“The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything.”—Nelson Rockefeller
(Four times elected governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller was born on this day—to a family of privilege, of course—in 1908. Yesterday’s New York Times featured a fascinating op-ed by Richard Norton Smith, now at work on a biography of this former force in the life of his state and country. But if Smith’s piece is any indication, it won’t catch why Rocky had to settle for the Vice Presidency—a post that he was dumped from, to placate the GOP’s right wing—instead of the one thing he couldn’t have in life: the Oval Office.
People weren’t troubled just by this charismatic pol’s womanizing, as all-consuming as that could be—did you know he even made a play for brother John’s fiancée? It wasn’t even just his liberal positions that annoyed conservatives, as Times Web responses to the Smith article overwhelmingly indicated. No, you have to read one of the great uncompleted biographical projects of our time—the single volume that the Cary Reich finished before his untimely death, taking the politician up to his first election as governor—to gauge fully the depth of Rockefeller’s shameless sycophancy toward bosses such as FDR, or to understand how that life of privilege gave him an insufferable air of presumption that anything he wanted could be had—not just people but offices.
It’s too bad, really: I’m extremely uncomfortable with the pro-choice stance it came to embrace, yet I mourn the demise of the “Rockefeller Republican” – it was surely better than the suburban shakedown machine that put Alfonse D’Amato in the Senate for three terms. But Rockefeller pioneered the way for filthy rich people to buy and spend their way into public office. You have to ask yourself whether it really is a good thing in this republic to concentrate extreme wealth and power in one person in a state.
Do you think it’s a good idea for Mike Bloomberg to flirt with the idea of a third-party Presidential bid only because he has a billion dollars to spend for no other better purpose?
Do you think it was a good idea for Jon Corzine to move from Wall Street to the Senate in 2000 by spending $60 million of his own money? Or for him to loan girlfriend Carla Katz, president of New Jersey’s largest state worker union, $470,000, then forgive it and pay gift taxes totaling more than $160,000?
That’s the kind of politics we’re increasingly having today—a bipartisan plutocracy, a Rockefeller legacy just as enduring as those terrible drug laws or those godawful monumental Albany buildings.)
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