Chapter V

The Vice President

Rockefeller Jr.'s second son, Nelson, born in 1908. With his elder brother superintending the family's cultural power, he turned his attention to the arena of political power.

His first major sphere of activity was political propaganda. Before he was 30, he became a director of the Creole Petroleum Company, the subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey which then provided it with most of its foreign oil from the enormous reserves it controlled in Venezuela. In examining the position of Creole Oil in Venezuela, Nelson became convinced that public relations in the host country was essential to retaining control over Latin American oil. In 1939 he and his associates from the Chase Manhattan Bank and Rockefeller Center prepared a three-page memorandum for President Franklin D. Roosevelt that suggested the creation of a government agency to counter Nazi propaganda and covert infiltration in Latin America. FDR. on the recommendation of an adviser (who later received a loan from Nelson Rockefeller), named Nelson in 1940 to head the new agency which became known as the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) or simply as the Rockefeller Office.

Before America even entered the second world war in 1941, Nelson was actively recruiting the elites of Latin America. According to a former staff member of the Rockefeller Office, "almost all our efforts were directed into organizing the pro-Western elites of Venezuela and Brazil into a private network of influence". Almost exclusively, Latin-American business executives and public opinion leaders were brought into this network. Then, after the United States entered the war, the Rockefeller Office directed its major efforts towards outright propaganda.

To gain control over the media of Latin America during the War, Rockefeller obtained a ruling from the U.S. Treasury Department which exempted the cost of advertisements placed by American corporations that were cooperating with the Rockefeller Office from taxation. This tax-exempt advertising eventually constituted more than 40 per cent. of all radio and newspaper revenues in Latin America. By selectively directing this advertising towards newspapers and radio stations that accepted guidance from his office and simultaneously denying it to media which he deemed uncooperative or pro-Nazi he skillfully managed to gain economic leverage over the major sources of news throughout South America. Moreover, as the newsprint shortage became critical in South America, his office made sure that the indispensable newsprint licences were allocated only to friendly newspapers. With a staff of some 1,200 in the United States, including mobilized journalists, advertising experts and public opinion analysts, and some $140 million in government funds (expended over five years), the Rockefeller Office mounted a propaganda effort virtually unprecedented in the annals of American history. It was also a formative education for Nelson in the vulnerabilities of the Press.

All the Rockefeller Office's programs were divided into two categories economic warfare" and "psychological warfare." Nelson explained to a Senate committee at the time: "We consider it an information program, the objectives to be to explain what is going on in a military way." A battle plan was thus drawn up for the press campaign. George Gallup, who later became famous as a political pollster, and a group of prominent social scientists quietly conducted systematic surveys of' public opinion in Brazil. In a clear adumbration of the postwar CIA, the Rockefeller Office arranged for a "research division" to employ clandestine "observers" from the Export Bureau of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in Latin America. The advertising men who served as "observers" supplied the Rockefeller Office with data concerning the editorial policy, personal opinions of the owners and editors of the newspapers. Dossiers could thus be systematically organized about the opinions and operations of the major organs of public opinion in Latin America.

Under the brilliant tutelage of Francis A. Jamieson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and public-relations expert (who stayed with Nelson for most of his public career); James W. Young, head of J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and Karl A. Bickel, former president of United Press and then chairman of Scripps-Howard Radio, Rockefeller learned the rudiments of managing news.

From the beginning it became apparent that news was not the product of journalistic investigation, but of special interest groups. If economic pressure could be brought against the owners, and incentives given to editors, news in Latin America could be surreptitiously authored in Washington rather than Berlin or elsewhere. To this end, the Rockefeller Office provided not only 'canned' editorials, photographs, exclusives, feature stories and other such news material, but manufactured its own mass circulation magazines, supplements, pamphlets and newsreels. To ensure understanding of the 'issues' being advanced in Latin America, the Office sent 13,000 opinion leaders a weekly newsletter which was to help them 'clarify' the issues of the day. The CIAA also arranged trips to the United States for the most influential editors in Latin America (and later scholarships for their children). More than 1200 newspapers and 200 radio stations, which survived the economic warfare, were fed a daily diet of some 30,000 words of news in Spanish and Portuguese, which were disseminated by cooperating news agencies and radio networks in the United States to their clients in Latin America. By the end of the War, the CIAA estimated that more than 75 percent of the news that reached Latin America originated from Washington where it was tightly controlled and monitored by the Rockefeller Office and State Department. The operation, Nelson realized, required only sufficient money, talent and will.

After the War Nelson divided his time between managing various Rockefeller interests and in service in various government administrations in Washington. He served President Harry Truman as chairman of the International Development Advisory Board. He served President Dwight D. Eisenhower as both under-secretary of the Department of Housing, Education and Welfare and as a special assistant for foreign affairs.

Nelson believed in power. He explained "power per se is good or bad depending on how it is used [but] power is essential". To get it, he decided in 1955 to seek the Republican nomination for governor of New York State. Since no Rockefeller had sought elective office before, Room 5600 had to marshal special resources to ensure that Nelson received the nomination of the Republican party. At the time the Republican party in New York State was controlled by a few dozen county leaders in upstate cities, such as Elmira, Syracuse, Rochester and Albany. In New York City, the one place where the Rockefellers could most easily bring their financial and foundation power to bear on politicians, the Republican organization was moribund if not totally deceased.

To this end, Nelson made arrangements with two professional politic operators in New York State, Malcolm Wilson, a legislator who could deal expediently with the Westchester County Republicans, and Lyman Judson Morhouse, the state Republican Chairman, who, according to his defense at a subsequent bribery. trial, was a professed 'influence' seller in New York State.

Morhouse proceeded to select Nelson as the chairman of the Committee on the Preparation of a State Constitutional Convention, which provided convenient access to all grass-root Republican leaders in the state. But behind the scenes, Morhouse played an even more important role in helping Rockefeller make his separate peace with various county leaders, by collecting cash contributions of one sort or another from pro-Rockefeller sources and redistributing them where necessary to help towards securing the Republican nomination for Nelson. Nelson not only succeeded in easily winning the election, but provided more than half the campaign funds for the entire Republican party.

As both chairman of the party and the director of the powerful State Thruway Commission (to which Nelson appointed him), Morhouse continued his service as a political bagman and all-purpose fixer during the first three years of the Rockefeller administration. During these years he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from watch manufacturers, drug laboratories, lessees for space at the airport, highway contractors (through the Good Road Association), radio and television licensees in New York State, detective agencies seeking concessions at the 1960 World's Fair, and others seeking indulgences from the State of New York. Whether Morhouse was collecting this money for his own account, or simply laundering the money for undercover politics, Nelson was aware of the operation. For example, in June 1959, he personally witnessed Morhouse receive a hundred thousand dollars. in a 'shoe box' at a Republican Party dinner, and ordered the money returned because, he later testified, he "was fearful that this was race track money [from] people who wanted to get a licence for a racetrack".

While such backstage redistributions of cash from those seeking and owed favors was hardly novel in New York State politics, Nelson was able to change the rules of the game by infusing vast amounts of money into the subterranean system through ingenious use of his own personal fortune and the institutions under his family's sway. Providing Morhouse with cash, untraceable in any way to the Rockefellers, required, however, the unique institutional resources of the Rockefeller Brothers and Associates in Room 5600 of Rockefeller Center. It sold Morhouse 2500 shares in a privately held corporation, the Marks Oxygen Company, for a nominal $25,000 (No money actually changed) and then proceed to buy the stock back from Morhouse for $79,375, leaving a profit of more than $50,000 in Morhouse's account. A similar arrangement was made on shares of Geophysics Corporation of America deposited in Morhouse's account, which rose almost tenfold, and left Morhouse with a paper profit of a quarter of a million dollars.

When Morhouse, overheard on a wire tap arranging a hundred thousand dollar bribe for obtaining a liquor licence for the Playboy Club, was convicted of conspiracy and bribery, Nelson, as governor, pardoned him on medical grounds before he could spend any time in prison.

As governor, Rockefeller demonstrated that he was a masterful orchestrator of both the levers and symbols of political power. He immediately found that the condition that satisfied most of the politically important interest groups in the state was the massive government construction program. Journalistic critics of Rockefeller in those years who attributed his monumental building projects to some sort of psychological 'erection complex' underestimated the political profit such vast expenditures on construction gained for him from key unions and business interests in the state. The political problem, which restrained Rockefeller's predecessors from constructing public works on a scale of the Egyptian pyramids, was that they could not be paid for out of taxes, since the wrath of the electorate over tax increases would far outweigh any advantages from special interest groups pleased with the expenditures. Nor was it easy to finance these projects through issuing long-term bonds, which had the obvious advantage of deferring tax burdens to future generations of taxpayers, because such bonds had to be approved by the electorate at a referendum.

With characteristic ingenuity, Nelson over-rode this stumbling block to expansion by devising special authorities which could issue long-term debt without the approval of the voters. These bonds were not legally backed by the full faith of the state, since they by-passed constitutional requirement of a referendum, but Nelson pledged the full moral authority of the state the bonds, bond buyers assumed that this pledge was tantamount to a state obligation. Through these "Moral obligation" bonds, as they came to be called, New York State raised over $6 billion. Through these and other innovation, its debt during the Rockefeller administrations rose from $1 billion to $13 billion, allowing Nelson to engage in a massive building and spending.

Under anyone but Nelson, there might have been great resistance among state officials to such unorthodox bonds. Nelson, however, succeeded in engendering loyalty among his key officials by quietly distributing to them over one million dollars in cash from his private funds. Typically, Rockefeller's secret loans that became gifts went to such instrumental state officials as the Superintendent of Banks, members of the State Housing Financing agency, the Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Commissioner of Housing and Community Renewal. While some officials receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Rockefeller, others received the promise of future employment in his family's empire.

While Rockefeller's ability to dispense largesse conflicted with the New York State Penal Code which explicitly prohibited conferring "any benefit upon a public official for having engaged in official conduct . Rockefeller asserted, when the gifts were finally made public by an FBI investigation in 1974, that he gave the cash to the public servants. out of his esteem for them, not out of any motive related to the work they were performing for him as governor. Because of his carefully managed reputation as a philanthropist the matter was never referred to a court for adjudication.

Nelson next set his sights on the Presidency. In his first effort to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency, in 1964, he used $12 million of the family's money. He failed, however. To win enough delegates to stop Barry Goldwater, a senator who strongly identified himself as an ideological conservative (and who went on to lose the general election).

Nelson's advisors told him he needed a more conservative image to win the Republican nomination in 1968. The solution he found was an issue that conveyed a tough conservative image to the law and order elements in the Republican Party, but which would not at the same time offend the more moderate elements in the party; it was the suppression of drug addicts. He cited polls that "document that the number one, and growing concern of the American people is crime and drugs, coupled with an all-pervasive fear for the safety of their person and property"

It was this well researched "all-pervasive Rockefeller set out to exploit brilliantly. The crusade against addicts reached its zenith in 1973 Rockefeller declared that a "reign of terror" existed with "whole neighborhoods . . . as effectively destroyed by addicts as by an invading army.

He pressed through the legislature laws which by-passed both the discretion of the court and the prosecutor by making it mandatory that anyone convicted of selling (or possessing more than one-eighth ounce of) heroin, amphetamines, LSD, or other specified drugs would be imprisoned for life without the possibility of parole. Even 16-year-old offenders hitherto protected by the youthful offenders law would receive automatic life sentences. Thousand-dollar bounties would be paid for information about these drugs. In another legal innovation the new law laid down life imprisonment (without parole) for the novel crime of ingesting a hard drug (including amphetamines or LSD) 48 hour's or less before committing a proscribed crime, including criminal mischief, sodomy, burglary, assault and arson. This draconian law made it possible to imprison undesirable users for the balance of their lite since they had only to be convicted of a minor crimes after ingesting drugs to which they were addicted.

The Rockefeller laws succeeded in enhancing Rockefeller's reputation among the hardline element of the Republican party without losing very much support anywhere else, as few people in America were concerned with the fate of drug addicts. To his more moderate supporters, Rockefeller justified the law by explaining, as he did in his senate testimony, "about 135,000 [addicts] were robbing, mugging, murdering day in and day out for their money to fix their habit, and it was costing the people of New York up to $5 billion". Rockefeller had obviously learned in his long experience in psychological warfare that numbers could be effectively employed in political rhetoric, even if they had no basis in fact, if they only sounded enormous and authoritative enough. In this case, if Rockefeller's alleged army of addicts maintained the "day in, day out" schedule they would have to commit something in the order of 49,275,000 robberies, muggings and murders a year, which would mean that the average resident of New York would be robbed, mugged and murdered approximately seven times a year.

The hyperbole not withstanding, Nelson had his issue. In speech after speech, with masterful vampire imagery, he agitated the popular fear that the population of New York would be decimated by a horde of addicts, infecting the innocent children. Through the agency of the generalized fear of drugs, Rockefeller was able not only to win elections but to project in the popular imagination a new nationwide crisis which he alone, among the nation's politicians, had the experience to solve. A newly created commission which supposedly supervised the involuntary rehabilitation of addicts, but which had on its staff many more public relations specialists than medical doctors and psychiatrists, systematically developed through its own nationally circulated newspapers (Attack), newsletters and contacts with the media, the highly dramatized image of heroin addicts as drug slaves, who were ineluctably compelled to steal and ravage by their incurable habit. The size of the addict population in New York proved infinitely flexible. When it was necessary to demonstrate the need for more police measures or judges, Rockefeller expanded the number of putative addicts from 25,000 (1966) to 150,000 (1972) to 200,000 (1973). For other audiences, especially when Rockefeller wanted to show the efficacy of his program, the army of addicts was conveniently contracted to under 100,000.

Nelson asked rhetorically in the New York Law Journal, "How can we defeat drug abuse before it destroys America? I believe the answer lies in summoning the total commitment America has always demonstrated in times of national crisis . . . Drug addiction represents a threat akin to war in its capacity to kill, enslave, and imperil the nation's future; akin to cancer in spreading of deadly disease among us and equal to any other challenge we face in deserving all the brainpower, manpower and resources necessary to overcome it." He then asked rhetorically, "Are the sons and daughters of a generation that survived the great depression and rebuilt a prosperous nation, that defeated Nazism and Fascism and preserved the free world, to be vanquished by a powder, needles and pills?" Indeed, he played the politics of fear so adroitly that President Nixon borrowed much of his rhetoric, images and statistical hyperbole on drugs and crime, when launching his own national heroin crusade.

Although Rockefeller's draconian drug laws had little effect on either drug addiction or crime rate in New York, they helped him to achieve the national prominence and acceptance by the hardline elements of the Republican party that he needed if he was to stand for the presidency when Nixon's final term of office was due to expire in 1976. In December 1973, in what members of his staff foresaw as the beginning of the presidential campaign, Rockefeller resigned as governor and announced that he was going to spend his full time directing the Commission on Critical Choices, which he had set up with family and foundation money several months earlier. Ostensibly, this Commission was designed to "seek a clearer sense of national purpose" but, as did the earlier Rockefeller panels, the well financed organization also served as a vehicle for gathering together the most important molders of public opinion in America and, with their assistance, determining issues of public policy they should support. To articulate possible positions the Commission also paid various academics fees ranging from five to thirty thousand dollars. Every word they wrote was scrutinized by the former governor's Press secretary, Hugh Morrow, to gauge the political impact it might, if published, have on Rockefeller's political ambitions.

The political plan for 1976, however, had to be radically altered after the collapse of the Watergate coverup made it apparent that President Nixon would not finish his term of office. Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew, had been forced to resign because of his own criminal culpability, and replaced by Gerald Ford, the leader of the Republicans in the House. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford became president. With another term available to him in 1976, Rockefeller's chances for the presidential nominations were effectively ended. He therefore accepted Ford's offer to appoint him his vice president.

After extended Congressional inquiries into his financial resources he was confirmed by a vote of 287 to 128 in the House and 90 to 7 in the Senate. He was sworn in as the 41st vice president on Dec. 19, 1974.

He retired from politics in 1977, and died in 1979 in New York City, during a tryst with a 25 year old lover.


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