“Rockefeller’s resume is impressive for his many accomplishments. But the sordid manner of his death is all that he’s remembered for.”
That’s not what I remember him for. Nelson Rockefeller was the leader of the eastern GOP liberal establishment that hated Goldwater conservatives with a passion.
His ideological heirs are the people we call RINOs; odd because they have controlled the GOP for most of its existence. Conservatives are the anomaly. The GOPe war against the tea party is just the GOP returning to its Rockefeller Republican past.
Politically, all that is very true about Nelson Rockefeller, he was the RINO capo di tutti capi. But as far as the endowments, charities, museums, & all the other artsy-f@rsty stuff, Rocky was not one of the idle rich living off inherited wealth. He was a human dynamo & I recall that wide-gauge 1,000 watt grin appearing everywhere in the news.
But do the math; by the time of his death in early 1979 Rockefeller’s hopes for the GOP nomination in 1980 were forlorn. The Reaganites were insurgent & had already come within a whisker of snatching it away from Gerald Ford in 1976.
Anyway, I wonder if the New Guinea cannibals who had Michael Rockefeller for dinner were ever aware of his aristocratic pedigree. Unlike the `long pig’ they were accustomed to, his fair flesh must have been the Wagyu Kobe beef of human comestibles.
;^)