The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  All around, on the surrounding acres of the estate (collectively, the Rockefellers are the biggest private propertyholders in Westchester), each Rockefeller has his own house, each with its own pool, own tennis courts. Jay Rockefeller’s mother, the former Blanchette Ferry Hooker, inherited two fortunes of her own—one from the Ferry Seed Company, and another from the Hooker Electrochemical Company. Her father was so keen on tennis for his four daughters that he hired a private tennis professional to come and live on the Hookers’ Greenwich estate. Jay Rockefeller’s father landscaped his share of Pocantico Hills so that, even though there are other houses nearby—even a fair-sized town—he can stand at any point on his property and have an uninterrupted view of woods, river, hills, and sky. He does not like to have other structures mar his vista, much less billboards that urge him to chew Mail Pouch Tobacco. Why, then—it is impossible not to ask—when they could have so much else, are the young Rockefellers here, in this godforsaken place? And, while here, why are they doing what they’re doing? Even John D. Three doesn’t seem quite to understand. At his son’s Pocahontas County picnic, Jay asked his father, “Dad, what do you think of what I’m doing down here?” His father looked briefly bewildered, and then replied, “Well, I think what you’re doing is very nice—but does it have to be in politics?”

  Jay Rockefeller shrugs, and says, “My father represents a set of values that just don’t have much meaning any more.”

  The Rockefellers have long had, as a family, a strong sense of mission. They have demonstrated a crusading spirit which—with the various Rockefeller foundations, grants, restorations, and other benefactions—has seemed aimed specifically at trying to set the ills of the world to rights. They have become America’s arch-do-gooders. Whereas the Ford Foundation, for example, was unabashedly created as a mechanism to help the heirs of Henry Ford escape huge inheritance taxes, the Rockefeller family philanthropies have always seemed sincerely more high-minded, designed to help the needy and deserving. It has been said that the Rockefellers have approached philanthropy this way out of a sense of penance and a Protestant sense of guilt over the inequities dealt out by the first John D. Rockefeller in the process of making himself the richest man in the world. Though the first John D. enjoyed throwing shiny new dimes to poor children when they knelt begging in his path, there were a great many other people who crossed his life who met with nothing short of disaster. And, considering the respectability and eminence and lofty worthiness of today’s Rockefellers, it is hard to believe that barely a generation ago Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager of New York’s venerable Gardiner clan, gathered her family about her and said—referring specifically to the five Rockefeller brothers—“No Gardiner will ever play with the grandchildren of a gangster.” Today, of course, the Rockefeller name is associated with industrial and banking efficiency and integrity, with civic rectitude and duty, with the improvement of international relations and the human condition in general, and with vast patronage of the arts, medicine, and science.

  At the same time, there is said to be another side to the Rockefeller coin—and coin is something the Rockefellers have much of—which is less apparent, yet far more concentrated, far less desirable, even sinister. There is a theory, more widely held than most people realize, that the Rockefellers want nothing more nor less than to divide up the entire world between various members of their family. They want in fact to be kings, controllers of all they survey, and are systematically nibbling away at this planet’s real estate until one day it will all belong to them. One of the problems young Jay Rockefeller faced in his campaign for the governorship of West Virginia is that he has been cited as one of the key figures in the international Rockefeller conspiracy to rule the world. In fact, his opponents in the state actually circulated literature to this effect. To the easily frightened, this is a frightening notion.

  Among the items supporting the conspiracy theory are these: Nelson Rockefeller, as governor of New York, has control of that state. Uncle Nelson, furthermore, has developed large landholdings in Venezuela, giving him more than a small amount of leverage in that country, and elsewhere in South America. Uncle Winthrop, in the meantime, was until recently governor of Arkansas, is still a political force there, and a large landholder.

  Uncle Laurance has concentrated his efforts on developing large resort hotels occupying considerable acreage in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. New Rockefeller resort tentacles have been stretching out elsewhere in the South Pacific. Uncle David, the best friend one could possibly have at the Chase Manhattan Bank (since he’s chairman of it), is not only an awesome power in Wall Street but one of the two or three most powerful commercial banking figures in the world. David has also spread his interests to include the film and entertainment industry. Father John D. Three, while his main thrust has been in the direction of philanthropy, has also been a key figure behind, in addition to other things, the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia. And now with young Jay making a bid to take over West Virginia—well, conspiracy or no, it is certainly true that Rockefellers have spread their activities across a great deal of the earth’s territory.

  But people who know young Jay Rockefeller merely laugh at this sort of talk. Jay, they point out, has always been an intensely public-spirited young man. He has also, from early boyhood, wanted desperately to be something other than a rich man’s son, the fourth-generation bearer of a celebrated name. He has wanted to succeed—indeed, to be famous—in his own right. “Anybody who goes into politics has to have a pretty big ego,” says one of his friends, “and I’m sure Jay’s is one of the biggest around. His ego gives him self-confidence, makes the guy positive he’ll win at whatever he sets out to do. At the same time, his ego doesn’t show—the way, for example, the Kennedy ego always showed and was vaguely offensive. He’s a whole new kind of today politician.”

  This ego, and this ambition, Jay Rockefeller doubtless inherited from his mother. Even Jay’s wife, who knows her mother-in-law well, admits that there is more of Blanchette Rockefeller in Jay than there is of John D. Three. Blanchette Rockefeller, for example, was the first distaff Rockefeller to merit her own paragraph in Who’s Who, where she is listed as an “organization executive,” in connection with her many trusteeships—of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Community Service Society, the Brearley School, Vassar College, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and the New York Philharmonic. It is from his mother, too, that Jay gets his hail-fellow personality, and his natural athletic ability—neither of which John D. Three possesses. Neither mother nor son is willing to sit back and just be a Rockefeller, a fat cat, and there are moments when Jay Rockefeller seems actually embarrassed by the name he bears. “Damn it, it’s in songs!” he says. (“… And if I never had a dime, I’d be rich as Rockefeller.…”) And not long ago, caught short of cash in a Washington restaurant, Jay Rockefeller tried to pay his bill with a personal check. The waiter refused to believe he was who he said he was, and only a helpful friend with a credit card averted the possibility that the red-faced Jay might have been sent into the kitchen to wash dishes. As a bachelor, living in Washington, he also developed a cynical approach to the girls he dated. “I’d always have to ask myself, with each new girl, is she going out with the name, the money, or the guy?” he says.

  Jay Rockefeller had spent no more than three years as a Harvard undergraduate when the urge to make something special of himself overtook him and, without graduating, he took off for Japan for three years of study at the International Christian University in Tokyo. Here he worked as an English instructor and—a language whiz—became fluent in both reading and writing Japanese. He then returned to Harvard, graduated with a degree in Far Eastern affairs and languages, and went on to Yale to study Chinese.

  Like many other young Americans during the early days of the Kennedy Administration, Jay Rockefeller became excited about the work the Peace Corps was doing. He joined the Corps in the summer of 1962, becoming a special assistant to the director, Sar
gent Shriver, and, appropriately, working as a recruiting officer for Peace Corps posts in the Far East. (Of all the Kennedy clan he is said still to admire Shriver the most, though Jay is too politic to say so.) A year later, he moved on to the State Department, again concentrating on Asian affairs. During these Washington years, Jay Rockefeller lived—with his friend Bill Wister (of the very proper Philadelphia Wisters)—in a handsome town house on Volta Place with a heated pool behind it and a park in front of it where Jay and Bill and their friends played tennis and touch football on weekends. While there, Jay himself gained something of a reputation. He was known as a fellow who would take one girl to a party, meet another one there, and—with no more than an offhand invitation to the second girl to visit “the family shack”—whip her off to Volta Place in his XK–E, after quickly phoning Bill Wister to tell him to get lost. “In those days,” says one girl who dated him, “even though it was very clear that he knew a lot about the Orient, he was so cocky and vain and arrogant that—well, if he hadn’t been so good-looking and a Rockefeller besides—I’d have hated him. In fact, I think I did hate him.”

  Inwardly, Jay Rockefeller still felt restless, unfulfilled. At one point, after meeting Maxwell Taylor and hearing about the Green Berets, Jay Rockefeller excitedly proposed to his friend and fellow Peace Corpsman Ray La Montaigne that they should both—since they had never been in the service—join the Marines. Both men marched down to the recruiting office to enlist, where they were promptly informed that La Montaigne, at twenty-seven, was too old, and that Jay Rockefeller, at six feet six inches, was too tall.

  It was another friend of Jay’s—Charlie Peters, now editor of the Washington Monthly—who first directed Jay’s attention to West Virginia. Peters, who admits that he is a frustrated politician and would himself have liked to run for governor of his native state (“But I didn’t have the money”), was an active worker in both the John and Bobby Kennedy campaigns. Peters had made Jay Rockefeller the godfather of his son, and had said to him, in effect, “If you ever want to go into politics, start in West Virginia because if you can accomplish anything in West Virginia you can do it anywhere.” At that point, Jay Rockefeller’s knowledge of West Virginia had been, like his father’s, pretty much limited to the luxurious confines of the Greenbrier. He had never been treated to the desolate reaches of the northwestern part of the state, around such Appalachian communities as Morgantown. At Charlie Peters’s suggestion, Jay Rockefeller took an aerial tour of West Virginia, where, among other shocks and surprises, he first witnessed the rape that has been committed upon much of the state by strip-mining.

  Strip-mining is the cheapest and hence the most profitable—but not the only—way to extract coal from the West Virginia hills. Literally whole tops and sides of mountains are plowed aside by bulldozers to open up the coal veins. Once the coal has been removed, the slashes are abandoned. Strip-mining requires no particular engineering skill, and practically anybody capable of driving a tractor can do it. Leases to strip-mine from local property owners, who don’t understand much about leases to begin with, are easily and cheaply obtained. The physical results to the countryside are, in the meantime, irreparable. Rains falling on the exposed mountainsides create mudslides that descend to clog and pollute the rivers. Attempts to reforest the stripped regions have proved failures; not enough soil is left for a tree to put down roots. As one ecologist succinctly put it, “It’s a tough job to try to rebuild a mountain.” The disastrous flood of early 1972 was not a direct result of strip-mining, but it dramatized the haste and ruthlessness, and lack of foresight, with which men have gone after coal in West Virginia.

  Land after it has been strip-mined is virtually without value, and what has happened to much of West Virginia is that it has simply been lost beyond reclaiming. The idea of saving what was left of West Virginia immediately appealed to Jay Rockefeller’s crusading spirit. This was in 1964, and Jay Rockefeller’s first job in the state was with an antipoverty program called Action for Appalachian Youth, where he was assigned to remote Emmons County.

  “One of the first things I discovered down here,” Jay Rockefeller says, “is that there are two things rural West Virginia people really get excited about—high school sports and local politics.” Democrats are in the majority in the state—though that doesn’t mean the Democrats will always vote that way—and so Jay Rockefeller turned his back on his family’s Republican tradition and became a Democrat. He also became a high school sports fan, and in his political campaigns—first for the West Virginia House of Delegates, next for secretary of state, then for governor—he has been known to take in as many as two high school basketball games an evening. At these games he appears, stands up, waves, and gets cheered (and of course sometimes booed), and makes a little joke about his height and the advantage it gives him in getting a ball into a basket.

  One of the girls Jay Rockefeller had been more or less steadily dating was Sharon Percy, seven years younger than he and the daughter of a Republican senator. When Sharon Percy’s twin sister, Valerie, was brutally murdered in a still-unsolved crime—while Sharon slept in the bedroom next door—Jay Rockefeller hurried to Sharon’s side. His support during and after this tragedy is really what brought them together, and they were married in the spring of 1967. Sharon moved to West Virginia, became a Democrat, and began helping her husband stuff envelopes, lick stamps, and tack up posters on rural telephone poles.

  The young Rockefellers’ life style in West Virginia has been simple, folksy, and old-shoe. Both Rockefellers insist that they live simply by preference, and not for political reasons. Though beautiful and wealthy, both Rockefellers bend over backward not to be ticked off as rich snobs. They have made a few mistakes. As any other young society girl might do upon moving to a new city, Sharon Rockefeller joined the Charleston Junior League, traditional meeting place for “nice” people. This drew some criticism and, at Jay’s suggestion, Sharon now underplays her membership in the League (though she still maintains it). She has since preferred to concentrate her efforts on an organization called Mountain Artisans which recruits women from West Virginia hamlets and teaches them to stitch New York–bought fabrics into countrified quilts and pillows and patchwork quilts and bodices. Not long ago Sharon Rockefeller brought a fashion show of mountain-made clothes to Bonwit Teller’s in New York, where a number of Manhattan’s so-called Beautiful People snapped them up eagerly. (“Just think, they’re made by genuine poor people!” one woman cooed.) Mountain Artisans boutiques have been set up in other stores in other cities.

  The young Rockefellers’ life style has been called phony. “They’re just like two little plastic people,” one acquaintance says, “little windup Judy dolls programmed to turn on with their simplicity and sweetness whenever you push a button. It’s just done to get votes.” Well, perhaps, but so far it has appeared to work, and what is the point of being in politics if not to get votes? The Rockefellers’ house is in the fashionable Loudon Heights section of Charleston, and is a traditional ranch-style affair. Originally it had only two bedrooms. (Again, the contrast with the Kennedy style is a marked one; Bobby Kennedy, when he moved to New York to run for the Senate, established himself in a posh apartment in the United Nations Plaza, probably the most expensive address in Manhattan.) Since his marriage, Jay Rockefeller’s house has grown somewhat larger. “I’ve kept adding on,” he explains. “When I bought it, I didn’t expect to get married, and when I got married I didn’t expect to have two children.” But the Rockefellers are quick to point out that their house in Loudon Heights is surrounded by many houses that are larger and more grand. Though comfortably staffed (two maids) and decorated (by Mrs. Henry “Sister” Parrish), breakfast is in the kitchen with Sharon serving cornflakes out of a box. When the Rockefellers entertain, it is nearly always political (“We really never do any social entertaining at all,” Sharon says), and inevitably informal. Sharon Rockefeller herself is a fair cook—her thick broccoli soup is a house favorite—and luncheons by
the backyard pool usually consist of her soup and plates of homemade sandwiches, served with pitchers of lemonade and beer.

  Even more wary of the political stigma that might be attached to his money and name (“I honestly don’t think the name Rockefeller means that much down here”), Jay Rockefeller is concerned lest he be branded a Northern carpetbagger, using West Virginia merely as a stepping-stone to something bigger—namely Washington, D.C. For this reason he turned down a chance to run for the United States Senate from West Virginia, and chose the governorship as his target instead, promising, if elected, to serve two full terms, or the most that the state law allows. “I don’t want that New York image,” he says frankly. Both Rockefellers have been beseeched to appear on such talk shows as Dick Cavett’s and David Frost’s, but have refused “because I’m not running for a national office; I’m running for a West Virginia office.” And, not long ago, a New York journalist was following one of the Rockefellers’ exhausting campaigning trips through West Virginia (trips conducted in Chevy station wagons, not limousines). The journalist happened to be wearing a Bill Blass suit (slightly nipped waist, slightly flared trousers), and Gucci shoes. Jay Rockefeller suddenly turned to the journalist and said, “Look—don’t take this personally, but would you mind not standing so close to me? I mean, you look just a little bit too New Yorky, if you know what I mean—and that could really hurt me here. It’s what I’m trying to get away from, see?” Also, until recently, Jay and Sharon Rockefeller systematically turned down interviews from national magazines. Asked why the change of policy had come about, Sharon Rockefeller gave a disarmingly honest answer: “Well, perhaps if we’re nice to reporters, they’ll write nice things about us.” She may be right, because the Rockefellers quickly got an affectionate national press.