On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Norton Smith

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Republican draws on thousands of newly available documents and over two hundred interviews, including Rockefellers own unpublished reminiscences.

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 Roosevelts wartime coordinator for Latin America. As New Yorks 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.

In On His Own Terms, Richard Norton Smith re-creates Rockefellers improbable rise to the governors 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 sons 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 Rockefellers was a life of astonishing color, range, and relevance. On His Own Terms, a masterpiece of the biographers art, vividly captures the soaring optimism, polarizing politics, and inner turmoil of this American Original.

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