On His Own Terms; A Life of Nelson Rockefeller

xxxiv, 842, [4] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index. DJ has some wear, soiling, and edge wear. Small red dot on bottom edge. Richard Norton Smith (born 1953) is an American historian and author specializing in U.S. presidents and other political figures. In the past, he worked as a freelance writer for The Washington Post, and worked with U.S. Senators Edward Brooke and Bob Dole. Smith's first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984); The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986); and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993). His 1997 biography of Robert R. McCormick, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick received the Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1998. In 2014 Smith published On His Own Terms: A life of Nelson Rockefeller. Smith took 14 years to write the book and said that he spent about $250,000 of his own money on the project. In an interview with C-SPAN, he said that Random House provided an advance of $50,000 for the book. In October, 2003 he was appointed the first Executive Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a four-building complex in Springfield, Illinois. In 2009, Smith was invited by the US Congress to be one of two historians addressing it on the two-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (July 8, 1908 - January 26, 1979) was an American businessman and politician. He served as the 41st Vice President of the United States under President Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977, and previously as the 49th Governor of New York. He also served in the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. A member of the wealthy Rockefeller family, he was also a noted art collector, as well as administrator of Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller, a Republican, was often considered politically liberal and progressive, or in other cases moderate. He successfully altered the political platform of the Republican Party just before the 1960 Republican Convention in what is termed the Treaty of Fifth Avenue. In his time, liberals in the Republican Party were called "Rockefeller Republicans". As governor of New York from 1959 to 1973 his achievements included the expansion of the State University of New York, efforts to protect the environment, the building of the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza in Albany, increased facilities and personnel for medical care, and creation of the New York State Council on the Arts. After unsuccessfully seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968, he served as Vice President under President Gerald R. Ford. Ford had been the first vice president to be appointed under the provisions of the 25th Amendment, and ascended to the presidency following the August 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon over the Watergate Scandal, selecting Rockefeller as his replacement. Rockefeller did not join the 1976 Republican national ticket with Ford, marking his retirement from politics. Ford later selected then-Senator Bob Dole from Kansas for his new running mate but ultimately lost the election to Democrat Jimmy Carter and his running mate, Walter Mondale. Rockefeller remains, as of 2017, the last Vice President who declined to seek re-election. As a businessman he was president and later chairman of Rockefeller Center, Inc., and he formed the International Basic Economy Corporation in 1947. Rockefeller assembled a significant art collection and promoted public access to the arts. He served as trustee, treasurer, and president of the Museum of Modern Art, and founded the Museum of Primitive Art in 1954. In the area of philanthropy, he founded the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 1940 with his four brothers, and established the Am.