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On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 130; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/polq.12429

1538-165X

Gerald Benjamin,

Academic Freedom and Politics

A smart, enthusiastic undergraduate visited to discuss her term paper topic for PLS 301 State Government. I pointed to a 45-year-old campaign picture on the wall and asked, “By the way, who was that guy?” She had no clue. Even though I was sitting under a banner hanging from my office ceiling, also dating to the 1970 campaign, that read “Governor Rockefeller for Governor.” The larger-than-life governor, who won office in the year I entered high school and was still serving when I joined the SUNY faculty, was in 2015 unidentifiable by a political science major on a campus of the university that was his single greatest achievement. Sic transit gloria mundi. But maybe not. Not, at least, if your life and works attract the attention of Richard Norton Smith, the accomplished biographer whose capstone volume on Nelson Rockefeller rivetingly captures the essence of the public and private man and his times in New York, the nation, and the world. This work, 14 years in the making, relies on thousands of pages of primary documents, countless interviews, and files compiled by earlier Rockefeller biographer Cary Reich (whose untimely death left his work incomplete), all supplemented by a thorough consideration of published sources.