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Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma
The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism
Marsha E. Barrett (Author)
9781501776236
Hardback, published 15 August 2024
400 pages, 16 b&w halftones - 16 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm, 0.907 kg
Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma recounts intraparty differences over civil rights in the years before and after 1964. Meticulous. A timely, invigoratingly original intervention into our historical understanding of the modern Republican Party. Offers a clever way of considering the most important figure in recent Republican history: Mr Trump. Barrett's narrative allows readers to follow Rockefeller on his cringe-inducing course. [F]ascinating and really tragic.
Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma reveals the fascinating and influential political career of the four-time New York State governor and US vice president. Marsha E. Barrett's portrayal of this multi-faceted political player focuses on the eclipse of moderate Republicanism and the betrayal of deeply held principles for political power. Although never able to win his party's presidential nomination, Rockefeller's tenure as governor was notable for typically liberal policies: infrastructure projects, expanding the state's university system, and investing in local services and the social safety net. As the Civil Rights movement intensified in the early 1960s, Rockefeller envisioned a Republican Party recommitted to its Lincolnian heritage as a defender of Black equality. But the party's extreme right wing, encouraged by its successful outreach to segregationists before and after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, pushed the party to the right. With his national political ambitions fading by the late 1960s, Rockefeller began to tack right himself on social and racial issues, refusing to endorse efforts to address police brutality, accusing, without proof, Black welfare mothers of cheating the system, or introducing harsh drug laws that disproportionately incarcerated people of color. These betrayals of his own ideals did little to win him the support of the party faithful, and his vice presidency ended in humiliation, rather than the validation of moderate ideals. An in-depth, insightful, and timely political history, Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma details how the standard-bearer of moderate Republicanism lost the battle for the soul of the Party of Lincoln, leading to mainlining of white-grievance populism for the post-civil rights era.
Introduction: Nelson Rockefeller and the Reorientation of Twentieth-Century US Politics
1. New York's Shaky Liberal RacialConsensus
2. The Life of the Party
3. Limited Victories and Harmful Concessions
4. A Fruitless Defense
5. The Denunciation of Rockefeller Republicanism
6. Law and Order as "Enlightened Liberalism"
7. Rockefeller Republicanism's Last Gasp
8. The Twilight of Rockefeller-Era New York
9. Rockefeller Unmoored
Epilogue