5

The Two Rockefellers

Lame duck though he may be, if President Eisenhower wished to do so, he could make or break Nixon or Rockefeller. An incumbent President always has this power. Theodore Roosevelt had only to mention to a few intimates that he wanted William Howard Taft, and Taft—much to Roosevelt’s later chagrin—it was. Harry Truman chose Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and Stevenson it would have been without further fuss, if Stevenson had not made the fuss. With his prestige and his presidential powers, Eisenhower could certainly have his way, if he decided to descend into the hurly-burly and fight for Rockefeller against Nixon, or vice versa.

But it seems a safe fifty-to-one bet that Eisenhower will not descend into the hurly-burly, that he will maintain a strict hands-off attitude until the last ballot is counted. The President dislikes the political hurly-burly in any case. But he also has a peculiar theory, which is certainly original with him (unless one goes right back to George Washington), that a President has no business trying to influence the choice of his party in convention assembled. It was in accordance with this odd theory that Eisenhower refused, right up to convention time in 1956, to endorse Nixon as his running mate, to the Vice-President’s extreme annoyance.

The President, to be sure, has let it be known that there are limits to his private hands-off theory, as when he remarked in a 1959 press conference that he would intervene against any candidate who “opposed my policies.” This gentle hint was almost certainly directed at Nixon, who had shown a tendency to stray off the Eisenhower reservation. In the early spring of 1958, for example, Nixon had come out semi-publicly in support of Secretary of Labor Mitchell’s call for a tax cut to spur the economy, which was flatly contrary to Administration policy. But the issue on which Nixon came closest to alienating Eisenhower was the defense issue. Both in the pre-Sputnik and post-Sputnik eras, Nixon argued strongly within the Administration for a stepped-up defense program. During the heated defense debate in the early months of 1959, it was reported that Nixon privately agreed with critics of the Administration position.

There was no issue, as Nixon was certainly aware, on which Eisenhower felt more passionately. Nixon therefore called in a half-dozen key reporters and strongly defended the Eisenhower defense policy. This episode suggests that Nixon himself believed that a failure on his part to support the Administration defense policy might have bestirred the President to intervene against him in 1960.

In public and in private, to be sure, both Nixon and the President protest an undying devotion to each other. The real relationship can only be guessed at. No doubt the President does admire Nixon in some ways, notably for his guts and his political acumen. No doubt Nixon admires the President in other ways, and for other reasons. But the stubborn fact remains that Eisenhower seriously considered dumping his controversial running mate, both in 1952 and 1956. On both occasions Nixon “moved quickly to shape events”—and events were shaped as Nixon wanted them to be shaped, but not necessarily as the President wanted them to be shaped. The President is not a fool, as that memorable little scene when he broke his pencil lead in the Cleveland auditorium suggests. He would not be human if he had not felt some twinges of resentment against his aggressive subordinate. It can be reported on good authority that he has felt such twinges.

If the President were a passionate admirer of Rockefeller, those twinges might assume a profound historical significance. In fact, the evidence suggests that, while doubtless the President also admires Rockefeller in some ways, he is not really a passionate admirer of either man. He neither likes nor dislikes either enough to make a major effort to make or break either. This is another reason to suppose that Eisenhower will be neutral in spirit, as well as in deed, if a war to the knife develops between Nixon and Rockefeller.

It is no secret that Rockefeller did not greatly enjoy working for Eisenhower. Both as Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the first Eisenhower administration and as special cold-war adviser to the President, Rockefeller felt frustrated and unhappy a good deal of the time. Rockefeller’s final frustration, which occurred in the second Eisenhower administration, has not, as of this writing, been previously described.

Early in 1957, Rockefeller was informed that, as a deserving Republican who had not been rewarded according to his deserts, he was to be offered the post of Deputy Secretary of Defense by the President. Although it was still a subordinate post, like his two previous jobs under Eisenhower, Rockefeller was delighted. Defense had long been one of his special interests; the job might well be a steppingstone to the Secretaryship of Defense; and in any case it offered Rockefeller just the kind of authority and responsibility he had theretofore lacked.

But then Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey got wind of the intended appointment and immediately protested as strongly as he knew how—which is very strongly indeed—to the President. It would be a cardinal error, Humphrey maintained, to put a “spender” like Rockefeller in a key defense job. The President, always remarkably subject to Humphrey’s influence, promptly reversed himself, and Rockefeller was told he was not to be made Deputy Defense Secretary after all.

There the episode ended. Rockefeller, as far as is known, has never said a word about it, in private or public. But it had its effect on Rockefeller. It finally persuaded him that there was only one way for a very rich man like himself to achieve what he had always wanted—real political power and authority. That way was to be elected to high office. Almost immediately after he had been turned down for the defense post, Rockefeller began the complicated process of study and analysis which always precedes any major Rockefeller decision. As a result, long before the end of 1957, and before there was even a whisper of a whisper of a Rockefeller boom, he had decided that he had at least an outside chance for the New York governorship, and he had further decided to make a try for it.

Had it not been for George Humphrey’s intervention, Rockefeller would not be governor of New York today and Richard Nixon would have had clear sailing to the nomination. Thus it is at least possible—a lovely irony—that George Humphrey, in keeping a “spender” out of a subordinate Defense Department post, put that same “spender” into the White House.

By his own lights, of course, Humphrey was quite right to intervene. Rockefeller has always given the national security a higher priority than a balanced budget or reduced taxes, thus reversing the Humphrey system of priorities. The kind of defense policy he would have favored is suggested by the report on defense which he sponsored and largely paid for, and which was published in January 1958. The report proposed a sharp and continuous increase in defense spending in order to maintain a reasonable balance of power with the Soviet bloc. If Rockefeller had been permitted to take the defense post, the policy of maintaining a true power balance would at least have had a strong advocate in the Administration. It is possible that, as a result, Khrushchev would not be quite so cockily confident that the power balance has now shifted heavily in his favor, as he constantly boasts. In any case, the President’s reversal on the Rockefeller appointment marked the moment when he finally and fully embraced the Humphrey order of priorities, about which he had previously evinced some doubts.

The episode of Eisenhower’s withdrawn offer to Rockefeller suggests an obvious conclusion. Eisenhower will not fight, bleed, and die—nor will he lift a finger—to get the nomination for Rockefeller. Why, after all, should he favor the presidential candidacy of a man who, he was persuaded, was unfitted by his tendencies as a “spender” for a sub-Cabinet post? To sum up, if Eisenhower does not greatly admire either Nixon or Rockefeller, why should he intervene in favor of either of them?

There is a sharp contrast between the records of Nixon and Rockefeller in Eisenhower’s Washington. From the fund crisis on, Nixon almost always got his way with Eisenhower. Not quite always, to be sure. Early in the second Eisenhower administration, Nixon was eager to be appointed chairman of the obscure but powerful Operations Coordination Board. The OCB, which is supposed to follow through on decisions of the National Security Council, has its fingers in every pie, and the job would have provided Nixon with useful experience and contacts. The President vetoed the idea, however, much to Nixon’s disappointment and annoyance, on the grounds that a Vice-President has no constitutional business holding a job in the executive branch. Nixon has also been occasionally disappointed and annoyed by the President’s tendency to treat him as a politician, and nothing more—the President listens with respect to his views on politics, but tends to interrupt him and dismiss his opinions on other subjects.

But the fact remains that, by and large, Nixon has had his way in Eisenhower’s Washington. Above all, he has been able to use the vice-presidential office as a steppingstone toward the presidency as no other Vice-President in history has been able to do. By contrast, Rockefeller’s experience in Eisenhower’s Washington was a long exercise in frustration. And the contrast is not only with Nixon. It is also with Rockefeller himself—the younger Rockefeller who came to Washington in 1940 to work for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Let us have a look at that younger Rockefeller. In the ten years after he had graduated from Dartmouth in 1930, Nelson Rockefeller was a frenetically busy man, as he will be to the day he dies. But he was busy mostly at the business of being a Rockefeller.

His most important individual achievement was his marriage to Mary Todhunter Clark, of a distinguished Philadelphia family—it was thought among the old Philadelphia families at the time that Mary Clark had married beneath her station. Like Pat Nixon in Nixon’s life, “Tod” Rockefeller is an important factor in Rockefeller’s life, although in both cases the men decidedly wear the family pants. Mrs. Rockefeller is very tall—taller than Nelson—and she has an original mind, liberal political views (she was a member of New York’s Liberal party until shortly before her husband ran for governor), and a sense of humor. The sense of humor is important, since Rockefeller, like most fiercely ambitious men (Nixon, for example), tends to an excessive earnestness about everything, and Mrs. Rockefeller thus acts as a much needed balance wheel in the family.

The newlyweds established themselves on the vast family estate near Tarrytown on the Hudson, and in six years, with Nelson Rockefeller’s usual enthusiasm and desire to get things done, they produced five children. Meanwhile they traveled around the world and over much of South America, where Nelson interested himself in the great oil holdings of the Rockefeller-controlled Creole Corporation. Rockefeller also managed to keep himself busy in innumerable director-ships and other odd jobs connected with the family interest: as a director and in 1938 president of Rockefeller Center, and as a trustee and in 1939 president of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Museum of Modern Art was, and is, one of the really big things in Rockefeller’s life. When the museum caught fire some years ago, Rockefeller insisted on borrowing a fireman’s uniform and rushing into the burning building, like a parent rescuing a beloved child. In fact, Rockefeller’s interest in art is entirely genuine. If he ever goes to the White House, he will fill the old mansion to the eaves with Picassos, Mondrians, Matisses, Paul Klees, and the like (which will no doubt become an “issue” like Harry Truman’s balcony). Unlike many other rich men, he is not the kind of art collector who buys pictures as investments, like hog futures. He really loves pictures. Indeed, he is an aesthete, in the dictionary meaning of the word—“one very sensitive to the beauties of art or nature.” Yet even the museum, like Rockefeller Center or Creole Petroleum or the other things that kept him busy in those days, was a family project rather than something he did on his own, as an individual rather than as a Rockefeller. The museum had been founded by his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and as one of her pet projects had been largely financed by her.

And yet Rockefeller’s beloved museum gave him his first chance to do something important on his own, not as a Rockefeller but as Nelson Rockefeller. After he became president of the museum, Rockefeller planned a radio show, on a national hookup, celebrating its splendors. With typical self-confidence, he decided to get the President of the United States to star in his show. Franklin Roosevelt had no more interest in modern art than Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower (which is none at all). But he welcomed an opportunity, in those days of the Nazi threat to all civilized values, to make a speech about culture. And so Nelson Rockefeller met the President and thus got his first chance to branch out on his own.

The two got on well right away. Roosevelt always had something of a penchant for millionaires (Averell Harriman and Vincent Astor are examples). Moreover, although the Rockefellers were loyal Republicans, they were by no means the kind of Republicans, then very prevalent among the rich and their toadies, who turned puce-faced and incoherent at the mention of Roosevelt’s name. “I’m increasingly bored by hearing attacks on the Roosevelts,” Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Nelson’s mother, had written in 1935 when the hate-Roosevelt movement first began to gather steam, “and depressed by the bad taste that prompts them.” Perhaps the President was aware of this Rockefeller tendency, which was wildly eccentric among the rich in those days, to regard him as less than the devil incarnate—and with war on the horizon, he doubtless saw advantages in having a representative of the biggest capitalist family in his Administration. At any rate, the President took a shine to the young man.

When the two met before the radio show, Rockefeller seized the opportunity to talk about a subject which he knew at firsthand, and which was already something of a King Charles Head with him—Axis infiltration and propaganda in South America. The President expressed a casual desire to hear more. Rockefeller wrote a memorandum on the subject and got it to the President through Harry Hopkins, who had also taken a shine to him. The upshot was the creation, in August 1940, of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, with young Nelson Rockefeller, at thirty-two, in the exalted post of coordinator.

The Rockefeller agency rather rapidly grew to around five thousand government workers—a respectable number for those days. With his own big agency, and with direct access to the President, Rockefeller was a far bigger mover and shaker on the Washington scene than he was ever to be again.

Most witnesses—though by no means all—of his performance in his role as coordinator, and later in the role of Assistant Secretary of State for South American Affairs, agree that he performed usefully as a wartime bureaucrat. Some go further and say that his operations in South America were brilliantly successful and should have set the pattern for all future American dealings with the underdeveloped countries. There is no doubt at all that Rockefeller is still genuinely popular in South America even today—the Communists could hardly have organized against him the kind of mass demonstrations they stage-managed against Nixon.

But all witnesses, critics and admirers, agree on one point. In the fierce and bloody battles which took place continually within the richly proliferating wartime bureaucracy, the fledgling Rockefeller held his own remarkably well. He defended his own empire with a single-minded ferocity, and he was not at all averse to carving a slice or two out of someone else’s empire. In the process he made enemies, for the first time in his young life. That was inevitable, of course. What is interesting is how he made his enemies, and why. In this respect, a few episodes are revealing.

There was, for example, the matter of his falling out with Carl Spaeth. Spaeth, now dean of Stanford Law School, was in those days one of Rockefeller’s closest friends, perhaps the closest friend he had. He had graduated from Dartmouth the year before Rockefeller—a high proportion of Rockefeller’s associates are Dartmouth men—and he had worked with Rockefeller on various projects in South America before the war. Rockefeller brought him to Washington as his deputy and installed the Spaeths in his Washington home. For a time the two men were the Damon and Pythias of the Washington scene.

Then something happened. Spaeth left the Rockefeller agency, and he and his wife left the Rockefeller house—abruptly, according to one report, and with Mrs. Spaeth in tears. Rockefeller and Spaeth wholly ceased to play Damon and Pythias. Spaeth got a job with the South American division of the State Department. In 1944, when his agency was being liquidated, Rockefeller was offered the post of Assistant Secretary of State for South American Affairs. He accepted on one condition—that Spaeth find “other employment.” His condition was, in short, that Spaeth be fired.

The trouble between the two men began, apparently, when Spaeth, an ambitious man who likes to have his own way, started making decisions on his own, without consulting Rockefeller (Rockefeller has remarked that as a result of this experience he will never again have a single “deputy” whose title and position imply the right to move independently). The trouble got worse when Rockefeller discovered, or was led to believe, that Spaeth was attempting to carve out a separate bureaucratic empire for himself in South America, at the expense of both Henry Wallace’s Board of Economic Warfare and Rockefeller’s agency. And the break became final when Spaeth, working with a committee of South Americans, proposed that his committee have the power to counteract Axis propaganda in South America. This proposal Rockefeller interpreted as an attempt to undercut his agency’s propaganda function in South America.

But the details of this ancient bureaucratic battle between former friends are unimportant. All passion is now spent, and Spaeth and Rockefeller are again on speaking terms. What is interesting about the episode is that it suggests that Rockefeller is decidedly jealous of his power and prerogatives (as, it may be worth noting, all strong Presidents have been). It also suggests the degree of personal allegiance which Rockefeller expects from those around him.

“Nelson doesn’t expect you to be a yes-man,” one of his associates has said. “But he does expect you to be a Rockefeller man, first, last, and all the time.” The men around Rockefeller today are just that—Rockefeller men first, last, and all the time. If Rockefeller ever does move to the White House, whether in 1961 or 1965, every man and woman around him will have a similar allegiance.

Other episodes of Rockefeller’s wartime days cast a revealing light on the kind of man he is, the kind of politician he has become, and the kind of President he might be. He is a man who wants—indeed, who passionately wants—to have his own way, and who is willing to fight for it, so long as there is a chance of victory. Take, for example, the policy dispute over the admission of Argentina to the United Nations. Almost everybody has forgotten now about this ancient battle, but it was a furious one at the time. Even today, Rockefeller and those who were involved in the dispute on both sides still have passionate views on the issue—Rockefeller is capable of going on at quite inordinate length on the subject.

Argentina had played footsie with the Axis during the war, although after the Act of Chapultepec a belated and purely pro forma Argentinian declaration of war against the Axis had been issued. The Soviets were loudly opposed to Argentina’s admission into the United Nations. Soviet opposition was, of course, strictly cynical and wholly for bargaining purposes—at one point the Soviets hinted privately that they would not object to Argentina if the United States would support recognition of Poland’s Lublin government. But there were also respectable moral reasons for casting Argentina into outer darkness—there had been some sporadic and rather languid official anti-Semitism in the country, for example, in pale imitation of the Nazis. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, with the support of such top State Department officials as Dean Acheson, James Dunn, and Spruille Braden, wanted to give Argentina its comeuppance and strongly opposed any invitation to Argentina to join the U.N.

Rockefeller, on the other hand, passionately believed that the only practical policy was to make peace with Argentina—otherwise, he argued, what seemed to be an American effort to discipline one South American nation would be bitterly resented by all South American nations. Feelings ran high—very high indeed. A participant recalls one heated top-level State Department meeting at which James Dunn flatly accused Rockefeller of misrepresenting official American policy toward Argentina in cables marked NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. With considerable drama Dunn produced the cables which, he claimed, proved his point, and there was an unholy row.

There were other unholy rows. At the San Francisco Conference there was a fierce dispute within the American delegation, both about admission of Argentina and about a related issue, Article Fifty-one. Article Fifty-one laid down the principle that a group of states could band together to repel aggression. This was in accordance with the Act of Chapultepec, which Rockefeller had chiefly engineered, and which Argentina had accepted, thereafter declaring war on the Axis. Rockefeller, of course, was passionately in favor of Article Fifty-one, which the Soviets opposed.

He therefore invited Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chief Republican foreign-policy spokesman at the time, to dine with him in his suite in the St. Francis Hotel and laid his case before him. Vandenberg then passed the word that he would resign from the American delegation if the delegation did not insist on Article Fifty-one. Other members of the delegation were infuriated by Rockefeller’s move, not least Vandenberg’s fellow Republican, John Foster Dulles. In an angry scene, Dulles accused Rockefeller of ruining patient weeks of effort to hold Vandenberg in line.

When Rockefeller had his way, and Argentina was admitted and Article Fifty-one included in the Charter, the feelings of those he had defeated were by no means tender toward him. After Hull was out of office, Rockefeller made several efforts to see him so that he could make his peace with the old man (this, too, is typical of Rockefeller, for although he is willing to make enemies, he does not like to have unnecessary enemies). All his efforts were unavailing. Finally he approached Thomas Blake, then a State Department official, who was close to Hull for family reasons. He asked Blake to telephone Hull and ask for an appointment for him. Blake knew what Hull’s reaction would be, but he obligingly called him and then held out the receiver toward Rockefeller. The old man’s bellow was embarrassingly audible: “YOU CAN TELL THE YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPER TO GO TO HELL.” Rockefeller smiled rather pallidly, turned on his heel, and left Blake’s office without another word.

When James Byrnes replaced Edward Stettinius as Secretary of State, the bureaucratic wheel came full circle. Byrnes asked Dean Acheson to be his Under Secretary, and Acheson agreed on condition that Rockefeller find “other employment.” Acheson, in other words, demanded that Rockefeller be fired, just as Rockefeller had demanded that Spaeth be fired. The final episode of this era of Rockefeller’s government service is also worth telling.

After Byrnes replaced Stettinius, Rockefeller found himself in purdah. Every attempt to see the new Secretary of State was met with a run-around. Finally, Rockefeller bulled his way into Byrnes’s office to tell him that he planned to give a very important speech in Boston on policy toward Argentina and that he wished to confer with Byrnes first. Byrnes, who had agreed to Acheson’s condition, listened courteously and then said gently: “Well, Nelson, I don’t think we ought to worry about that now. The President has decided to accept your resignation.”

Rockefeller gulped, for he was, of course, quite smart enough to know when he was being fired. He told Byrnes he felt very strongly about the matters he wished to discuss in the Boston speech and hoped he could make the speech as his last act as an Assistant Secretary of State. Byrnes allowed as how it might be better all round if he resigned immediately. At this point, no doubt, that “curious narrowing of the eyes” occurred. Rockefeller told Byrnes that, if he were not permitted to make the speech as Assistant Secretary, he would make it as Nelson Rockefeller and he would “tell the whole story” of how South American policy has been idiotically mishandled over his protests. He made the speech as Assistant Secretary of State.

Immediately thereafter he “resigned.” Spruille Braden, his fiercest policy opponent, took his place. And to complete the circle (and also, one suspects, as a slap at the departed Rockefeller) Carl Spaeth was brought back as Braden’s special assistant.

In retrospect, Rockefeller seems to have been right in his basic positions—Spruille Braden’s subsequent experiment in getting tough with the Argentinians was hardly an unqualified success. But that is not the main point. For our purposes the main point is that on the basic issues Rockefeller had his way—and he had his way, as a young and comparatively junior official, against the combined opposition of some of the most powerful men in Washington, including, on some issues, all three of the Secretaries of State under whom he served. In the kind of battles in which he fought, moreover, his money was no asset. Indeed, rather the opposite—there is an automatic tendency to dismiss a man very rich by inheritance, and especially a very young, very rich man, as something of a fool. Altogether, it was a quite remarkable performance. The contrast provided by his second major appearance on the Washington scene, as an official in the Eisenhower administration, is really very odd and interesting.

In the years between 1945, when he was fired by Jimmy Byrnes, and 1953, when he was hired again by Eisenhower, Rockefeller briefly held an advisory post with Truman’s Point Four program. But his chief interest in those years was the International Basic Economy Corporation, or IBEC. IBEC oddly combined the ingrained Rockefeller habits of both making money and also handing it about. IBEC was, and is, concentrated largely in South America, Rockefeller’s old stamping ground, and its policy is based on the ancient precept: “The Lord helps them who help themselves.” The idea was that capital investment in a whole series of projects, from sewage-disposal plants to modern dairies, would improve the standard of life in the countries where the investment was made and, incidentally in the long run, make money for Rockefeller.¹

In the early period after Rockefeller started IBEC, the eleemosynary aspects of the venture tended to overshadow the more practical considerations. In fact, IBEC lost a great deal of money to begin with. His friend Thomas Braden has quoted Rockefeller on what happened: “I had to go to Father because the company had to have a million dollars.² Father looked at the balance sheet and told me he would lend it to me on one condition: that I use the money to liquidate the company. I said ‘Very well, Father,’ and I went out and I raised a million dollars on my own.”

IBEC is now reported safely in the black. But although IBEC interested Rockefeller and kept him busy, his heart really still belonged to Washington and government service. The Rockefellers backed Dwight D. Eisenhower against Robert A. Taft for the nomination in 1952 and contributed handsomely to the Eisenhower war chest. In 1953, accordingly, Rockefeller was offered the post of Under Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was hardly a large, ripe, and juicy plum. The Department, newly created by Eisenhower, was the lowest in the departmental pecking order, and the Secretary, and thus Nelson’s boss, was a woman, Oveta Culp Hobby. But Rockefeller took the job with seeming enthusiasm. Indeed, the enthusiasm may have been real. Already, the idea of going into elective politics had entered his mind—as early as 1950 he discussed with friends, not altogether idly, the notion of running for mayor of New York or even for governor. It may have seemed to him that experience in a purely domestic area of government might be useful—as indeed it has been.

But where was the fierce infighter and bureaucratic empire builder of other days? In this second Washington appearance the face which Rockefeller turned to the world was the face of a genial, enthusiastic, but not very effective “Indian”—as the second-level bureaucrats without real power are known nowadays in Washington.³ A senator describes the impression Rockefeller made on those who saw him in action:

“Oveta would always take Rockefeller to all the hearings, but she did all the talking. Sometimes she’d say, ‘Now Mr. Rockefeller will show you what I mean,’ and Rockefeller would take a pointer and point something out on a chart, while Oveta went on talking. Any clerk could have done the job, but he seemed to enjoy it—always had a big smile.”

A friend of Rockefeller’s, who knew the inside workings of HEW and who was shown this senatorial quotation and asked to comment on it, wrote as follows:

“Every idea that came out of HEW was Nelson’s. He plotted the organization that turned a lot of bureaus into an agency. He got the people together to work out the new social-security legislation and health reinsurance. He recruited all the new talent. In fact he ran the outfit. Now, if you’re running the outfit from the number-two spot, you try very hard when in public to behave like a good number two. You don’t try to overshadow your boss. And if your boss is a woman, and you’re at a public hearing, you do the chart lifting, not she. Particularly when they’re your charts, and it was your idea to put everything on charts, as Nelson always does.”

All true, no doubt, though Mrs. Hobby might not agree in every detail. But the fact remains that the face Rockefeller turned to the world while he was working for Mrs. Hobby was the face of a dutiful and eager subordinate—which was, for Rockefeller, an entirely new face. He wore a similar public face in his second Eisenhower job, as a special adviser to the President, a post to which he was appointed in 1954. His duties were exceedingly ill-defined—the position derived from the chairmanship of a committee set up in the Truman era to try to make some sense out of American propaganda policy. Rockefeller’s job was usually described as “advising the President on how to win the cold war.”

It was a frustrating job. Among the chief frustrators were the powerful members of the “Four H Club”—Treasury Secretary Humphrey, Budget Director Hughes, foreign-aid chief Hollister, and Under Secretary of State Hoover. Rockefeller’s advice to the President on “how to win the cold war” usually involved spending money—Rockefeller argued, for example, for an expanded and more imaginative foreign-aid program. Rockefeller lost all such arguments hands down, thanks partly to the fact that the Four H Club had successfully pinned the label “spender” on him in the President’s mind.

But the greatest frustrator of all was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. As we have seen, Dulles’s first official contact with Rockefeller, at the San Francisco U.N. Conference, was not exactly happy. Later, when the two happened to be seated next to each other at a dinner honoring Winston Churchill at the time of the famous Fulton speech, Dulles was magnanimous, in a mellow and avuncular way. He told Rockefeller that Rockefeller had been right, and he had been wrong, at San Francisco. If Rockefeller and Vandenberg had not insisted on the right of collective self-defense, as laid down in Article Fifty-one, Dulles said, the Soviets would have been in a far better position to pick off the free-world nations one by one.

At first, when Rockefeller became the President’s special foreign-affairs adviser (a job Dulles had once rather fancied for himself) Dulles’s attitude toward Rockefeller continued mellow and avuncular. But when Rockefeller began putting forward foreign-policy ideas of his own, the relationship quickly cooled. A participant at one meeting between Dulles and the President shortly before the 1955 summit conference recalls that the President mentioned the aerial inspection, or “open skies” plan, and that at first Dulles sounded rather sympathetic to the plan, saying something to the effect that it was well worth studying. The President then remarked that Nelson Rockefeller had first proposed it to him, and Dulles, with his brilliant lawyer’s mind, immediately enumerated a long list of cogent reasons for rejecting the plan.

A participant at another pre-Geneva White House meeting recalls a somewhat similar episode. Dulles took the line that the essential purpose of the summit meeting would be simply to define the areas of disagreement, so that the foreign ministers could thereafter attempt to negotiate accommodations in those areas. At this point Rockefeller burst in to protest against so sterile an approach. He reminded the President of a public-opinion poll which he had had taken in various European countries, which showed that most Europeans considered the United States and the Soviet Union about equal threats to the peace. Here was an opportunity, Rockefeller said, to re-emphasize America’s dedication to peace and to re-assert American leadership of the West.

Dulles then broke in to say that “we don’t want to make this meeting a propaganda battlefield.” The subject was changed by the President and the discussion continued for a time along the lines laid down by Dulles, when Rockefeller, unable to contain himself, again passionately protested that it would be fatal to give the Soviets the propaganda initiative on the peace issue. At this point the President testily interrupted Rockefeller to say, “Damn it, Nelson, I’ve already told you we don’t want to make this meeting a propaganda battlefield.”

As this suggests, in those days the voice of Dulles was quite literally the President’s voice in matters concerning foreign policy. And although these two episodes also suggest that Rockefeller did not lose all his battles, Dulles used his great power with the President to frustrate most of Rockefeller’s bright ideas for winning the cold war. In retrospect, Rockefeller does not blame Dulles—he has told friends that, since there can be only one Secretary of State, in Dulles’s shoes he would no doubt have behaved as Dulles did. But it was an unhappy time for Rockefeller all the same. It was the time when he got his reputation, which is an article of faith in certain conservative Republican circles, as a “spender,” a “boy scout,” a “rich do-gooder,” and a New Dealer in disguise.

His chief enemies and critics were the more right-wing Republicans in the Administration. But a good many of the upper-level civil servants who knew Rockefeller in his days as cold-war adviser also have a tepid opinion of him, at least in his capacity as a fellow bureaucrat. Rockefeller had a habit of summoning large numbers of government people to meetings, often at Quantico, which is inconveniently distant from Washington, and often over weekends, when civil servants (who in the higher bureaucratic echelons work a good deal harder than their opposite number in business) like to get a little rest. This may help to explain the rather sour view of Rockefeller held by a number of government officials, which was expressed by one of them as follows:

“You know what you have to do if you want to win on a big issue like foreign aid. You go to the press. You go to the key men on the Hill. You get access to the White House, one way or another. And you fight like hell. But Nelson did none of these things. He just called meetings, and you know how much meetings mean in Washington.”

The reputation Rockefeller got in his second Washington appearance was, in short, in total contrast to his earlier reputation as an ambitious and ruthless infighter and empire builder. How explain the difference?

Part of the answer lies, of course, in the difference between Rockefeller’s situation in the wartime forties and his situation in the Eisenhower fifties. As head of a big wartime agency Rockefeller possessed the sinews of bureaucratic power, which he largely lacked in the fifties.

Far more important, however, was the difference in his relationship with the President. Nowadays, Rockefeller’s relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt is no doubt a delicate subject. But the evidence suggests that Roosevelt had a profound influence on Rockefeller. Rockefeller not only liked and admired the President who gave him his first chance to prove himself on his own, he has also, one suspects, deliberately in some ways patterned himself on Roosevelt, just as Roosevelt deliberately patterned himself on his cousin Theodore. In any case, there are many ways in which Rockefeller is like his fellow member of the Hudson River squirearchy, from his peculiar methods of dealing with subordinates to the aura of confidence and optimism with which he surrounds himself. And there is no doubt that Rockefeller’s relationship with Roosevelt was quite different from his relationship with Eisenhower.

Rockefeller was never in the Roosevelt Inner Circle, of course, but he was close enough to the wartime President so that he could always, in a pinch, appeal to the White House, which is a decisive weapon in the endless internecine wars in Washington. One former official in Rockefeller’s wartime agency recalls his first day on the job, when a meeting was held to consider some long-forgotten policy dispute between the agency and the State Department. Rockefeller, after listening for a while, turned casually to a secretary and said, “Get me the President.” In a matter of minutes the new official faintly heard, to his amazement, the familiar voice, slightly mocking, slightly avuncular, over the telephone: “Well, Nelson, what is it now?”

There was no such relationship between Rockefeller and President Eisenhower. Rockefeller tried very hard, to be sure, to establish close personal relations with Eisenhower. He even had a one-hole golf course built on his Washington estate in the hope—or so all his acquaintances assumed—that the President would use the course for practice. But the hope was dashed—Eisenhower never so much as swung a club on the Rockefeller tee, while the self-made big businessmen who had the President’s instinctive respect dismissed “young Rockefeller” as a “boy scout” or “do-gooder.” A government official without real influence at the White House is pretty well licked before he starts, in any really major bureaucratic battle, and Rockefeller no doubt recognized that this was so.

Then there was also another reason why the tough empire builder of the Roosevelt days became the obedient Indian of the Eisenhower era. In the wartime days he simply wanted to have his way, on issues very close to his heart, and he did not very much care if he made a few important enemies in the process. In the fifties he was certainly thinking about his future, within the Administration and within the party. He doubtless hoped for just the kind of really important job he thought he was going to have in 1957, before George Humphrey intervened and snatched the prize away from him. He could not even hope for such a job if he got the reputation of “not playing with the team.” And in a larger sense, since he was also beginning to think seriously of elective office, he did not want to alienate large numbers of important Republicans, notably including President Eisenhower himself.

But there is a final reason why Rockefeller got two such contrasting reputations in his two periods of service in Washington. There really is a lot of the boy scout or do-gooder in Rockefeller, just as there is a lot of the tough infighter and ambitious empire builder. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to understand something of Rockefeller’s inheritance, which is unique, and also something about the environment in which he was brought up, which was also unique.

¹ Rockefeller laid down one firm rule, however—not a penny of investment in oil.

² That Rockefeller had to go to his father for so comparatively paltry a sum as a million dollars suggests the extent to which the Rockefeller fortune, as noted in Chapter 2, is frozen.

³ The word spread from the Pentagon, the “Chiefs” being the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the “Indians” being the lower-ranking officers who crowd around them at meetings with the other Chiefs to make certain that they don’t give an inch in the ancient battle between the services.