Nelson A. Rockefeller

Nelson A. Rockefeller was born on July 8, 1908, the third child of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and

Abby Aldrich. He attended the Lincoln School—a new, free-form institution—beginning in the third grade, staying until shipping off to Dartmouth. There he majored in economics and wrote his honors thesis on the explosive growth of Standard Oil under his grandfather. In his senior year, Nelson put an interest in art to work by joining the junior board of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a body that also included George Gershwin and a young architect, Philip Johnson. A year later, Nelson plunged deeper into that world by joining the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the invitation of J. P. Morgan, Jr., and also taking a seat on the committee assaying artwork for Rockefeller Center. In 1934, he launched a study of the center’s management for his father and began taking on ever more responsibility—efforts that culminated on May 23, 1938, when he became Rockefeller Center’s chief executive at the age of 30. One of his biographers called it Nelson’s “first great political victory.” It came as the center shifted from a building project that employed as many as 75,000 construction workers on any given day to a working commercial office complex of 5 million square feet. Marketing that acreage had become the key thing, and Nelson Rockefeller its master practitioner. Early on, he became a big booster for the complex’s magazine, Rockefeller Center Monthly, a glossy devoted to chronicling the center’s myriad happenings and achievements, including its growing stock of murals, sculptures, and paintings—from giant Atlas outside the International Building, across from St. Patrick’s, to the soaring airplanes featured in the murals of the Eastern Air Lines Building’s lobby. One of his early triumphs as pitchman came in 1936, with the founding of the Sidewalk Superintendent’s Club, an 80-foot-long

NELSON ROCKEFELLER SHAKES hands with ironworker John Corbett on the day the first steel is set in place: April 3, 1958 (opposite).

JUNIOR ATTENDS SENIOR’S funeral, accompanied by his five sons, to right of John D.: David, Nelson, Winthrop, Laurance, and John D., III, May 26, 1937 (above).

GOVERNOR NELSON ROCKEFELLER and his grandchildren Peter and Meile, photographed in 1960 at the Rockefeller home in Pocantico Hills, New York (top right).

ELECTION NIGHT, NOVEMBER 4, 1958: Nelson wins the New York gubernatorial race (bottom right). viewing platform from which club members could drink in all the details of the construction work at their

leisure. By the end of the first week, 20,000 people had joined. Three months later, with chapters popping up across the nation, that figure had exploded to 750,000. Nelson himself traced the inspiration for his public relations coup to an insult suffered by his father, who one day had stopped dead on a truck ramp to check out the construction work, only to be shooed off by a burly guard who told him, “You can’t stand around loafing here.” Nelson worked out of the family office, “Room 5600” in the RCA Building, a suite that took up the entire 56th floor. Early on, he established a close relationship with Wallace Harrison, one that for years included sitting down most mornings for coffee together. Nelson needed to track the work that Harrison and Associated

Architects were doing. But the two men had other things in common as well. They moved in similar social circles and shared a passion for modern art—and for installing as much of it as they could into prominent spots around Rockefeller Center. It was a passion Nelson inherited from his mother, who served as

vice president of the Museum of Modern Art until she eventually stepped down in favor of Nelson. In May of that year, that succession became official at the grand opening of MoMA’s permanent home three blocks north of Rockefeller Center, an event attended

by Salvador Dalí, Lillian Gish, Edsel Ford, and 6,000 others. Participating by a radio link from Washington was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who made an

opening address. Nelson’s performance that evening as master of the moment won him a Time magazine cover story the following week. For the next two decades—with occasional inter-

ruptions to serve in the State Department during World War II and to run for political office—Rockefeller Center remained the North Star of Nelson’s professional life. In 1958, that changed for good when he won the election for the first of his four terms as governor of New York. In 1974, President Gerald R. Ford tapped him to be vice president, a post he held through the end of the Ford administration in 1977. Nelson Rockefeller died two

Part II

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