 Good evening. Good evening. I'm Mark Uptigrove, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library. I want to welcome you here tonight. And before I bring on Elizabeth Christian, who will introduce tonight's guest, I just want to tell you that I want to thank you all. In recent weeks, in particular, I've gotten a number of people who have come up to me and told me how much they enjoy being a member of the LBJ Friends group. And I want to tell you how much that means to me. You have been very generous in your praise of this program and of this library. And you've also been very generous in suggestions that you've had about very generous. I want to tell you how much it means for me to hear both those things. I love hearing how well we're doing, because I can tell you that we try to knock it out of the park every time we do a program here. So it means the world to me when you tell me that you're getting great value out of your membership. We are always going to strive to do the best that we can for you. And I also value your feedback. And I can tell you that it registers and it's helped to guide the Friends program. So please be forthcoming with your suggestions. They mean just as much to us. I would ask if you enjoy this membership that in return that you help us to fill every seat in this auditorium. We are trying to get the biggest names and best minds through our door. And tonight is a great example. Richard Norton Smith is not only a dear friend of mine. He's also one of the great historians our country has today. And you'll see that by reading his book on Nelson Rockefeller, which he'll talk about tonight. But in exchange for that, in exchange for all the time and effort that we put into this program, we ask that you sell it to your friends or family members and you try to help us to fill every seat. That would be a great tribute to this library and to the folks that we bring here on stage. So thank you again for your generous support of this library and this membership group. And with that, I will hand it over to my friend, Elizabeth Christian, the president of the LBJ Foundation. Thank you very much. Good evening. It is my honor to welcome you here. I am president of the LBJ Foundation. My name's Elizabeth Christian. And on behalf of Foundation Chairman Larry Temple and our entire board of directors, I want to echo what Mark just said. We are so grateful for this group and we're so glad to see you all here. It's also a big honor tonight to introduce our guest, Richard Norton Smith. To call Richard Norton Smith an authority on American presidents is perhaps the understatement of the year. Mr. Smith is arguably the authority on the modern presidency. Between 1987 and 2001, he served as the director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Dwight Eisenhower Center, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and the Gerald Ford Museum and Library. He also served as director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas and was the first executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. I can't imagine that this is a record that will ever be broken. Nor is it easy to figure out how Richard has had enough time to be as prolific as he's been as a writer. After serving on staff with Senator Robert Dole, Mr. Smith collaborated with Bob and Elizabeth Dole on their joint autobiography and also helped Mr. Dole write two subsequent books on political humor, and our president, Lyndon Johnson, was subject of some of that. Mr. Smith's first major book of his own, entitled Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. Richard Norton Smith has also written, an uncommon man, the triumph of Herbert Hoover, the Harvard Century, the making of a university to a nation, Patriarch George Washington and the New American Nation. And in June 1997, Mr. Smith's The Colonel, the Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick was published, and that book has been described as the best book ever written about the press. Richard Norton Smith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. His roommate, Steve Chapman, I think Steve's parents are here tonight, I hope they are, who is now on the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, happens to be a lifelong close friend of mine too. When I learned that I would have the pleasure of introducing Richard Norton Smith, I thought, I'm not gonna just Google him, I wanna find out some real stuff. So I asked Steve for insights that we might not glean from a mere search of the internet. Could you have guessed that Richard Norton Smith is a hurricane aficionado, and has taken a plane into the eye of a storm? He's a devotee of Charles de Gaulle. He's a veritable encyclopedia of Broadway musicals. He has visited every single presidential grave site, and he has a gorgeous singing voice. I hope Mark Uptegrove, director of the LBJ Presidential Library and tonight's interviewer will get more details on these enticing tidbits. Richard Norton Smith is here with us to share his thoughts on his latest book on his own terms, A Life of Nelson Rockefeller, which is already being called the definitive work on a man who made it to vice president and never quite cracked the code to be president. Please help me welcome Richard Norton Smith and Mark Uptegrove to the stage. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Welcome Richard. Comfortable chairs. The bane of author's existence, you know? You sit in these little, anyway. We brought out the best chairs for you Richard. Thank you. We brought the best for you. I'm trying to bring out the best stories for you. Good, good. Well this is an epic book about an epic subject and it was 14 years in the making. So first let's talk about the epic subject, Nelson Rockefeller. Why did you choose to take on Nelson Rockefeller? You know, every once in a while you hear about the book you were born to write and it's a phrase I never thought I'd use except now. 14 years actually underestimates my fascination with a man. I was a very oddly annoying precocious child. Some would say it was a preview of coming attractions. But in any event, in 1964 the epic party redefining battle between Barry Goldwater representing the Sun Belt conservative wing of the party and now Longstons dominant and Nelson Rockefeller a fading Eastern establishment that had been responsible for the likes of Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower. Arguably Richard Nixon. One of the last political conventions that really mattered and it was an amazing scene. It was in the Cow Palace outside San Francisco and there were 3,000 Republican delegates who were behaving like Democrats. If you know what I mean. Democrats are supposed to have fights like this. Republicans are supposed to be scripted and well-behaved. But it was a fight over something, something profound. It was geographical. It was philosophical. It really was a reopening of the wound first opened in 1912 between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. A month before the convention, this fight had reached its climax in California, a California primary where the weekend before the primary Nelson Rockefeller Jr. was born, which reminded everyone that Governor Rockefeller in addition to being a quote, big spending Eastern liberal had divorced his first wife, married a much younger woman and now fathered a child. And this point of evidence to suggest that it was just enough, the morality issue in 1964 arguably cut in ways that 50 years later, people might be scratching their heads about. But it was enough to put goldwater just over the top. So there was no question coming into the Cow Palace who had won this fight numerically. But Rockefeller and those who agreed with him were not about to go down without a fight. The great issue was civil rights. Very goldwater who let's be fair was no racist. Personally, goldwater, for example, in Arizona had led the fight to desegregate the National Guard and his own family's department stores. But goldwater was that brand of libertarian who at least in 1964 believed that government had no right to tell people who they could and couldn't associate with or conduct business with. He believed it was a constitutional matter. He did, he did. Nelson Rockefeller came from a very different tradition. One of the things, some of the things discovered in this book, give me an idea of just how close he was, for example, to Dr. King. In 1958, some of you may remember, Dr. King was stabbed by a crazed assailant in Harlem. His hospital bills were picked up by Nelson Rockefeller. Anonymously. Anonymously. In 1963, the Birmingham Crusade, the height, the moral backbone of the civil rights movement. And they were running out of people to put in jail and so they turned to children. And of course it was the pictures of those kids and bull corners, police dogs and water hoses that really shocked the conscience of the nation. But the idea was to send all these kids out in demonstrations, they would be arrested, their bail would be paid, they'd be out on the street and the cycle would repeat itself. They were out of money. Nelson Rockefeller provided almost $100,000 anonymously to pay the bail bonds. And then tragically, in 1968, when Dr. King was killed, just a few days after President Johnson announced his own withdrawal from the race, and Nelson had announced that he would not run in 1968. Nelson Rockefeller sent his agents and his checkbook to Atlanta and paid for and organized Dr. King's funeral. But he insisted that it not be made public because he didn't want to take advantage of the family's suffering. And in fact, the story remained hidden until. Anyway, I ramble, but it gives you some idea of what mattered, what this man was passionate about and why 1964 is such a turning point. So anyway, that night, the second night of the convention, Governor Rockefeller was scheduled, he gave him five minutes to talk about a platform plank that the moderates wanted to add. And it was very simple. It was denouncing political extremism. Now remember, this is the summer of 1964. President Johnson is sending extra FBI people to Mississippi where civil rights workers are missing, have been murdered. I mean, extremism in the summer of 1964 was no abstract term. Rockefeller specifically defined it for the benefit of the national viewing audience. It was the Communist Party of America, the Ku Klux Klan, and here's the rub, the John Birch Society, at the mention of which the place exploded. I don't know how many Birchers there were, but there were plenty, particularly in places like California. But more than that, symbolically, Barry Goldwater I think would be the first to say, people like Bill Buckley said this, the biggest cross they had to bear were some of the nut jobs who ostensibly believed in the movement. Anyway, this was all on natural TV. And as the minutes crawled by, there was a woman immortal, immortalized herself, who got up on a chair, not fast on the podium, and screamed on camera, you lousy lover, you lousy lover, which had very little to do with his political views, and everything to do with the cultural earthquake that had taken place, and was still unfolding in San Francisco. And again, America was a very different country. So Nelson Rockefeller was the personification of everything these people hated. He was the Eastern establishment. He had a sense of humor about it. Just before the California primary, the great political strategist, Stu Spencer, who later became very well known as Ronald Reagan's chief advisor. Anyway, Spencer, the polls were not looking good. There were no volunteers. There was lots of money, but that was all. Spencer said, governor, it's time to call an Eastern establishment. And Rockefeller said, you're looking at it, buddy, I'm all that's left. And in a sense, he was. But he made what many people thought was a heroic last stand at that convention. And I, at the ripe old age of 10, had persuaded my parents to let me stay up that night. And I suppose that night planted the seeds all these years later on his own terms. We'll come back to that seminal convention in 1964, but talk about, if you would, Rockefeller's famous family. He is the grandson of John David Rockefeller, he's a famous capitalist. How does, what does his childhood look like? It's fascinating. First of all, he never felt self-conscious, pressed uniquely in the family about being a Rockefeller. And that's one of the things that set him apart, not only from his brothers, but his father, because he was his mother's son. His mother was this remarkable woman, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. And one of the first discoveries I made to my own surprise is that Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller is more an Aldrich than he is a Rockefeller. Nelson Aldrich, the original was Republican leader of the United States Senate from Rhode Island, corrupt in the Gilded Age style of corruption, but also a great collector of art. History would repeat itself. His daughter, Abby, was this marvelous kind of combination of Margaret Sanger and Auntie Mame. You know, this colorful, larger than life, open to all new experiences, endlessly curious about people, respectful of everyone she met, committed in a way that's very rare in those days, committed to racial and ethnic equality and insistent that her children emulate that. And she's the one who told Nelson when he was seven years old that he could be president of the United States. Now, you also have to remember, Nelson did not know, Nelson went through life with a severe, undiagnosed dyslexia. He was 50 years old before he ever heard the word, which he pronounced dyslexia. And his mother told him, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, which is where all the gurus and the advisors and the, you know, everyone else came from. It's where the incredible respect he had for expertise came from. If he'd never done anything else in the 1950s, you know, he commissioned the Rockefeller, self-commissioned the Rockefeller Brothers reports, which brought together these extraordinary blue ribbon panels of experts and a number of fields to look into the future. He was very much a futurist. He was rather critical. He was 32 years old when Franklin Roosevelt put him in charge of Latin America. And by the way, he said, you know, you could be president one day if you were a Democrat. Harry Truman told him the same thing. He couldn't, and it's revealing, he couldn't bring himself to change his party registration. He understood himself. He said, if I was a Democrat, then I would always be trying to hold people back. And that's not me. As a Republican, I'm always trying to push people forward, which is very revealing in a lot of ways. Does he believe what they say? Does he believe that switching parties will provide a gateway to the party? He later on came to believe that he was in the wrong party. But, you know, it was too long, you know. By that time, the party had changed dramatically. But there was even, there was a problem. What Nelson Rockham, in some ways, what makes him incredibly contemporary, I don't know about Austin, Texas contemporary, but he said he had a Republican head and a Democratic heart. And Mead Espozito, who's this wonderful, raffish, cigar-chomping, Ronyonesque, crooked as a day, his long, but colorful as hell, Tammany-type boss from Brooklyn, became one of his unlikely collaborators. It was said that Nelson in New York owned one political party and rented the other. And I can tell you, the lease went cheap. By the way, Mead Espozito said, and he summed it up better than anyone else, he said he was too liberal for the Republicans and too conservative for the Democrats. What he was, was non-ideological. He was a pragmatist who called himself a problem solver. And I would argue that there are tens of millions of Americans out there today who might not think of themselves as Rockefeller Republicans, but who in effect share those same instincts. They're tired of having everything filtered through ideological labels. They're not comfortable labeling themselves. They want to govern that that is as competent as it is compassionate. And leaders who can learn from their mistakes. And Nelson, the problem with the term Rockefeller Republican is it meant one thing in 1962 and another thing in 1972. Because Rockefeller himself, I mean, stop and think, you just isolate those years. He was governor of New York from 1959 until 1973. Those were amazingly turbulent years. Four terms. He got elected four terms. Yeah, four terms. The only governor in modern times elected four terms. The last term by the biggest margin ever. So clearly people, it's one of the things that he did that I don't think anyone could do today. Certainly no one is trying to in this election. Every four years he would start out 30 points behind. Didn't matter who he was running against. He'd be 30 points behind because people were sick of him. They were sick of his taxes. They were sick of his programs. They were sick of his enthusiasm. They were sick of, you know, they were sick of him. So in the third term, he runs for a third term in 1966. And he starts out 30 points behind. Anyone, doesn't matter who it is. Half a dozen names, he's behind them by 30 points. And it very quickly came down to this. Imagine a candidate's advisors today sitting around and saying, you've got to run an intellectual, you've got to run an educational campaign that convinces people that their taxes are being well spent. Can you imagine anyone doing that? Or any candidate taking that advice? But that's exactly what Nelson did. Go on YouTube and look at the commercials. The best campaign commercials in history because they were entertaining and they were informative and they were persuasive. There was the Talking Fish that said how much his wife had improved since Governor Rockefeller's Pure Water's anti-pollution program. Who doesn't love a Talking Fish? A billion dollar bond program to clean up the Hudson and New York Harbor. New York State spent more money fighting water pollution than the federal government did in 50 states. I mean, give you an idea of, but the same is true of education and housing. There was one great commercial. For 60 seconds, all you saw was an aerial shot of highway. You're moving along at a rapid rate. And in the background is this unmistakably tinny Hawaiian luau music. What's the connection? And at the end, you really, the voice says Governor Rockefeller's built enough roads to get to Honolulu and back. Well, guess what? And then he went out on the road and wherever he went, he took on people. And he said, look, this is what you're getting. If you don't want this level of government, fine, vote for the other guy. But don't believe that you can have it without paying taxes. And that is a message we don't hear very often these days. You can't have it both ways. You can't have it both ways. But more than that, not only can you not have it both ways, it was an argument for the positive effects of good government, competent, smart, future oriented, programmatically thoughtful government. And in area after area, after area of mass transit, housing, civil rights, women's rights, mandatory seat belts, reform, divorce laws. I mean, you just on and on and on. The first state arts council in America, the legislators hated it. They talked about toe dancing and demonstrated a general Philistinism that one associates with legislators, particularly in New York. And Rockefeller finally said, we traded judges for ballet dancers. But once the camel got its nose under the tent, guess what? Legislators were competing to announce grants to this orchestra and this museum. And he was, but again, that's his mother. Abby founded the Museum of Modern Art. Nelson collected with a passion, his press secretary at Albany once said out loud, I don't know if the American people are ready to elect a president who collects Picasso. The legislators, the legislators, he filled the executive mansion, built, you know, occupied since Samuel J. Tilden and someone say not refurbished in the intervening period. He filled the place with Pollock and Picasso and Motherwell and sculpture. He loved sculptures. And of course, the legislators would come and just, you know, one of them suggested that his favorite painting be referred to the select committee on pornography. They didn't know what to make of it. And then of course, he tore down Albany. 99 acres of downtown Albany where 3,000 people were then living to build the mall, the South Mall, a capital commensurate with what he believed to be the majesty of the empire state inspired by Brasilia in many ways. It was known as Brasilia on the Hudson. But it's there. And you can criticize it. Albany's gotten more than used to it. But what you can't deny is there are very few people then and there's almost no one today who had that level of imagination. It's one reason why he and Lyndon Johnson were in so many ways kindred spirits. Talk about that, because Lyndon Johnson held Rockefeller in the highest regards and in some ways I think he would have chosen Nelson Rockefeller as his heir apparent. Well, he did. More than anyone else. He did. The relationship went back a long ways. Back to the 1930s, it's not well known. Nelson wanted to buy a ranch in South Texas. He had five other homes and so why not add a ranch? He eventually settled for a ranch in Venezuela, bigger than Manhattan. But he couldn't get, he would come down every year to the King Ranch and met the Klebergs and of course met Congressman Kleberg and his hyperkinetic administrative assistant. And they seemed to have taken an instant shine to one another. I think they, however different their backgrounds, they recognized they had many of the same aspirations for the future and many of the same instincts about- We interjected at Kleberg's hyperkinetic assistant is Lyndon Johnson, a very young Lyndon Johnson, circa 1934 to 1937. I apologize. Yeah, no, no, no. And then I found a letter, really touching letter. LBJ had just come to the Senate. There was a famous incident in which a young Mexican Army veteran, I believe, had been killed and the local community frankly refused to bury him. Sheer ranked prejudice. And Johnson, this is long before he was a national figure, secured a burial slot at Arlington National Cemetery. And Nelson, who again had spent World War II and thereafter, following in love with Latin America, wrote to congratulate Johnson on what he had done. And the response, it was very revealing. It was very clear that there's some real respect and appreciation, instinctive appreciation. Later on, of course, Johnson was a master of the Senate and Sam Rayburn, as wonderful story, in 1959, Nelson went on a listening, not a listening tour, a speaking tour all over the country to see if he should run against Vice President Nixon in 1960. And he came to Dallas, and the only friend he had there was Sam Rayburn, who drove a couple hours to be there. He said, just to show Nelson, he had some friends in Texas, but the room full of Republicans were not particularly friendly then or ever, frankly. But one wonderful Mr. Rayburn story, Dwight Eisenhower had created a national commission on outdoor recreation and asked Lawrence Rockefeller, who Lady Bird Johnson, always referred to as Mr. Conservation. The wonderful story of Bess Abel, who many of you know, told me, LBJ used to say, where's Lady Bird? Is she out planning two bulbs with Lawrence Rockefeller again? So Nelson wasn't the only Rockefeller who was close to Vic Johnson's. But anyway, so Lawrence Rockefeller agreed to be chairman of this commission. But Congress, for whatever reason, provided no funding. Now, Sam Rayburn's friends were raising money to build a Sam Rayburn library, and they were a couple hundred thousand dollars short of their goal. And Nelson went to the Rockefeller Foundation and said, why this was a good idea? And so they took care of the $200,000. Well, then came this incident with Lawrence. Speaker Rayburn said, I'll take care of it. He climbed down from the podium, which was a very rare occurrence. And from the floor of the house made a pitch for a funding for this commission. And let's say the debt was canceled. But it's no doubt the speaker and then Senator Johnson felt a real affinity for Nelson as an activist. And I suspect like FDR and Truman, they thought he was in the wrong party. In 19, well, as soon as LBJ becomes president, even though Nelson's running against him in 1964, it never seems to have gotten personal. Like the wonderful story, he supported President Johnson on Vietnam. I think there was a little bit of a friendly competition because while LBJ was pursuing the great society nationally, Nelson in New York was pursuing his own great society. And he had the help of a Democratic legislature. Because of the Johnson landslide in 64, the Democrats took the legislature for the first time since the 1930s. And the irony is it's the best legislature Rockefeller ever had. It passed Medicaid, among other things. Now, Medicaid is the backbone in some ways, the apogee of the liberal drive in 20th century America. And it does illustrate Nelson's tendency to let enthusiasm get away with him. He bought the program right away. He made the program his own. He embraced it enthusiastically. And only then did he discover that it was in danger of bankrupting the state. And it turned out, God's honest truth, Jacob Javits said, Nelson, at the rate you're spending, you're gonna spend every dollar the federal government has set aside for Medicaid. Well, in fact, he spent more than every dollar the federal government has set aside for Medicaid. In 1968, I've talked to Mr. Temple, who was the man who smuggled Nelson Rockefeller in and out of the White House in April of 1968. Remember, in March, Rockefeller said, I'm not running. 10 days later, President Johnson withdrew from the race. Four days later, Dr. King was killed. Two weeks after that, Rockefeller was in Washington. He and Happy are brought to President Johnson in the White House for dinner and conversation. And it was very clear what President Johnson wanted was for Nelson to change his mind and get back into the race. And Nelson said at one point, Mr. President, I'm not the one you have to convince. It's her. Well, Happy Rockefeller described Lyndon Johnson to me as a magnificent animal, and she met it as a compliment. She and Lyndon Johnson hit it off during the famous blackout in New York in November of 1967. There's a telephone call made by President Johnson to the White House. The Rockefellers lived on the 12th and 13th floors of this apartment building, and they had trudged up through the dark to their home. And the call came through, and it's pure Johnson. It's just wonderful. He's calling to see if he can help. Is there anything Washington can do, et cetera, et cetera. And then, of course, it becomes more personal. And he said, you know, we got to get those whites on. Nelson, I don't care about seeing you in the light, but I want to see Happy, you know? And there was just this kind of very good natured, instinctive, family feeling. Nelson did get into the race two way Richard Nixon wins the nomination. Then, the sequel, after the Republican Convention, but before the Democratic Convention, Hubert Humphrey's emissaries call Nelson in Maine and ask him if he would run for vice president with Humphrey. If he would join a coalition government, a government of national unity, which, if you remember the times, would have had great appeal. And eventually, Humphrey himself called. Nelson could not bring himself to change parties, nor could he bring himself to take a job that he always regarded as, as he said, standby equipment. But the relationship with the Johnsons continued. In fact, the last weekend that they spent at Camp David when they could have had anyone or no one as their guests, they asked Nelson and Happy Rockefeller. And that weekend, they watched the Super Bowl. Remember, it was the contest between Joe Namath and the Jets and Johnny Unitis and the Baltimore Colts. A quick background, of course, in 1968, Spiro Agnew had stabbed Rockefeller in the back by coming out for Richard Nixon and then was rewarded with the vice presidency. I needless to say, the Rockefeller-Agnew relationship never recovered. And so I found the telegram, though the night of the Super Bowl, when the Jets upset the heavily favored Colts, it's a telegram from Camp David. Dear Ted, you can't win them all, signed Nelson. That's wonderful. You said that Nelson Rockefeller regarded the vice presidency as standby equipment, and yet he ends up being- Oh, and he hated it. And he hated every minute of it. He said, oh, actually, he wrote, I never wanted to be the vice president of anything. That was the title of his memoir. Well, you know, first of all, he was a Rockefeller. In his mind, he was the Rockefeller. You know, there were a number of others. He was the governor of New York at a time when that automatically made him a presidential prospect. You know, he and Gerald Ford had a very good personal relationship, genuinely. And I know it because I became close to President Ford these later years and we talked about this. At the same time, Ford and Ford knew, Ford said the vice presidency was the worst job he ever had. So he was sympathetic to his vice president. He had it for nine months. And hated it. Mostly because he couldn't say whatever was on his mind and he couldn't acknowledge the possibility that in fact he might become president. So he actually did his best. He tried to give Nelson some substantive things to do. But then of course the problem became he had in effect promised Nelson something that he shouldn't have promised. He in effect led Nelson to believe that he would be in domestic policy what Henry Kissinger was in foreign policy. And remember Kissinger was another Rockefeller creation, one of those experts. And the fact is Nelson should have realized early on that was impractical. Nelson wasn't completely honest with himself about his motives. I talked to a number of people who tried to talk him out of saying yes when President Ford called because they knew him. They knew he'd be miserable. They knew how miserable he'd been in the Eisenhower White House fighting John Foster dollars over Cold War policy. And after 20 minutes of this, one of them told me this story. Nelson said, look, everything you say is true. It makes perfect sense, but you don't understand. This is my last chance. So yes, he took the job because the country was in a constitutional crisis and he was a great patriot. But he also took the job because it was his last chance at the presidency. And then the problem became quite frankly, Gerald Ford had a chief of staff named Donald Rumsfeld. And as I often say, Donald Rumsfeld and Nelson Rockefeller were put on this planet to piss each other off. And in this they were richly successful. Rumsfeld to be honest, you know, Ford had been a legislator all his life. It's a different, as we've learned in recent years, legislators have unique talents that don't automatically transfer to the executive. I mean, Lyndon Johnson is a unique case. Someone who mastered both, you know, instinctively. Donald Rumsfeld had been with Ford in Congress and would be his tutor in some ways, getting him from a man of the hill to someone who thought like and communicated like a president. That didn't leave much room for Vice President Rockefeller. But it became quite personal. Rockefeller was convinced that Rumsfeld wanted to be on the ticket in his place in 76. And some of it sounds improbable, but there are a lot of improbable things that have been confirmed by people who were there. Some mornings, Nelson Rockefeller was not above walking by the Chief of Staff's office, opening the door, poking his head in and just shouting out to no one in particular, Rummy, you're never gonna be Vice President. And in that, he turned out to be prophetic. On the other hand, he hated the job, if he'd really hated Rumsfeld, he would have wished he had been Vice President. In 1975, belatedly, Ford awakens to the threat of the Reagan challenge. And his old buddies get together and say, look, we can't re-dominate you if you have Nelson Rockefeller on the ticket. And President Ford said publicly and privately that it was the one act of cowardice in his political life that he really regretted. So Rockefeller gets rejected in 64, he gets rejected in 68, and he gets rejected again after being Vice President in 74, in 76. And within two weeks, guess who's on the phone? Hubert Humphrey and George Meany to ask Rockefeller if he will change parties and consider being the Democratic nominee for president in 1976 in the event that a stalemate takes place at the convention in New York. Now, in the end, Jimmy Carter prevented that from happening, but it is remarkable that even at that point, now, you could imagine, you're gonna see why Nelson felt sort of all the surprise made, you know, never a bride. Publicly, he was the best of soldiers, and for the most part, privately. In fact, Gerald Ford was re-dominated narrowly, if you remember, in Kansas City with delegates that Nelson Rockefeller supplied in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. And without those delegates, without Rockefeller's personal intervention, it's questionable that Ford would have, and that's... Reagan would have been the nominee. Yeah, and that's something. Now, privately, and privately, he was the good soldier with one exception. I found one instance, Charles MacMathias, Senator, liberal Republican from Maryland, who recently passed away, recalled vividly, right the day after Rockefeller was dumped, he called the vice president to commiserate, to offer his sympathy and let him cry on his shoulder if he wanted to, and Rockefeller wasn't sort of crying, he went shoulder, but he did say, ah, he said, Mac, who wants to hang around with these shits anyway? An eloquent summation of his mood at the moment, but he never went public with it. Let me go back to 1964, because that's really a seminal moment for the Republican Party, where the party rejects moderate, Rockefeller, Republicanism for Barry Goldwater. It seems to be anomalous for Republicans to elect an ideologue who is not a viable national candidate. Conservatives tend to be just that, conservative with their choice. They tend to look for electability. Goldwater's not electable in that election, and frankly, Rockefeller is, why does it go to Goldwater? What happens? Goldwater was very frank. Goldwater never particularly wanted to be president. Goldwater literally had to be drafted by this movement. The Goldwater movement was always about much more than Goldwater. In fact, I'll tell you, it may surprise you, early on when it appeared that Goldwater really, really was serious about not wanting to run. There were people who got together and said, well, let's run John Tower as the face of American conservatism. That didn't happen, and Goldwater eventually was persuaded to run. Goldwater and JFK liked each other. They even fantasized about conducting a modern Lincoln and Douglas Day campaign where they would ride the same airplane around the country and get up and debate. And of course, JFK was utterly convinced the result of that. But on the other hand, Goldwater had a different goal. Goldwater's goal, and it helps to explain the emotionalism at the convention. Goldwater's goal was not for him to become president, but it was for people like him to take over the Republican Party. 10 days before the 1960 election between JFK and Richard Nixon, Goldwater called Thruston Morton, who was a Republican national chairman. And this is pure Goldwater. And he said, you know, it's, you know, Nixon should not waste a minute of his time in these last 10 days in the urban East, i.e. New York. I mean, Goldwater's view was going after the black vote was a total waste. It wasn't gonna happen, et cetera, et cetera. Nevermind the Dwight Eisenhower got 40% of the African-American vote in 1956. He said, he should spend his time in Illinois and Texas. And of course, being Goldwater, he couldn't leave it at that. He said, you know, I'd really like to win this election without New York. Then we could tell New York to kiss our ass and we could start a conservative party. Well, guess what? He got his wish. In 1964. But of course, he wasn't the only one who wished for logically, ideologically neat divisions. Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, thought he had an endorsement from Wendell Wookiee. And the idea was, after the election, there'd be a liberal party and there'd be a conservative party. No more of this, you know, fuzzy mix. So you could argue that Barry Goldwater, in effect, got his wish. Delayed. Arguably, it's a party even more conservative than Goldwater envisioned. We tend to forget, but of course, in his later years, Goldwater became quite outspoken on issues like gay rights. He was no friend of the religious right. He famously told Jerry Falwell to kiss his ass. And he became every liberal's favorite conservative in a lot of ways. Who knows how he would feel in today's Republican party? One thing we know is that today, Nelson Rockefeller is a man without a party, which in some ways is the fulfillment of his own doubts about whether he was a liberal or a conservative. Talk about his last years, Richard, and to this fading stars, right? It would be difficult. He went back to New York after the vice presidency, feeling somewhat bitter, but believing naively that he could just walk in and reassert leadership of the family, which had always been his. And guess what? In the intervening years, there's a whole new generation. The cousins, as they were known, that had grown up. And many of them were not willing to roll over for Uncle Nelson. Many of them disagreed with Uncle Nelson's politics. They disagreed with him on Vietnam. They disagreed with him about Attica. And frankly, they weren't happy than in his vice presidential confirmation hearings. Their net worth, that of everyone else in the family, had been explored at embarrassing length by Congress and the press. So there were a lot of friction, a lot of tension. To his credit, I think, after some rather bitter confrontations within the family, he decided to step back, change his ways, if you will. He spent the last year of his life trying to repair relations with his first family. He said, I made all my mistakes with my first family. And he certainly did not repeat that. He had two boys by happy, whom he thought the world of, and to whom he was very, very close. So that gave him real happiness. What people do not know, and I think one of the real sort of surprising things in the book, which obviously leads into the end, is his health had very seriously deteriorated. He had very serious heart conditions, a serious angina, which he did his utmost, typically to keep, absolutely secret. Happy knew it, a handful of other people knew it. One of the really joyous occasions for him, about three months before he died, happy, afraid that he might die at any time, went to Governor Hugh Kerry, who's a Democrat, locked in a tough re-election battle. And basically the upshot was, they decided to take the South Mall, this extraordinary kind of, well, Brasilia on the Hudson, and rename it the Nelson Rockefeller Empire State Plaza. And so that was arranged, and that took place in October, 1978. And it was said that the sound, Hugh Kerry and Nelson Rockefeller got up and heaped praise on one another. By the way, the poor Republican candidate for governor sat there in the corner, unmentioned by either, but it was said that the sound of brass balls clanking could be heard across the river in Troy. That was his last real public appearance, touchingly. He didn't want to be around for the last days of the campaign. So he called up his daughter Ann from his first marriage and said, you want to go to Mexico for the weekend? And for him it was a chance to revisit a place that had always given him great joy. In the 1930s, he had discovered Mexican art. Nelson Rockefeller loved every kind of art. We think of him as modern art, contemporary art, a friend of Picasso's, et cetera, et cetera, that's true. But his mother popularized folk art. He loved folk art. And indeed, go to San Antonio today. I know the director, the creator, former director is here and part of his legacy whips on because after his death, Ann bought several thousand, his entire collection of Mexican folk art, much of which was deeded to a new museum in San Antonio that has his name. So he had, the wonderful thing about that weekend was it suggested he had not lost the capacity for joy. And above all, the joy of being in the presence of one of his children and sharing this mutual interest. And two months later he was dead. His death was a matter of great speculation and a great scandal. What did you learn about his death upon writing this book? Two, there's 20 pages at the back of the book, which I'm embarrassed to tell you how much time I spent checking and rechecking and tracking down paramedics and other people, many of whom have never spoken until now because let's face it, I also knew that a lot of people would read that chapter before they read anything else. There are two historically significant questions about that night. I'm not interested in people journalism. To me, the story is the cover-up, the cover-up that was put together that unraveled. That night, I would argue, it didn't begin with Gary Hart. It began that night that the media redefined how it covered, quote, what was personal and what was public about the life of public officials. And that's a profound difference and I'm not at all sure it's for the better. But nevertheless, there it is. It began that night. The other question, the one historically significant question is could he have been saved? Had anything differently been done? Mike Nelson Rockefeller have lived and I came to the conclusion that the answer was no. Happy Rockefeller talked to me very candidly about that last day and that evening. He had gone to a fundraiser at the Buckley School where both of his boys were enrolled and he had gotten Henry Kissinger to come speak. And afterwards they went to the apartment, to the Rockefeller apartment, they had dinner. Now you have to remember, I said how close he was to his mother. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller had died the perfect death. She had a weekend with her extended family, wonderful time and the next morning died instantly of a massive heart attack. And Happy told me, she heard him pick up the phone, call his research assistant, Megan Marchek, said to meet him down at the townhouse where he, which he used as a midtown office. She said he didn't wanna die in front of the boys. He wanted his mother's death. He said to her before he walked out the door, the boys are fine. I love you very much, it won't be long. And three hours later, she was on her way to the hospital where he had just passed away. And she went into seclusion that week. The one person who visited her, who she would see, improbable as it seems, was Richard Nixon, who was in town to visit Trisha, who was about to have a baby. And he detoured to go to Poconaco and for two hours, he sat and told Happy what a great man Nelson was. And the only thing that can top that was at the memorial service a few days later in the front row, President Carter and Ford, Ford with tears streaming down his face, Happy and the boys. You know who else was in the front row? It was Lady Bird Johnson, Muriel Humphrey, Ethel Kennedy, and Coretta Scott King. And that said it all. Yeah, yeah. What is his legacy? His legacy, it seems to me, is a very healthy disregard for intellectually facile slogans that may provide short-term emotional gratification but do very little to address the substance of real problems. His legacy is summed up. He used to say the role of government is to convert problems into opportunities. He believed that. He spent a lifetime believing that and doing that. And he never lost his optimism. Maybe unrealistic optimism. He believed that there was no six-thing as a problem that couldn't be solved. Now, the downside of that is after two failed drug programs that emphasized the therapeutic side, he came up with a third drug program that stressed the punitive side and that in its original form, could put housewives in jail for giving friends diet pills. So he's complex. But now in this day and age, here we are 10 days out from an election that no one's very excited about in part because no one believes it's going to change very much, in part because too many people have concluded the opposite of every problem has a solution and we can count on our elected officials to address it. He seems to be like a pretty attractive alternative. I have to ask, you are sitting in what might be the only presidential library you have not been the director of. Elizabeth mentioned you. And I have no designs on your job. Thank you, thank you. That's all I wanted to hear. Can I, let me just say, Harry Middleton, the sainted Harry Middleton, it should be known, insiders know, was is always will be not only my role model, my mentor, my idea of what a presidential library director should be, but of other directors as well. I was a speech writer. I was a speech writer in Washington. I'd done a book on Herbert Hoover. I got a call from John Fawcett, a name some of you may recognize. Out of the blue, totally astonishing me, saying would you like to be director of the Hoover Library? Of course, I subsequently learned it was not a position for which there was a long line of applicants. But that's okay, that's fine. And I was thinking of all the reasons why this made no sense. And I said, well, but, you know, I'm a speech writer. He said, that's okay. Harry Middleton was a speech writer. And I thought, and I took, and I said, John, I don't even drive. He said, that's okay, Harry Middleton doesn't drive. And we went through all these lists of all the things Harry Middleton didn't do. And he left out all the things that Harry Middleton did do better than anyone in taking what could be, could be, a static archival warehouse and turning it into what I think President Johnson wanted it to be, a lively, dynamic classroom of democracy, constantly offering new things, new ideas, new programs and addressing both the historical and civic illiteracy of our culture. And I have said more than once that you are very much in the tradition of Harry Middleton than which there is no higher compliment. So thank you. Thank you, thank you, fair kind of you. And I will tell you, Richard, after Harry blazed that trail, you followed quickly thereafter and I certainly agree, Harry is number one and but you are very definitely in that second spot. So you have been the director of Hoover, Reagan, Ford and you've started the Dole Institute and the Lincoln Library. But the important thing, it's not the point that you start the Lincoln Library. The important thing in Illinois, success is measured by the ability to get out before the indictments. Right. You did that too. And I did that. Well done. But I must say, I mean, in the name of bipartisanship, it is totally bipartisan corruption in Illinois. We have two governors, one Republican and one Democrat in jail. So make of it what you will. What has been the most rewarding job in your career? I talked to a friend of Nelson Rockefeller and he didn't have many friends and I said, who were Nelson's friends? And he said, whoever he was working with at the moment. And I suppose you're tempted to say whatever, because you throw yourself, you're passionate about what you're doing. Not a day went by when I didn't pinch myself and say how incredibly lucky I was. If you love history and you love, dare I say, public history, not academic history, but history, whether it's on C-Span or in a museum exhibit or in a book, what better place to... I think for personal reasons, for obvious reasons, because I got to know the Fords as well as I did. That was very special. President Ford asked me to deliver the final eulogy at his funeral in Grand Rapids and then Mrs. Ford honored me by asking me to do the same for her. And a bit of presidential history, I'll never forget, if you've ever been in that situation, maybe you may have been called upon to speak at services and it's not easy under the best of circumstances and you're in a bit of a fog and Mrs. Ford and the children were sitting 20 feet in front of me and I didn't want to lose it. And I remember at one point, it's funny what you remember, I remember I heard a woman weeping, I mean, audibly weeping and I looked over in the direction and it was Rosalind Carter and I thought to myself, who would have thought in 1976 that this is how the story would end? And what does it say about the American people and our system and our ability to put partisan, you know, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were two great examples, certainly George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have joined the club. But I also think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have in addition to elder statesmen, statesmen, you know? Why do we have to wait until they're elder? Just a thought, you have covered and written eloquently on so many great historical figures. Who is the most indelible in your view? Well, of course, George Washington is. George Washington indeed, you could legitimately ask and I asked myself, do we need another book on George Washington? And it turned out we did because we can never know George Washington well enough. And unfortunately, don't quote me, but so much of what passes for modern scholarship that is designed to humanize Washington, winds up in my opinion, trivializing him. I mean, I don't wanna hear any more about his teeth or Sally Fairfax or, you know, I wanna know in the last 10 years of his life when he was most vulnerable, you know, because he's hearing his failing and his memory is not, when he's most human, when he's most accessible and he's called upon to make the greatest sacrifice of time and reputation. And that's his real greatness, it seems to me. And the ability to know when to walk away from power, because he'd already done it at the end of the revolution and he was determined to do it, he wanted to quit halfway through his first term, which if he done stopped to think that he would have turned the presidency into a kind of prime ministerial job, but he was persuaded from doing it, then God knows he didn't wanna run for a second term, he was finally persuaded he had to do that. So there was no question of a third term, but just stop and think, his talent for renunciation put limits on government, which the framers of the constitution intended, but couldn't be sure would actually be implemented. And so, you know, there are some people in history the closer you get, the more awe you feel. But you're still obliged to bring them to life, to humanize them. And I thought the last 10 years of his life was the best time to do that. In my opinion, Richard's book on Washington called Patriarch is the best biography of Washington. Mine is dog ear because I've read it so often. I would also strongly recommend that you read on his own terms, Richard's book. And if you haven't already gotten a copy, they will be for sale afterwards in the lobby, and they'll be in our bookstore signed by Richard. Richard, thank you for a delightful evening. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. So much.