by Gerard Colby
“Sure, it all fits,” said Nelson, elevating the worst prison riot in U.S. history to the status of an international conspiracy. “The prisoners’ demands transcended prison reform and had political implications,” he later explained.5
But the veil was too thin. The official investigating commission criticized Nelson’s refusal to be present at the scene when critical decisions were made involving a potential great loss of life. Attica, it determined, was, “with the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century … the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”6
There were political rewards. President Nixon, with whom Nelson had been in touch throughout the crisis, praised Nelson’s “courage.” Nixon’s rival had passed the test for many conservatives by answering definitively, if bloodily, the growing mood of revolt behind prison walls. “The assault on Attica was a moral disgrace,” admitted Nixon aide William Safire, “but politically he did what our people wanted.”7
POCANTICO’S WATERGATE SECRETS
To the uninitiated, Republican politics seemed topsy-turvy. Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal, appeared to liberals to be the warmonger on Vietnam, even the executioner of African Americans in his own state, while Richard Nixon appeared to be the would-be peacemaker.
This change in the Republican political spectrum alone should have indicated that Nixon’s choice of the New York governor to nominate him for a second term at the 1972 Republican convention was not merely the usual gesture of party unity. Thanks to Nelson’s move to the right, there was little gap to close between the Right and liberal wings of the party—at least no obvious gap. Nelson had demonstrated his willingness to shed much of his liberalism and move to the right to join the new Republican mainstream.
The Rockefellers showered $260,700 on the Republican campaign that year.8 Nelson personally ran Nixon’s campaign in New York State to give the president the biggest victory of any state in the Union. He traveled more than 30,000 miles to deliver 44 speeches in 33 cities to help Nixon.
Nelson had been a loyal member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, not because he liked Nixon, but because he agreed with most of the administration’s foreign policy initiatives—the invasion of Cambodia, the resumed bombings of North Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, and the increased bombings in the countryside and police repression of Vietnamese civilian “suspects” despite the My Lai massacre.* After all, his protégé, Henry Kissinger, was overseeing that policy and effectively neutralizing arch conservatives who considered Rockefeller anathema.
Kissinger’s ignorance of Latin America and Nixon’s hatred of any Kennedy legacy like the Alliance for Progress did have their fallout on Nelson, however. Cutbacks in foreign aid had triggered the Chilean cancellation of Nelson’s visit during his 1969 tour. The coincidental lecture at a June 1969 White House meeting of Latin American ministers by Chile’s foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, on North-South trade and financial inequities, left Nixon in a rage. When the minister explained that Latin America was sending back to the United States $3.80 for every dollar it received in U.S. aid, Nixon interrupted. The statistic must be wrong, the president said. The minister answered that his source was a study by a major American bank.
Kissinger seized the opportunity to appease his superior and to play on Nixon’s intolerance of such “Communist-leaning” liberal nationalist governments as Eduardo Frei’s in Chile. Nixon had taken Valdés’s comments as a personal insult, and Kissinger was eager to answer in kind.
The next day, Kissinger was staring Valdés down at the Chilean embassy. “Mr. Minister, you made a strange speech,” Kissinger opined. “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time.”
Valdés was astonished. “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South.”
“No,” Kissinger responded, “and I don’t care.”9
Nelson Rockefeller, however, did care. Frei had been a Rockefeller favorite, enjoying the backing of David’s Business Group for Latin America, whose members were the principal conduit for corporate and CIA funding of Frei’s 1964 presidential campaign against Salvador Allende.* Although he would back Nixon in overthrowing Frei’s leftist successor, again Allende, in 1973, Nelson’s loyalty to the president was being severely put to the test by the 1972 reelection campaign. Nixon did not, of course, dump his vice president and former Rockefeller-backer, Spiro Agnew. Agnew was useful to Nixon as a foil for attacks on his enemies, despite rumors that Agnew had been deeply involved in Maryland’s corrupt graft-taking political machine. Agnew was more to Nixon’s liking than was Nelson Rockefeller.
So were CIA veterans of the Guatemala and Bay of Pigs invasions for finding and plugging up leaks to the press and for carrying out illegal operations against Nixon’s long list of “enemies.” This “Plumbers Unit”—headed in the field by E. Howard Hunt—had as its first assignment the discovery of who was leaking intelligence documents revealing the hidden history of the Vietnam War. Wiretaps were placed on the phones of current and former staff members of the National Security Council (NSC). Break-ins were proposed to recover documents believed to be stored at the Rockefeller-funded Brookings Institution. When the New York Times was preparing to publish the Pentagon’s top-secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 (leaked to the newspaper by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst), Nixon was desperate. He had the FBI place taps on the home phones of NSC staff members who had been privy to the report, even Kissinger, a notorious leaker and the only senior adviser not openly enthusiastic about the Plumbers Unit.
It was the Kissinger wiretaps that caused Nixon the most concern. He had been warned that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would respond to the Justice Department’s request for evidence against Ellsberg by providing logs of the illegal wiretaps on Kissinger. Hoover might even use the wiretap summaries and documents to bribe Nixon to keep his job, as he had previous presidents. Therefore, Nixon wanted Hoover’s assistant director and rival, William Sullivan, the FBI official in charge of transcripts of the phone taps, to destroy the evidence. Meanwhile, Hunt’s team of Cuban CIA operatives was sent in to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to try to get information that would damage Ellsberg’s credibility. Ellsberg had learned of Nixon’s secret B-54 bombing of Cambodia, nuclear threats against the Soviet Union over Hanoi’s refusal to bend to his will, and Kissinger’s studies on mining Haiphong Harbor; Nixon was worried that Ellsberg might be believed when he outlined Nixon’s strategy of escalation, not peace, in Indochina.
Through all this, Nelson Rockefeller kept up his close relationship with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger provided free NSC office space for Nelson’s assistant, Nancy Maginnes (Kissinger’s future wife), in the Executive Office Building.10 Nelson liked to keep a New York State Office in Washington. But never before had he such access to the inner sanctum of the NSC—at least, not since he had served on the NSC himself. In fact, according to one NSC official, Kissinger had such trust in his mentor that since 1970 he had been smuggling his most sensitive national security documents out of the White House to Pocantico, for Nelson’s safekeeping.11
Kissinger had reason to violate normal security procedures. He had to protect himself from Nixon’s orders to destroy evidence and to rewrite history. Kissinger, of course, had his own version of history, and he would use the documents to write his own memoirs. It was precisely Kissinger’s penchant for keeping his own logs for such obvious purposes that inspired Nixon, in self-defense, to set up the less time-consuming audiotaping system that ultimately destroyed his career.
Nothing better illustrated the danger of Nixon’s duplicity, however, than his backing off from Kissinger’s negotiated and approved peace accord of October 1972. Kissinger had traveled to Saigon in August to manipulate South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van
Thieu into silence during the election campaign by promising escalation of the war after the election; however, Kissinger was negotiating an agreement with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho that secretly promised a coalition government. Withdrawals of U.S. ground troops continued, and an end to the U.S. draft by July 1973 was announced.
Nixon appeared to many Americans as a peacemaker who wanted détente rather than war with the Communist nuclear powers. His trip to China was seen by most as a gesture for world peace, when in fact it was an effort to widen the split between China and the Soviet Union, to increase Soviet insecurity about its relations with the United States, and to demonstrate to North Vietnam its isolation and the fickleness of its supposed Communist allies. Polls showed that the American people believed that their president was doing everything reasonable to end the war. But they also showed Nixon that 47 percent opposed any coalition government, the very thing Kissinger was secretly pushing for. Kissinger was pledging a de facto recognition of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the National Liberation Front (NLF) as an equal player with Thieu. The North Vietnamese asked only for elections and an international election commission, something the Saigon regime had never accepted. Thus, after telling the world “peace is at hand” in late October, Kissinger found himself and his reputation out on a limb after Nixon’s reelection: The president reneged, backing Thieu’s rejection of the election commission and opting instead for the Christmas 1972 bombing campaign.
Nelson publicly backed the bombing that followed. But the public’s distaste for the war (by now a majority of those polled) guaranteed that Congress would cut off funds for the war in early 1973. Nixon knew that it would, and he hoped to bring North Vietnam to its knees before then. Kissinger knew it also. So did Nelson Rockefeller. But when Hanoi did not surrender, Nixon opted to end the bombing before Congress acted, reopened negotiations in Paris, and declared victory.
The generals in Hanoi, Saigon, and the Pentagon were not fooled, especially when Nixon, announcing the end of the war, declared that the United States stood behind the Saigon regime as the only legitimate government in South Vietnam. Not only would Hanoi and the NLF in the South not accept that declaration, Saigon’s soldiers either would not, or could not, fight well enough to protect Thieu’s rule. North Vietnam and its NLF allies had no reason to surrender. The war would continue, and Nixon would not be able to keep his promise of continued U.S. military support to Thieu that his Christmas bombing had seemed to make credible.
Watergate had made it impossible for Nixon to do so. If his hush payments to Howard Hunt’s Cuban team ever became public—and there was every likelihood that they would—he could not resume bombing without spurring Congress to open a full investigation of his possible misuse of presidential powers, including his authorization of illegal wiretaps, which, in turn, could have revealed his secret bombing of Cambodia and his role in Watergate itself (particularly his obstruction of justice by trying to use the CIA to get the FBI to drop its investigation of the Watergate burglary). Nixon’s own secret wars and illegal activities doomed any chance he had of winning the Vietnam War. If the choice was between saving Thieu’s presidency or his own, the decision was obvious.
Kissinger was certainly apprised of this situation, and given his close relationship to Rockefeller, Nelson probably was, too. Pocantico hid Kissinger’s secrets, one of the gravest of which was Kissinger’s knowledge of the Plumbers Unit and the White House tapes. Later, during Nelson’s confirmation hearings as vice president, charges would be made that Rockefeller was aware of the tapes and their contents, but a key witness from Kissinger’s NSC staff, who had earlier made such a claim, waffled before Congress, his memory failing. And Nelson denied everything.12
THE GREAT COMMISSIONS
Richard Nixon was unusually acquiescent to Nelson Rockefeller after his reelection. Given the animosities between the two men in the past, this behavior was unexpected, even considering Nelson’s help in the campaign. Yet, when Nelson (his excitement about the national arena rekindled by his involvement in a winning campaign and the warm support he at last received from Republican audiences) approached Nixon in December 1972, Nixon did not reject a request for a presidential endorsement of a vague National Commission on Critical Choices—chaired by Nelson, with members selected by Nelson. As governor, Nelson had started a Commission on the Role of a Modern State in a Changing World, but had “discovered” that New York’s problems were really inseparable from the world’s. A national commission was needed, he told the president.
White House aide John Ehrlichman immediately saw the political potential for Nelson and suggested that the commission be a federal project, so that there could be some White House oversight. No, answered Nelson, a bipartisan commission would have more credibility and could command more resources if it were not part of the government.
Nixon acquiesced. The fall of John Connally as treasury secretary and architect of Nixon’s “New Economic Policy” had already been forced by Rockefeller allies, Connally later charging that he had been “stabbed in the back” by Kissinger, who persuaded Nixon to abandon Connally’s xenophobic trade and monetary policies.13 With Watergate revelations looming, Nixon needed friends, not enemies, among the Rockefellers.
Lyndon Johnson was Nelson’s first choice for cochair of the commission. The Rockefellers had kept up their friendship with the Johnsons. Nelson and Happy had spent the last weekend of Johnson’s presidency with him at Camp David and “had a good time,” Nelson recalled. “Happy conjectured as to whether everything said in the room was being recorded. She was fabulous.”
Since Johnson’s retirement, they often visited the LBJ Ranch, the last patch of the world Johnson could control, issuing orders to field hands like he had to White House officials. The Perdernales River Valley, a beautiful oasis filled with wild flowers that had once been the home of the Comanche Indians, had caught Nelson’s fancy. He credited Happy with getting Lyndon to slow down, and the former president tried futilely to loosen up; he even grew his silver locks long like the peaceniks he loathed. But he agonized over the course of the war navigated by Kissinger and Nixon or over what Nixon’s “New Federalism” was doing to his Great Society programs by requiring local antipoverty projects to be approved by local politicians.
The last time they had seen Johnson was in June 1972, when they joined him and Mrs. Johnson in a round of golf. When it came time to go, the two couples drove out together in a golf cart to the Rockefellers’ plane. Nelson sat up front with Lady Bird and overheard Johnson’s last remark. “Happy, I’ll never see you again.”14
On January 21, 1973, the day after Nixon took the oath of the presidency for a second term, a cease-fire was declared in Vietnam. Nixon finished the day of celebration by announcing his new plan to end the Great Society.
Nelson understood the political significance for his own future. He immediately set up a meeting at the LBJ Ranch for the evening of January 23, to ask Johnson to cochair his Critical Choices commission.
It would have been a brilliant move. Johnson would have provided a bipartisan alliance and an entry to the conservative Southern Democrats that John Connally was trying to deliver to Nixon. But on January 22, fate struck down Nelson’s plan. Johnson, alone in his bedroom, suffered a fatal heart attack. Nelson’s last great hope to rally Middle America behind him was dead.
Johnson’s death was also a terrible personal blow, the worst since another stalwart ally, Adolf Berle, suffered a fatal massive cerebral hemorrhage at his East Nineteenth Street home in February 1971. The town house in which Berle had entertained and counseled some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful men for half a century closed its doors to history.
Then, in February 1973, Nelson’s brother, Winthrop, died. Nelson and his brothers were confronted with the fact of their own mortality.
So now Nelson speeded up his efforts to achieve his lifelong goal: the presidency of the United States. Encumbered by Nixon’s protectionism and no longer in the grip of
his youthful passion for Latin America since his disastrous tour in 1969, he began to pull in IBEC’s horns. Paring off losing subsidiaries and consolidating the winners became the order of the day. Faced with Nixon’s import quotas on Far Eastern textiles, Nelson and brother John 3rd sold off IBEC’s fabric factories in Thailand, not an imprudent move considering how badly the war was going. Patriotism in Latin America was also taking its toll, not to mention the potential for scandal in Brazil. IBEC sold its holding in Deltec International’s Brazil Investment Bank (BIB).
The Amazon basin would still become one of the great cattle-raising and mining areas in the world—at the expense of the rain forest and its Indian people, but, besides retaining the million-acre Fazenda Bodoquena just south of the basin’s watershed, the Rockefellers would leave that to Augusto Antunes, J. Peter Grace, and their associates on the board of Brascan, the Canadian holding company. Brascan bought Deltec’s two ranching companies and the Swift-Armour Brazilian meat-packing subsidiary. IBEC’s 19 percent holding in Deltec’s BIB was sold to Walther Moreira Salles’s group for a handsome profit: a $25,000 initial investment in 1957 to hire a staff for Fundo Crescinco’s management firm had yielded a company that was sold for $10 million;15 IBEC, even after discounting for later advances, marked up a net return of $2 million on its books.
Nelson lost nothing politically with these withdrawals, either. Old allies took up the slack and earned handsome profits, men like Moreira Salles, the Klebergs of Texas, Antunes, Grace, and Lewis B. Harder (Brascan director and head of Molybdenum Corporation, Moreira Salles’s partner in a rare metals mining venture in Minas Gerais, Cia. Brasíliera de Metalurgía e Mineração [CBMM],16 and in the search for cassiterite in Rondônia region17 near the lands of the besieged Cintas Largas and Surui Indians). Deltec’s chairman, Swift in-law A. Thomas Taylor, remained in leadership, along with Deltec president Clarence Dauphinot, the man who first gave D. K. Ludwig a stake in Brazil by selling him 25 percent of St. John d’el Rey, the owner of the massive Aguas Claras iron lode in Minas Gerais. Ludwig’s holding in St. John d’el Rey, in turn, had by now given him 19 percent of MBR, the Brazilian firm that brought together still other Rockefeller associates—investment banker Leo Model (chairman of St. John d’el Rey), Antunes, and Hanna Mining—to lock up control of Minas Gerais’s iron riches in 1971.
