The Most Interesting Man in the World - Washington Free Beacon
Enoch Powell once remarked, “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure. ” Nelson Rockefeller, so unlike the gloomy Powell, would have agreed, and said so in his way. A few weeks later, Rockefeller was found dead in his New York townhouse. But how could the four-term governor of one of the most powerful states in the union, and the one-term vice president of the most powerful state in the world, think of himself as a “has-been”. Rockefeller’s sense of failure sprang from one fact: that the top job—president—didn’t grace his résumé. And, after all, “when you think of what I had,” he said, “what else was there to aspire to. ”. Rockefeller’s relentless and unfulfilled effort to reach the White House makes his life one of the most fascinating in American history. Richard Norton Smith’s new biography, On His Own Terms , is a magisterial guide to that life and politics of which it was a part. Smith’s own enthusiasm for his subject—he was a part of a pro-Rockefeller delegation at the 1968 Republican convention—makes for an admiring portrait, but one that is never over-sympathetic or lacking in critical judgment. This is in part because Rockefeller’s life is so. Source: freebeacon.com
