riches through good works and the sharing of wealth," writes Smith. He worked comfortably in appointed positions in Republican and Democratic administrations but ultimately "hungered for the legitimacy uniquely bestowed by the ballot box." As governor of New York, Rockefeller advanced measures combating discrimination in various forms and engaged in a building boom, much of it financed through constitutionally dodgy bonding schemes. In national politics, however, Rockefeller ultimately proved too liberal for the Republicans, the pillar of the "eastern establishment" at a time when the party was becoming more stridently conservative. In person, Rockefeller was a force of nature—optimistic, impatient, hard-charging and strikingly virile, engaging in sex with subordinates in a way that would never be hidden or tolerated today. Ironically, his presidential hopes were scotched by his very public divorce and remarriage, along with a considerable measure of tactical ineptitude. Rockefeller's enormously full life as a diplomat, bureaucrat, politician, businessman, and avid collector and proponent of modern art justifies the prodigious scale of this intensively researched work, presented in sturdy, confident prose with the occasional well-placed barb. The author maintains a dignified objectivity throughout, recounting events with penetrating perceptivity but refraining from intrusive editorial comment or analysis. An overdue comprehensive biography of a giant of mid-20th-century American politics.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169351095
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/21/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

On His Own Terms

A Life of Nelson Rockefeller

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By Richard Norton Smith

Random House LLC

Copyright © 2014 Richard Norton Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-50580-5

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CHAPTER 1

The House That Sugar Built

I had a grandfather—don't jump to any conclusions; this was my mother's father. He was the collector of art. He also happened to be a politician, which is a rather unusual combination, to be frank.

—Nelson A. Rockefeller

1

The headlines were predictable. croesus captured. beauty to wed wealth. son of richest man in the world gives up church and goes in for dancing to win miss aldrich. Americans in the autumn of 1901 were both fascinated and repelled by the pending alliance between the world's greatest fortune and the country's dominant lawmaker. The site of the wedding was never in doubt. Although the bride expressed her preference for a modest ceremony in a small Warwick church, and the groom would have been perfectly happy to plight his troth before a handful of witnesses in New York's Little Church Around the Corner, the choice didn't rest with Abby Greene Aldrich or John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In the Aldrich household, senatorial privilege governed; unmitigated by senatorial courtesy, it reserved all questions of importance to the imperious figure popularly labeled "the General Manager of the United States."

Virtually forgotten today, for twenty years straddling the end of the nineteenth century, Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich pulled the nation's financial strings in tandem with Wall Street confederates like J. P. Morgan and Paul Warburg. "He was so much the man of power that he never thought about his power," wrote Aldrich's official biographer. "It was natural to him, like breathing air." Much the same would be said of the senator's grandson and namesake, who emulated his appetite for command, his chronic restlessness, and his unabashed delight in art at once spiritual and sensual. "Most people don't know what they want!" Aldrich grumbled. This was not a criticism frequently directed at the senior senator from Rhode Island. The recent assassination of President William McKinley, long a champion of economic protectionism, may have been grim news indeed for like-minded Republicans like Aldrich. Yet the death of a president, however untimely, could not be allowed to interfere with the wedding of Abby Aldrich four weeks later.

If anything, uncertainty about McKinley's swashbuckling successor, Theodore Roosevelt, lent a note of urgency to the invitations Aldrich dispatched to his Capitol Hill colleagues. "Come right to Warwick and stay," he told one. "We will have a committee [meeting] right away after. There are a number of things I want to talk to you about." The new president, precluded by the requirements of public mourning from attending the nuptials, was nonetheless careful to solicit senatorial counsel as he composed his first, defining message to Congress. Aldrich took such deference as his due. As a child he had come to see himself among the elect, a status reinforced by his mother's claims of descent from New England patriarchs John Winthrop and Roger Williams. While still a newcomer to the Providence City Council, Aldrich had resolved to build a great country seat on the west shore of Narragansett Bay at Warwick. Even now, architects were drawing plans for a seventy-room château, serviced by a two-hundred-yard private railroad laid down to muffle the clatter of tradesmen making deliveries. The parklike setting already boasted a large stone teahouse, in the elegant ballroom of which Abby and John would exchange their vows.

None of the several hundred invited guests who made their way there on the morning of October 9, 1901, by steamer or special streetcar could fail to be impressed by the waterfront estate Aldrich called Indian Oaks and muckraking journalists made notorious as the House That Sugar Built. Its owner, the son of a millworker from Foster, Rhode Island, had traveled an improbable road in his sixty years. Before his tenth birthday, Aldrich passed up a visiting circus and, with the money saved, purchased the self-improving volume A Tinker's Son, or, I'll Be Somebody Yet. At seventeen, he landed a job as a wholesale grocer's clerk in the state capital of Providence. Attending evening lectures at a local lyceum to compensate for a meager formal education, Aldrich paid special attention to the rules of debate and parliamentary procedure. The attack on Fort Sumter interrupted his bookkeeping labors, but only briefly; a bout of typhoid fever earned him a discharge from the Tenth Rhode Island Volunteers garrisoning wartime Washington.

Sickened by the possibility that he might remain one of the "dumb driven cattle" constituting the bulk of humanity, Aldrich returned to Providence in the autumn of 1862. He began courting Abby Pearce Chapman, a Mayflower descendant to whom he confided a fierce resolution to achieve, "willingly or forcibly wrested from a selfish world Success! Counted as the mass count it, by dollars and cents!" The ambitious clerk dreaded anonymity only slightly less than the soul-killing drudgery of the ledger book. Within a year of their 1866 marriage, Nelson and Abby welcomed a son, christened Nelson Jr. The boy's death at the age of four devastated his parents. But it was the father who fled to the Old World, leaving Abby to console herself as he applied the healing balm of art.

At the Parthenon ("the most sublime of all temples or churches"), Aldrich was nearly overcome by the urge to prostrate himself on the marble pavement. Rejecting the stern theology of his New England fathers, Aldrich found inspiration in the parallel universe of artistic and literary expression. Denied creative talent, Aldrich was frustrated a second time when his hopes of becoming a great orator, a modern-day Cicero, went glimmering. Politics beckoned. Elected to the Providence City Council in 1869, Aldrich served simultaneously as president of the city's Board of Trade and the First National City Bank. After making his peace with the Republican boss of Rhode Island, General Charles Brayton, he won a seat in the state legislature. His subsequent ascent to the Speaker's chair foreshadowed two terms in the national House of Representatives and three decades as a senatorial powerhouse.

His reliance on government as an engine of democratic capitalism placed Aldrich in the nationalistic camp of Alexander Hamilton, a financial wizard rejected by the very people whose democratic experiment he capitalized. Hamilton believed that only by linking the interests of the state "in an intimate connection" with citizens of great wealth could the success of the young republic be assured. For Nelson Aldrich, the line demarking self-interest from the public good was indistinct, if not invisible. From an early age, Aldrich the self-made aristocrat entertained visions of grandeur centered on Warwick Neck. Lacking the cash to realize them, the freshman senator and his growing family made do with a suite of rooms in a Washington hotel, supplemented by rented houses in Providence. Eventually there would be eleven Aldrich children, eight of whom survived infancy. These included a daughter born in October 1874 and named for her mother. As the elder Abby faded under the strain of repeated pregnancies and the physical and emotional distance imposed by Nelson's political pursuits, the second Abby came to fill the void in her father's life. Belying his reactionary image, Nelson Aldrich was a thoroughgoing progressive when it came to educating women. Thus his daughter began her formal schooling with a Quaker governess, precursor to Miss Abbott's School for Young Ladies in Providence, at which modern languages, ancient history, and art lent ballast to the traditional curriculum of dancing, gymnastics, and edifying verse.

Young Abby became a voracious reader, with a versatility extending far beyond the classroom. She enjoyed baseball as much as needlework. Tutored by her father, who entered the Senate when she was seven years old, Abby became proficient at poker, bridge, and games played for much higher stakes. She observed his quiet domination of the Philosophy Club, a powerful quartet of senators that convened on the front porch in Warwick to deal cards and determine the national agenda. In modern parlance a workhorse, not a show horse, even as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Aldrich held no press conferences, published no manifestos, submitted to no interviews. Trained observers like the painter Anders Zorn found him inscrutable. "Of all the sitters I ever had Senator Aldrich is the most difficult because of the expression of his eyes," said Zorn. "It is so hard to get."

By his stubborn refusal to concede public accountability, as in his social Darwinist preference for the strong over the weak, Aldrich mirrored his closemouthed counterpart in business John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (who famously declined to answer critics by muttering, "Let the world wag"). Each man had escaped youthful poverty with the aid of a motivating mother and his own towering ambition. Each invited caricature at odds with his complex motivations and personal magnetism. Certainly Aldrich, a muscular six-footer with dark hunter's eyes and a florid mustache, cut an imposing figure in Capitol Hill cloakrooms, where a brisk nod or sidelong glance could fix the fate of legislation. At home in the shadows, according to one lobbyist, "He made no noise ... but when we saw him moving about, and whispering to Senator Allison, and just giving a wink to Senator Hale and Senator Platt of Connecticut, we knew our cake was dough."

Aldrich's domestic table was less amply furnished, his official salary of $5,000 being insufficient to maintain two residences and raise eight children. Too proud to live off his wife's money, in 1892 the senator announced his retirement from politics. A group of Rhode Island businessmen, grateful for his help in consolidating a tangle of rival street railway companies in Providence, offered to make him president of the United Traction and Electric Company. This set off boardroom alarms in the American Sugar Refining Company, the so-called Sugar Trust, whose economic interests had never been far from the senator's heart. Now Big Sugar filled the Aldrich wallet, beginning with $100,000 from chief lobbyist John E. Searles, Jr. As events would demonstrate, this was a mere down payment on Aldrich's continued services. All thoughts of resignation from the Senate were buried under $5 million of Searles's money, used by Aldrich to capitalize the fledgling transit company. This, in turn, laid the foundation for a personal fortune exceeding $15 million. His sudden prosperity enabled Aldrich to purchase a mansion in the elegant College Hill neighborhood of Providence and to realize his boyish dream of possessing an estate grand enough for the Philosophy Club, if less garish than the oceanside palaces of Newport.

Each summer, the Aldriches gathered at Warwick Neck to bask in nautical breezes and navigate the choppy currents of Narragansett Bay. Besides sailing lessons, the patriarch imparted to Abby his unconcealed joy in acquiring European masters, Persian rugs, and Chippendale chairs. (One of the senator's proudest legislative achievements was the elimination of import duties on art and antiquities, thereby accelerating the Yankee plunder of Old World collectibles.) By the time she made her social debut in the autumn of 1893, nineteen-year-old Abby Aldrich was a beguiling compound of majesty and mirth. Tall and bosomy, her Gibson girl figure topped by luxuriant chestnut hair, she was outgoing, free of prejudice, and exuberantly original, with a low, slightly nasal voice that erupted in frequent laughter. Her square jaw and thick blade of a nose marked Abby as a true Aldrich. If these rendered her appearance more vivid than beautiful, they did nothing to diminish the line of suitors who bestowed on her no fewer than fifty-two bouquets. Nor was it difficult to see why: boasting confidence to spare, Abby exuded the intuitive sympathy and warmth that make a man feel more of a man.

Denied access to power by a society that placed women on pedestals to avoid dealing with them as equals, Abby channeled her political energies into such respectable substitutes as the Providence Day Nursery and the Dorrance Home for Aged Colored Women. She enjoyed an active social life. No dinner of the period was complete without a Welsh rarebit; in her diary, each was "the best I have ever tasted in all my life." On foreign travels, everything was "marvelous ... I simply can't understand it," Abby wrote of her less impressionable companions. "They just don't enjoy anything so much as I do." (An indiscriminate use of superlatives, topped by the all-purpose "Faa-bu-lous," would reappear in the speech of her son Nelson.)

One evening in November 1894, Abby went to a party at the home of a friend whose father was a trustee of Brown University. There she met a shy, socially awkward Brown sophomore who had never been to a "round dance" out of fear it might offend his deeply religious mother. Simply attending the party was, for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., an act of muffled rebellion. He did not ask Abby to dance, fearing that he might slip and fall on the highly polished dance floor. Miss Aldrich compensated for his timidity. Distilling the pattern of their lives together, John would recall, "She treated me as if I had all the savoir faire in the world, and her confidence did me a lot of good."

2

If Abby Aldrich was her father's daughter, the youth Brown classmates called Johnny Rock was emphatically his mother's son. All his life he insisted that there could be but one John D. Rockefeller; to the end of his days he was known as Junior, Mr. Junior to family retainers. The struggle for self, intensified by spiritual perfectionism, left him physically vulnerable and emotionally stunted. Such was the inheritance bequeathed her only son by Laura Spelman Rockefeller, the deacon's daughter with the blood of New England abolitionists in her veins. An early advocate of equal rights for black Americans, she was just as outspoken in promoting education and votes for women. At Cleveland High School, her valedictorian's address was entitled "I Can Paddle My Own Canoe."

After 1859, Laura taught school and let herself be courted by John D. Rockefeller, a stone-faced high school classmate staked to the commission merchant business with $1,000 of personal savings and an equal amount advanced him—at 10 percent interest—by his hedonistic father, William Avery Rockefeller. The elder Rockefeller had first appeared in the countryside around Richford, New York, in 1835, displaying a slate chalked with the statement "I am deaf and dumb." Among those taken in by his act was red-haired Eliza Davison, who in twenty-four unremarkable years had never done an imprudent deed—until she defied her father and wed the charismatic peddler in February 1837. Economic uncertainty, sexual fecklessness, and public humiliation were her reward. Cayuga ("Land of Superior Cunning") County seemed tailor-made for "Devil Bill" Rockefeller, a charming scoundrel and self-styled "botanic physician," whose phony cancer cures were less embarrassing to Eliza than his habit of impregnating housemaids.

After installing a girlfriend named Nancy Brown as his "housekeeper," in two years the con man fathered four children between his emotionally battered wife and his mistress. In 1849, a hired girl in nearby Moravia accused him of rape. The case never went to court. Instead, Rockefeller moved his legitimate family to the village of Owego. Then he took to the road. Abandoned for months at a time, Eliza and her youngsters lived precariously on credit extended by sympathetic merchants. Youthful insecurity bred in her second child, John Davison, an adult need, bordering on compulsion, to control his circumstances and environment. John's father, superfluously, instructed the boy to "never trust anyone completely, even me." When trading with his three sons, bragged the elder Rockefeller, "I ... skin 'em and I just beat 'em every time I can. I want to make 'em sharp."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from On His Own Terms by Richard Norton Smith. Copyright © 2014 Richard Norton Smith. Excerpted by permission of Random House LLC, a division of Random House, Inc.
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