Before the Storm (12 page)

Nelson was a different story.

He grew up in the typical family fashion: born at the vacation cottage at Seal Harbor, Maine, shuttled in childhood between the 3,500-acre family estate on the banks of the Hudson, Pocantico Hills (the rambling, two-story Tudor “Playhouse” had a bowling alley, billiard room, squash court, indoor tennis court, and swimming pool), and the nine-story townhouse at 10 West 54th Street in Manhattan—but compelled all the same to mend his clothes, weed the garden, keep strict accounts of his thirty-cent-a-week allowance, and conduct himself with the modesty and dignity befitting a Rockefeller. But he was a scampish, impatient boy—qualities much in the way of his beloved and vivacious mother, but unbecoming to his towering father. So early on Nelson developed an unmistakable gift to, as a biographer put it, “diligently attend to the Rockefeller rituals, while stealthily subverting them at the same time.” For all his advantages in life, he honed a skill for working the system more proper to a man without means. He grew up seeking something that would resist him. Late in his life an interviewer asked him how long he had wanted to become President of the United States. “Ever since I was a kid,” he answered. “After all, when you think of what I had, what else was there to aspire to?”

In 1937, around the time Goldwater was penning nasty open letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rockefeller, not yet thirty, began consummating that aspiration in earnest. He had invested much of his massive trust in the Venezuelan arm of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Long fascinated by Latin America (some said it was the hot-blooded, effusive, and physical Latin temperament—his temperament—that attracted him), he spent two months traveling its length and breadth on the pretense of inspecting his holdings. The unspeakable poverty in the squatter towns that had grown up around the oil fields, and the imperial condescension with which workers were treated, overwhelmed him. Upon returning, he addressed Standard's board of directors in perhaps the
most succinct statement he would ever make of his evolving patrician liberalism: “The only justification for ownership is that it serves the broad interests of the people. We must recognize the social responsibilities of corporations and the corporation must use its ownership of assets to reflect the best interests of the people.”

By 1940, with the Nazis making diplomatic and commercial inroads into South America, Rockefeller bluffed and hustled his way to an appointment by President Roosevelt to a position he invented: “Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.” By the height of the war Nelson had seven personal secretaries and 1,413 employees and projects ranging from producing propaganda cartoons by Walt Disney to a failed scheme to manufacture wooden, sail-powered warships in Latin American shipyards (which Navy man FDR latched onto with delight); he had even, incredibly, persuaded FDR to insert an unnoticed clause into the Appropriations Act of July 1942 giving his office power to act “without regard to the provisions of law regulating the expenditure, accounting for and audit of government funds.” By 1943 he was laying fantastic plans for a massive (American-funded) social welfare program for the entire South American continent—budgeted all the way through 1953. Later it would serve as blueprint for a key aspect of U.S. foreign policy: using foreign aid to win the loyalty of the world's multitudes in the struggle against Communism.

When the Republicans—the Rockefeller family's ancestral party—took over the White House in 1953, Nelson made an even greater imprint in Washington, first as undersecretary of the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—where, practically serving as acting secretary, he was the guiding hand in the agency's every attempt to preserve or extend the welfare state, from Social Security to his own failed plan for instituting guaranteed national health care—then in the State Department's top propaganda post. He was in line for the number two job at State when he was blackballed by Ike's thrifty treasury secretary, George Humphrey, who blanched at Rockefeller's reputation for fiscal profligacy. The experience galvanized Rockefeller: checked by bureaucracy, he decided his ticket upward was the electorate. He saw no reason in his first campaign, in 1958, not to run for what was widely regarded as the second most powerful office in the nation: governor of New York. Three men had made the governorship of New York a stepping-stone to the presidency; Nelson Rockefeller wanted to be the fourth. He made his political ambitions impossible for the state Republican Party to ignore. They tried to shunt him into the New York City postmastership or a congressional seat from Westchester County. These he rejected. They suggested a run for U.S. Senate. “All they do there is talk,” he grumbled.

He planned his gubernatorial campaign by refining a political vision. After
he quit his State Department post he joined his brothers in assembling the best minds of the American establishment in a half-million-dollar project to produce a series of definitive reports on ... everything. The goal of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation's Special Study Fund was to define an American mission for the 1960s. Its eight subpanels (“The Moral Framework of National Purpose,” and so forth) included magnates like Justin Dart of Rexall Drug, Thomas McCabe of Scott Paper, and Charles Percy of Bell & Howell; generals like Lucius Clay, former U.S. commander in Europe; media impresarios Henry Luce and David Sarnoff; university presidents, union leaders, and foundation bosses. Their reports were digested by the project administrator, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger, into some twenty volumes over three years and finally distilled into a summary paperback,
Prospects for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports.
It became a literary touchstone of the ideology—Rockefeller's ideology—future generations of scholars would label consensus, managerial, or pragmatic liberalism: the belief that any problem, once identified, could be solved through the disinterested application of managerial expertise.

Rockefeller surprised the world with his effortless populism on the campaign trail (though to be sure he was a populist who instinctively threw his arms back whenever he stepped outdoors to accommodate whomever—there was always someone—was putting his coat on for him). Some days he reached out with his muscular right arm to shake two thousand hands, giving most people his trademark salutation, “Hiyah, fella!” At a county fair he rode a harness racer's sulky at full gallop. At Coney Island he stripped to swim trunks and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. In Rockland County he spoke in the rain atop a wooden plank suspended between two oil drums. (“I hope my platform is stronger than this plank,” he said in that ever so slightly patrician voice with the rumble at the bottom.) And in an encounter that came to symbolize the Rockefeller campaign style, he trooped into Ratner's delicatessen on New York's Lower East Side and stuffed cheese blintzes, one after the other, into his chiseled, handsome face. “I recommend the blintzes,” he told anyone who would listen, shaking a hand, autographing a napkin, flashing a billion-dollar grin with a double wink of his left eye. He won handily. The planning for a presidential campaign began soon after.

A year later, he launched his opening salvo, in Los Angeles. The Republican Party was holding its Western states meeting the weekend of November 14, 1959, at the Biltmore in Pasadena. Rockefeller rented a hall at the Sheraton nearby for a luncheon. He delivered a technical address carefully calibrated to establish his foreign policy bona fides—the classic move for a governor seeking presidential credibility. Reporters exhibited little interest in his views on
strengthening the Western alliance. They wanted to know whether all these efforts meant he was challenging Richard Nixon for the nomination. He would reply with a grin that he was only an innocent “toiler in the Republican vineyards” working for victory in 1960. Then he sped off for a series of back-room meetings with Republican chieftains. For Nelson Rockefeller was an innocent toiler in the Republican vineyards that fall like the family's 107-room redoubt at Seal Harbor was a cottage. The machine he built merely to explore the possibility of a presidential run was larger than the machine Kennedy's “Irish Mafia” built to
execute
a presidential run. Within the two three-story buildings at Nos. 20 and 22 West 55th Street in Manhattan that served as the governor's executive offices whenever the legislature wasn't in session, some seventy deputies probed the Republican waters that autumn and devised methods to bring them to a Rockefeller boil. The names, faces, and dispositions of every local GOP grandee worthy of note from Maine to Malibu were filed by the Research Division for quick consultation by the Logistics Division, which planned one-on-one backslapping sessions, luncheon meetings, and conference-room dinners after addresses written by the Speechwriting Division, while the Citizens Division worked with the local “grassroots” Rockefeller Clubs which, one veteran correspondent marveled, “seemed ready to sprout fully armed like a dragon seed, all across the country.” There was also an Image Division and an office where an author scribbled away at a book-length Rockefeller biography.

In Los Angeles it did him little good. Rockefeller was received by his 2,600 lunch guests with the polite applause befitting a dry speech written by committee. Behind the closed doors the panjandrums told the governor they would back Nixon against all comers. And the next day, Rockefeller was resoundingly upstaged.

 

Goldwater had just wrapped up a marathon forty-three-state tour for the Senate Republican Campaign Committee with a morning hearing in southeast Arizona on water rights. He hopped into his Beechcraft, speechwriter Shadegg in tow, for a two-and-a-half-hour routine flight to a routine speech at a routine party conclave at the Pasadena Biltmore. The expanse of his beloved state passed beneath his eyes for the hundredth time, then California's eastern desert; he then approached the stunning pass that threads through the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains. Low, menacing clouds rolled in. He prepared an approach on instruments. Forty miles out he opened his flight case with a start: the tables he needed to execute a blind landing at Burbank Airport were missing. Only at the last minute did the clouds break and he was cleared for a visual landing. His luck ran out at the airport. It was the taxi driver's first day on the job. “Have either of you gentlemen ever been to the Biltmore before?” he
asked. When they finally arrived at the hotel, the desk clerk wouldn't cash a check Goldwater wrote for pocket money (he kept to habits from childhood: he never carried cash). By the time he got to the meeting it was already in progress. A sergeant at arms, who didn't recognize him, refused him entrance to the overflowing hall. Goldwater said to hell with it and went to grab a bite to eat. He was persuaded to return to the hall by the pleas of the chairman of the Western Conference. They were counting on him, he said. An appeal to duty was always the best way to Barry Goldwater's heart.

Maybe it was the adrenaline from the day's wild rides. Maybe there was something in the rubber chicken. Whatever it was, when Barry Goldwater spoke, the room sparked to life in a way that startled even those who had seen Goldwater do this many times before.

First came the body blow to the Democrats:
“Not long ago, Senator John Kennedy stated bluntly that the American people had gone soft. I am glad to discover he has finally recognized that government policies which create dependent citizens inevitably rob a nation and it.s people of both moral and physical strength.”

Then there were the home truths of his pioneer forebears:
“Life was not meant to be easy. The American people are adult—eager to hear the bold, blunt truth, weary of being kept in a state of perpetual adolescence.”

Then he made an appeal to the timelessness of his cause:
“Abraham Lincoln chose to be called conservative—one who would conserve and protect the best of the past and apply the wisdom of the ages to the problems of the future”
—and
of its inherent
popularity—
“We have, at times, offered candidates and policies which were little more than hollow echoes of the siren songs of the welfare-staters; and when we have fallen from grace, the American public has made it abundantly clear that we were in error.”

He landed a right-hook to the bloated midsection of the federal government:
“Government is the biggest restaurant operator and clothier, it spends almost $1.3 billion in these operations
”—followed by another aimed at Walter Reuther:
“At the opening of this Congress, we were told the majority of the Senate and the majority of the House were owned by the labor unions.”

Then, in defiance of the defensive trend of a party convinced it had suffered its blows at the ballot box in 1958 by moving away from the center, he delivered the knockout punch:
“Republicans across this great nation of ours have been telling me we can win the elections of 1960—they tell me we will win if we thrust aside timidity, plant our flag squarely on those conservative principles which made this nation great and speak forthrightly to the American public.”

Somewhere amidst the convention-sized ovation that followed, Earl Mazo of the
New York Herald Tribune
was heard to utter in amazement that Barry
Goldwater had just challenged Nixon and Rockefeller for the Republican presidential nomination—and that he would place his bets on Goldwater. The next morning Goldwater dutifully stepped up to a press conference microphone and assured the buzzing reporters (backsliding on his promise to the Manionites not to declare for a candidate) that Vice President Richard Nixon was his and the party's choice for the nomination. But something was happening. People were crazy for Barry Goldwater. The same day in South Carolina, a newspaper interview was printed in which Republican chair Shorey bragged he would corral at least two-thirds of the 310 Southern Republican delegates for Goldwater. (Manion sent the clip to his committee members: “Please get it reprinted and distributed as widely as possible among the Republicans who expect to attend the national convention.”) The
Los Angeles Times's
Kyle Palmer, who had virtually minted Richard Nixon as a political star in the 1940s, printed four paragraphs of Goldwater's remarks for his readers to savor over their coffee the next morning (the
Times
printed but two sentences of Rockefeller's address). The publisher, Norman Chandler, invited Goldwater to lunch with the newspaper's editorial board.