Rockefeller Laws Fail but Persist

by Robert Reno- Newsday

May 14, 2002

Even as they contemplate whether to elect a governor to a third term, New Yorkers have occasion this year to reflect on the legacy of the state's most memorable chief, Nelson Rockefeller, who was elected to four.

Into a single busy lifetime of art collecting, he also crammed a repeatedly frustrated and lavishly financed ambition to be president and served briefly but ingloriously as an appointed vice president. In that office his ambitions were frustrated by President Gerald Ford's White House chiefs of staff who just happened to be Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Ford had been appointed vice president when Spiro Agnew had to resign in disgrace. Rumsfeld and Cheney then succeeded in pushing Rockefeller off the Ford ticket, which lost in 1976. Rockefeller also mentored the immense ambitions of Henry Kissinger, who served him as foreign policy adviser. His worst miscalculation was in divorcing Mary Clark in 1962 to marry Happy Murphy, a divorced mother of four.

His career never recovered because those were the days before Ronald Reagan made divorce forgivable, at least for rightwing candidates.

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