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A Life of Nelson Rockefeller
Random House
November 2014
On Sale: October 21, 2014
880 pages
ISBN: 0375505806
EAN: 9780375505805
Kindle: B00KAFX9IU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
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. 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including Rockefeller’s own unpublished reminiscences. 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. 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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