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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