HALF NELSON

Rep. Peter King of New York sought to validate his credentials for assailing Newt Gingrich by noting that he had supported Barry Goldwater back when the future speaker was still a Rockefeller Republican (as indeed he was). Gen. Colin Powell spoiled his self-induction into the GOP by describing himself as a Rockefeller Republican (an apparently accurate description). To his dying day, Richard Nixon regarded me (quite incorrectly) as an unreconstructed Rockefeller Republican — citing this as reason enough not to grant an interview.

A Rockefeller Republican was really nothing more than a Cold War liberal — a believer in the power of government to solve domestic problems who took a hard line in the struggle against Soviet imperialism. Today this is a double anachronism. Everybody this side of Paul Wellstone harbors at least some doubts about the efficacy of governmental problem-solving; and there is no Soviet Union, now that the Cold War has been won.

Yet, Cold War liberal Scoop Jackson’s name scarcely excites such passion in his Democratic party; in fact, it is not mentioned at all. What biographer Cary Reich describes as Rockefeller’s enduring “power to fire up the most incendiary political passions at the mere mention of his name” for Republicans derives from their party’s internal history. Rockefeller represents the financial and social elite of the Eastern Seaboard, which lost its grip on the GOP in 1964 and never regained it but still is resented in the hinterland.

Reich’s biographical challenge is to breathe life and significance into a subject who left behind no movement and no dedicated band of supporters. The difficulty is compounded by the biographer’s decision not to make short shrift of Rockefeller’s rise and move quickly to his tumultuous and ultimately unsuccessful career in Republican politics beginning with his 1958 campaign for governor of New York.

Instead, Reich’s Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908- 1958 is a definitive, exhaustive, and quite often exhausting account of the subject’s childhood, young manhood, business career, and exploits as a Washington bureaucrat. Reich is a prodigious researcher and a graceful, entertaining writer, but Rockefeller’s struggles with his father and his father’s retainers do not sustain interest.

The book’s value is in pointing up the improbability of what Rockefeller achieved after 1958: a leading role in the Republican party that could have led to the White House, save for his lack of personal discipline, and did include election to four terms as governor of New York, then appointment as vice president of the United States.

The name Rockefeller evoked a much stronger popular response in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s than it does today. Then it was a symbol of unlimited wealth (“rich as Rockefeller” was a phrase in a popular tune of the ’30s) and of rapacious robber barons.

When Nelson was elected governor in 1958, his father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., widely called “Junior”, was “absolutely stunned.” Reich writes that ” deep down,” the senior Rockefeller never believed that his son would win, ” that he would ever overcome the stigma that, in Junior’s mind at least, still shadowed the family.”

Even more improbable was Rockefeller’s emergence in Republican politics at the age of 50, considering his service a little more than a decade earlier under Franklin D. Roosevelt — first as a coordinator of inter-American affairs (an appointment of his own instigation, to a job largely of his own making) and later as assistant secretary of state for Latin America.

His go-between with FDR was his longtime adviser and helper, New York Democratic insider Anna Rosenberg, who told the president in 1938 that Nelson was “sympathetic. He feels quite differently from some of the other members of his family” (though in fact he contributed $ 33,000 to Alf Landon’s 1936 Republican presidential campaign, more than his brothers).

Once they made contact, Rockefeller became a Roosevelt cheerleader, writing an impassioned defense of the WPA, the make-work New Deal project, to a critical congressional chairman and mailing a copy of the letter to Roosevelt.

In 1940, when Rockefeller’s name came up for the new post of inter-American coordinator, Roosevelt noted that “Nelson would be fine” because he had given $ 25,000 to his presidential campaign that year. Of this, Reich could find no “independent corroboration” in either Rockefeller’s or Roosevelt’s papers. On the contrary, Nelson and his brothers had offered to back Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940, but their checks were returned because of the opprobrium of the Rockefeller name.

Once on board as a lieutenant of the president Republicans despised as ” that man in the White House,” Rockefeller was a “consummate courtier,” according to Reich. “Already a past master at the art of ingratiation — having honed his skills to fine art with Junior — Rockefeller was tireless in his devout flattery of the President.” He sent a gushing congratulatory letter when Roosevelt defeated Willkie.

Inside later-New Deal circles, Rockefeller was drawn to the personality farthest to the left: Henry A. Wallace, first secretary of agriculture and later vice president. He put on Sunday-evening musicales aimed “at pleasing Wallace, the Latin music buff,” sent him gifts, and sometimes visited him in his Washington apartment to partake of the utopian socialist’s wisdom.

On one such visit, he heard the vice president mystically expound on the ” corn civilization” binding the United States and Latin America against the ” wheat civilization” of the rest of the world. As Rockefeller left, he told a companion: “There are no two ways about it. That man must be the next President of the United States.”

Simultaneously, Rockefeller sought and achieved a relationship with the FBI and its director, the totem of the Right, J. Edgar Hoover — a relationship that became more intense with the advent of the Cold War.

After Roosevelt’s death, with President Harry Truman a less pliable target of the Republican aristocrat’s blandishments, Rockefeller “expressed concern,” Reich writes, “that Truman did not really understand Communist tactics and how the Russians operate. Rockefeller thought it would be a “grand thing’ if J. Edgar Hoover were to educate Truman on that score.”

There was no such education, and Truman fired Rockefeller. It would be seven years before Rockefeller returned to the halls of power in the Eisenhower administration, first as undersecretary of health, education, and welfare (in which role he was a big-spending liberal) and then as presidential assistant for Cold War strategy (where he was a militant anti- Communist).

There was no easy road to get there. He was not an early recruit in Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential crusade. When asked by promoter Tex McCrary to contribute $ 25,000 for an “I Like Ike” rally at Madison Square Garden, Rockefeller replied, “Let me think about it.” McCrary heard no more from him. After Eisenhower’s nomination for president, Rockefeller’s efforts to get involved in the campaign were blocked by New York governor Thomas E. Dewey.

But one of the richest men in the world, blessed with incomparable contacts, could not be kept out of the first Republican administration in a generation. As he had with Roosevelt, Rockefeller cut across regular jurisdictional lines and sought to work directly with the president. Eisenhower’s Open Skies inspection proposal was a product of Rockefeller’s idea mill.

“A progressive by nature, Rockefeller wanted a Republicanism with a social conscience, a Republicanism that accepted the need for government intervention to right society’s wrongs,” writes Reich. But he ended his Eisenhower-administration tenure as “an implacable hardliner,” resigning after being isolated from the inner circles of power, in protest that Eisenhower’s Cold War strategy was falling short.

Frustrated in two administrations, Rockefeller now saw elective office as the path to power. Indeed, Reich records a 1952 postelection conversation in which he told Herbert Brownell, the New York lawyer and Dewey-Eisenhower insider, that he wanted “to run for President someday. . . . Dwight Eisenhower was still two months away from entering the White House, and Nelson Rockefeller was already planning the succession.”

Reich relates a comic but humiliating incident when Rockefeller sought out Gov. Dewey in 1956 to ask about running for governor two years later. Dewey suggested a gradual succession: appointment as New York City postmaster, a run for Congress, and “then later, maybe then, you could run for governor.” Rockefeller’s version: “He slapped my knee and laughed out loud and said, ” Nelson, you’re a great guy, but you couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in New York.'”

Disregarding the advice, Rockefeller won the party’s nomination (then decided by convention) in a brilliant tactical performance, superbly described by Reich, that must have made him think it would be easy to advance in a party he had ignored most of his life. The emergence of the blintz- chomping, pizza-eating Rocky who devastated the dour Democratic governor, Averell Harriman, ends the first volume of Reich’s massively detailed work.

Having devoted eight years of his life to this project, journalist Reich gives the impression he doesn’t really care much for the subject — particularly his “shrewd, designing side.” Neither does the biographer stint in reporting on Rockefeller’s seamier aspect, especially his continuous liaisons with attractive women, who invariably worked as his aides.

Reich, former executive editor of the Institutional Investor and biographer of financier Andre Meyer, makes no effort to hide his own ideological preferences. While seeming to approve of Rockefeller’s big government excesses, Reich condemns his Cold War activism. He mercilessly assails what may be Rockefeller’s greatest accomplishment in public life: his insistence on postwar regional agreements at the Chapultepec conference of 1945 — a performance that permitted the creation of NATO. “Among those in the U.S. government who were already hunkering down for the start of the Cold War, Nelson Rockefeller was in the vanguard,” Reich notes with obvious disapproval.

That mindset leaves doubt about how the biographer will perform in the second and more difficult half of his great task. That Rockefeller’s ultimate failure in national politics was the product not merely of his politically disastrous remarriage but also of his isolation from the overriding trends of the Republican party and America may be something Cary Reich is unable to cope with in an objective and insightful way.

Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist.