Nelson Rockefeller, the son and grandson of billionaires and abillionaire in his own right when there fewer than a baker's dozen ofsuch creatures, was a major force in national politics for threedecades. Rocky bestrode the State of New York like a colossus in the1960s, serving four terms as governor of the Empire State between 1959and 1973. Under his helmsman-ship, the size and scope of the stategovernment was vastly expanded, as was the state debt.

Born in Bar Harbor, Maine four days after the Fourth of July in 1908,Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the third child and the second son ofJohn D. Rockefeller Jr. and AbbyAldrich Rockefeller. He was named after his maternal grandfather, RhodeIsland Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, a political power-broker as the headof the Senate's Finance Committee. Aldrich battled his fellowpatrician, PresidentTheodore Roosevelt, over T.R'spolitical reforms. Ironically, Aldrich's grandson would inherit T.R.'smantle as head of the progressive wing of the Grand Old Party and wouldbe the last progressive Republican to make a serious bid for theG.O.P.'s presidential nomination.

After graduating from Dartmouth College, the young Rockefeller dabbledin his family's oil business, but it was public service and the artsthat were his passion. Working for a Venezuelan subsidiary of hisfamily's Standard Oil of New Jersey Co. piqued his interest in LatinAmerica, and he learned Spanish. PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt, T.R.'sfourth cousin and another member of the New York-American patricianate,created the position of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in theOffice of Inter-American Affairs for young Rocky after he told thepresident of his concern over Nazi influence in Latin America.

Roosevelt named Rockefeller the Assistant Secretary of State forAmerican Republic Affairs, a new position in the State Department, in1944. He served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the UnitedNations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco in1945 at which the UN was founded. Rockefeller was instrumental inpersuading the UN to establish its headquarters in New York City, andhis father subsequently donated the land on which the UN building wasbuilt.

In late 1945, he resigned from the State Department and went back toprivate business. Five years later, he was tapped by PresidentHarry S. Truman to serve as chairman ofthe International Development Advisory Board, which was tasked withdeveloping a plan provide technical assistance to foreign governments.President-electDwight D. Eisenhower gaveRockefeller the job of studying governmental reorganization, then in1953, Ike appointed Rocky to serve as Under Secretary of Health,Education and Welfare, a new Cabinet-level department. Under Ike, heoversaw the expansion of Social Security, a program that would betargeted by right-wing Republicans after Eisenhower left the WhiteHouse. In 1955, he was appointed Special Assistant to the President forForeign Affairs.

In 1958, Rocky was elected governor of New York State and provedimmensely popular, creating a presidential buzz. The RepublicanRockefeller had his hat in the ring for the GOP Presidential nominationin 1960 (when he bowed out early as the political position of VicePresidentRichard Nixon proved tooimpregnable), 1964 and 1968 (when once again, Nixon bested him). Hisbest showing was in 1964, when he lost the nod toBarry Goldwater in a bitter contest.

A proponent of Big Government, Rocky was the head of the progressivewing of the Republican Party, when such a thing still existed, and wasdespised by hard-core right-wingers like Goldwater. After losing thenomination to him and being booed by Goldwater supporters for 16straight minutes when he took the stage to deliver a speech at the GOPConvention in San Francisco, Rocky refused to campaign for Goldwater inhis match-up with PresidentLyndon B. Johnson, a Big Governmentliberal in the Rocky mold. Rocky was not alone: many moderate andliberal Republicans, including Michigan GovernorGeorge Romney, the father ofMitt Romney, eschewed Goldwater, whom thefelt was a dangerous reactionary.

Early on, Rocky supported George Romney, the fair haired boy of the GOPcirca 1966, for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.Subsequently, Romney stumbled badly before the New Hampshire primaryand withdrew from the race before the first votes were cast (NewHampshire was won by Richard Nixon) when Rockefeller made it known thathe was open to being drafted.Norman Mailer reported in '68 thatRockefeller would have been elected President of the United States ashe was well-liked by the common people who, at the time, votedDemocratic but were angry with the Democratic Party and Lyndon Johnsondue to the Vietnam War, inflation, and race riots.

Rocky's own polls showed that he was more likely to beat Vice PresidentHubert H. Humphrey, the DemocraticParty's presumptive nominee, than was Nixon orRonald Reagan, then making hisfirst bid for the presidency as the Great White Hope of the Goldwaterwing of the G.O.P. However, he was unable to secure his party'snomination, which was roiled then (as it is now) by a hard-corereactionary right. (The Goldwater wing of the party would come back tohaunt him eight years later.)

Nixon, who had carefully cultivated G.O.P politicians and theRepublican rank-and-file who served as delegates to the convention, wonthe nomination on the first ballot and eked out a victory over Humphreythat November. Rocky went back to governing New York State and won afourth term in 1970.

In 1973, Rockefeller resigned as governor of New York three years intohis fourth term, but the following year,Gerald Ford tapped him to serve ashis Vice President when he assumed the Presidency after the resignationofRichard Nixon. Rockefeller remains onlythe second man to become vice president without first being elected(Ford being the other), raised to the office by the machinations of the25th Amendment to the Constitution.

Ford's nomination of Rockefeller as his Veep was not a popular choiceamong right-wing Republicans or among liberal Democrats, as hisreputation as a progressive had been tarnished by his support of themilitary-industrial complex and the Vietnam War and by his failure tobring a peaceful conclusion to the 1971 prisoner riot and take-over ofAttica State Prison. In the post-Watergate environment, Rockefeller'srole as a power broker (Henry Kissingerhad been one of his aides) was looked on with suspicion. Rocky alongwith his brothers, most notably Chase Manhattan Bank CEODavid Rockefeller, had longfunded think tanks and other organizations that had been instrumentalin the creation of the post-WWII, government-academia establishmentthat had defined the parameters of he Cold War state, including howwars of national liberation were to be resisted and how the welfarestate was to be shored up. Some critics accused Rocky of being one ofthe main architects of a "secret government" that really ruled theUnited States.

Rockefeller failed to get his finger in the Big Brass Ring of Americanpolitics, the presidency, but his nomination was confirmed by the U.S.Senate, and on December 19, 1974, he became Vice President of theUnited States. He would serve two years, one month and one day in thepost as his nemesis Barry Goldwater and Ford's nemesis Ronald Reaganvetoed Rocky as Ford's running mate at the 1976 Republican convention,where Reagan nearly upset Ford. For the presidential match-up inNovember, Ford had Kansas SenatorBob Dole, then considered a rock-ribRepublican conservative, foisted upon him, which likely cost him theelection. He narrowly lost New York State (and its 41 Electoral Collegevotes) to former Georgia GovernorJimmy Carter, which gave Carter thepresidency.

Ford later admitted it was a mistake to allow Reagan to bully him intokicking Rocky, the avatar of progressive Republicans (now a deadspecies but once a vibrant part of the Grand Old Party since itsfounding), off of the ticket. With Rocky on the ticket, the EmpireState would likely have swung his way and he would have won a term aspresident in his own right. Ford remains the only unelected presidentin U.S. history.

The Rockefeller family's billions had once helped finance theRepublican Party and the advancement of the interests of AfricanAmericans by endowing the N.A.A.C.P. and institutions of higherlearning serving black folk. The Party of Lincoln had been the naturalhome of African Americans until the Great Depression and F.D.R. startedto peel them away from the G.O.P.

L.B.J. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voters Right Act of1965 sparked a major realignment of the political parties in America.African Americans in the 1960s were now solidly Democratic and theSolid South, which had once been solidly Democratic, began movingtowards the new Republican Party procreated by Goldwater, Reagan andex-Democrats from the former Confederacy likeStrom Thurmond.

The first Republicans voted to Congress since Reconstruction from theDeep South started to appear in the 1960s, starting with John Tower in1961, who was was elected to the U.S. Senate seat once held bythen-Vice President Lyndon Johnson in a special election in 1961.Connecticut transplantGeorge H.W. Bush,whose fatherPrescott Bush was a moderateRepublican who represented the Nutmeg State in the U.S. Senate, waselected to the House of Representatives from Texas in 1964, reapingpolitical hay from the backlash against civil rights.

The Republican in the South to make the biggest splash in the 1960s wasU.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who as the PalmettoState's governor in 1948 broke with Harry Truman over the inclusion ofa civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform (crafted byHubert H. Humphrey) and ran forpresident as the head of the "Dixiecrat Party". Thurmond won fourSouthern states good for 39 votes in the Electoral College. In 1964, hequit the Democratic Party and resigned from the Senate to protest thepassage of the Civil Rights Act, which a filibuster by SouthernSenators, Democrats all (including Senator Strom, a racist who hadfathered a mixed race child with his African American mistress) failedto derail. He subsequently was elected in a special election to his oldseat as a Republican.

Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Reagan'spolitical career had been bolstered by his support of Goldwater and hisopposition to Fair Housing Laws in the state of California. Reagan rodethe backlash against civil rights to the governor's mansion inSacramento and later to the White House. Under Reagan, who had launchedhis 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the siteof the lynching of three civil rights workers in 1964, the spirit ofthe hated Abraham Lincoln was exorcised from the G.O.P. he helpedcreate, enabling Southerners to embrace the Grand Old Party theypreviously had despised as a symbol of the Union's defeat of theConfederacy and is championing of equal rights for black folk duringthe hated Reconstruction period.

Shorn of Lincoln and a commitment to civil rights (in 1990, RepublicanPresident George H.W. Bush would become the first president in historyto veto a civil rights act), the realignment of the Deep South with theRepublican Party that had started in the 1960s quickened. The processthat had begun with a Democrat from the South (L.B.J.) in the WhiteHouse was completed by the mid-1990s, ironically, under anotherDemocratic President from a former Confederate state,Bill Clinton. (The next Democrat inthe White House would be an African American,Barack Obama.)

By 1976, the Grand Old Party that the Rockefeller family had financedwas dying. Rockefeller's party had supported African American suffrage(Ike pushed the Civil Rights Acts of 1958 and 1960 to increase thenumber of black voters in the Deep South and L.B.J. as Senate MajorityLeader got them passed) and had had an equal rights for women plank inthe party platform since 1940. (An echo of Teddy Roosevelt's supportfor women's suffrage in his renegade 1912 Progressive Partypresidential bid, the equal rights plank would be torn out of the partyplatform by Ronald Reagan in 1980.) In the Bicentennial Year of '76,Rockefeller's G.O.P was waning, and a new party more aligned with StromThurmond's Dixiecrat Party of 1948 was arising, Phoenix-like from theashes of Lincoln's G.O.P. In 1976, Nelson Rockefeller was no longerwelcome, and by 1980, progressive "Rockefeller Republicans" like U.S.SenatorJacob Javits of New York wouldbegin to fall by he wayside, defeated by the likes of conservative'Alfonse D'Amato'. By the 1980s, the onlyRockefeller in elected office,Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia (theson or Rocky's brotherJohn D. Rockefeller III), wouldbe a Democrat.

After a long career in public service, Rocky retired to private lifeafter President Jimmy Carter and Vice PresidentWalter Mondale were sworn into office. Hewas a noted art collector and a patron of the arts and served as atrustee of New York City's the Museum of Modern Art, which was foundedby his mother, from 1932 to 1979.

Nelson Rockefeller died of a heart attack in New York City on January26, 1979. He was 70 years old.