Friday BookReview: 19th-century debate of republicanism vs monarchy

[first published November 13, 2015]



by David Pence

"Monarchies and much of the world's aristocracies despised American democracy... Queen Victoria and British Prime Minister Palmerston, France's Napoleon III, Spain's Queen Isabella, and Pope Pius IX were happy to see conflict in the only nation on earth where people ruled themselves. 'Every friend of despotism rejoices at your misfortune,' wrote London Times correspondent William Howard Russell."          (from a reader review of Mr. Doyle's book)

The Cause of All Nations is subtitled "an international history of the American Civil War" by University of South Carolina professor Don H. Doyle. He wrote an earlier book comparing two nations with North-South regional differences -- the United States and Italy. That work introduced him to characters and European perspectives from the 19th century when Italians were forming a nation and Americans were testing one. Doyle emphasizes the Italian (and opposing papal) viewpoints of our Civil War, as well as describing the "return of the empires" by France and Spain in the Americas. There could have been a short chapter about how diplomatic recognition and free trade with the South for France, Britain, or Spain would have internationalized a world-wide naval conflict over the cotton trade. But the author leaves those matters to others while his interest is to place support for the North or South in terms of movements in Europe and the Americas pitting republican nations against monarchical empires. With American military forces in civil war, there was no one to enforce the Monroe Doctrine allowing "the empires' return."

In 1861 Spain annexed the Dominican Republic and France invaded Mexico. The annual 'Cinco de Mayo' celebration in Mexico is a memorial of the Mexican army's victory in the Battle of Puebla (the Fifth of May 1863) against the French invaders. That was one of the few early victories as Emperor Napoleon III was successful in establishing a Catholic monarch, Maximilian, as emperor of Mexico. The Mexican nationalists fought a sustained war against the Second Mexican Empire. The French troops eventually withdrew in 1866, and Maximilian was executed in 1867. He had accepted the Emperor title from Catholic Mexican aristocrats and saw himself as a true protector of the nation. As he bravely faced his execution he said, "Men of my class and station are meant to protect or be martyrs of the nation. I forgive all and ask all to forgive me. My blood is to be shed for the country." Maximilian had authored the Black Decree (October 1865) outlawing any gathering of armed men, with a penalty of execution to be carried out within 24 hours of the crime. More than 10.000 men were killed under that Decree and a generation of Mexican men were raised considering liberty and fraternity to be the cultural alternative to the tyranny of a Catholic order.

                               

From series of paintings of the execution of Emperor Maximilian
 (Édouard Manet, d. 1883) 

The Dominican Restoration war (1861-1863) ended with an empire's withdrawal as well. The Dominican Republic was restored with the withdrawal of Spanish troops in 1863. In that republic the Catholic Church was tied to  both republican and monarchical national movements. This would always be true in "White Catholic and Hispanic" Dominican Republic -- which has always defined herself most sharply from her neighbor invaders from "Black, Catholic/voodoo and French-speaking" Haiti.  

In Italy, the republican nationalist movement was directed against foreign empires (Austria and France) that controlled major sections of the geographic boot of Italy. Those Catholic emperors and their armies protected the Pope and Papal States from the claims of Italian nationalists like Mazzini (1805-1872) and Garibaldi (1807-1882). The men of the Risorgimento (the resurgence) believed that liberty depended on men forming nations under God. They would unite the entire geographical peninsula under the new bonds of fraternity forming the Italian nation. They remembered the Roman republic. They wore red-shirts linking that color with revolution for the next century. The Italian nationalists and their bonds of  fraternity were not as godless as the French revolutionaries or many of the Mexican revolutionaries. When Pius IX ('Pio Nono') was first elected, Italian nationalists and Catholic "liberals" throughout Europe were elated. This did not last long after the papal Secretary of State was assassinated and the pope exiled during the six-month Roman Republic. He was restored by French troops of Napoleon III who repaid his conservative Catholic French supporters with military protection for the pontiff. The pope became the enemy of the republicans, modernists, and liberals as he allied with foreign Catholic monarchs and emperors. The Catholic Church, founded on the apostolic fraternity of Holy Orders, became the enemy of political fraternity from the Masons to extra-ecclesial political clubs. This has led to a devastating impoverishment of Catholic political thought in developing a communal masculine ethic of citizenship and republican fraternity. The Popes did however remind men of a central truth often lost in that revolutionary age of "the people." Fraternity apart from God would lead to murder by the mob.
                                           

Pius IX: reigned 1846-78

Professor Doyle shows how Southern diplomats cultivated the sympathy of Pius IX and Emperor Napoleon III of France. This was certainly not an obvious alliance springing from Southern religion. The diplomats painted the Northerners as the mob against authority and were aided by the Irish-born bishop of Charleston: Patrick Lynch. The bishop wrote successfully to the pope to enlist him in urging Catholics in every state to support a "bid for peace." When Jefferson Davis was in prison he had on his wall a signed papal missive to show support. The pope approved the replacement of the anti-clerical Benito Juarez (1806-1872) with the Catholic Austrian Emperor’s brother Maximilian to be the new Emperor of Mexico. This combination of support for the French invaders of Mexico and sympathy for the South to establish buffers against the "radical puritans" of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant United States is what Doyle called the "Latin Strategy." Doyle's book, one reviewer said, was like visiting a well-known restaurant but getting there by a completely new roadway. It is a road that uniquely presents crucial events and characters in the 19th-century emergence of political fraternity as an enemy to slavery and an advocate of national republics.

Garibaldi spent brief periods in the U.S. in the early 1850s

The book ends with a beautiful exposition of the Statue of Liberty -- originally named "Liberty Enlightening the World." This gift from the French people was erected in 1886 after being built in France in stages for many years. At her feet are the broken chains of slavery. In her left hand is a book representing the law necessary for freedom; and her outstretched right arm is the light pointing out toward the open seas. A free republic (government by, for, and of the people) with no slavery to bind its feet now lights the way for the rest of mankind. The New York harbor may be a home to the refugees of the world, but that was not the deepest meaning of the French gift. For Doyle and our French benefactors, the statue is a thankful reminder that the Civil War was about "a last best hope for earth." The Law in Lady Liberty's hand was not the Constitution of 1787, but the document of July 4, 1776, declaring all men are created equal. What the French memorialized twenty years after the Civil War, the old Italian freedom fighter Garibaldi had known from the onset. When he was asked early in the war to lend his name and possibly lead a force in the Union Cause he said, "Tell me also if this agitation is regarding the emancipation of the Negroes or not." Comparing Lincoln’s First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural provides dramatic historical evidence that, for the best of America's leaders, it was late in the course of the war that the true meaning of the conflict emerged. That hiddeness of Divine Providence in the lives and wars of nations is one of the many lessons that can be learned from studying this book's exploration of emerging nations, the dying European empires, and the American Civil War.        

UPDATE: Here is an interview with Professor Doyle (conducted by Sidney Blumenthal, longtime adviser to the Clintons).



Some excerpts from a review in the 'Wall St Journal':

Americans tend to think of the Civil War in a kind of geographical vacuum, as a purely American contest at which other nations were mere passive spectators. Don Doyle, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, vividly demonstrates that, far from being a “ ‘brother’s war’ fought by Americans over uniquely American issues,” the Civil War was an earthshaking event that threatened and engaged the governments and people of Europe, from the British Midlands to Rome.

So thoroughly have liberal political values today triumphed around the world, says Mr. Doyle, that it is hard to remember that, a century and a half ago, the United States was the world’s only significant republic. European reactionaries and defenders of a hierarchical status quo exulted when America’s “republican experiment” seemed to collapse in on itself. Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister at the time of the American Civil War, remarked of the embattled North that it “shows that Power in the Hands of the Masses throws the Scum of the Community to the surface,” while a French cabinet officer blithely told a visiting American: “Your Republic is dead, and it is probably the last the world will see.”

... The Union victory in 1865 emboldened popular democratic movements everywhere in Europe. The consequences of a Confederate victory, Mr. Doyle asserts, would have been far-reaching, not just for the United States but for the world. He writes that “it would have meant a new birth of slavery rather than freedom, possibly throughout the Americas.”

   

                                                       

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, November 7

by David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch 



I. POPE FRANCIS AND CATHOLIC IDENTITY

VATICAN ARRESTS: Arrests by Vatican police in anticipation of new books telling sordid tales of Vatican corruption.

CATHOLIC ACADEMICS WHO DISSENT FROM CHURCH TEACHING REALLY DISSENT FROM BEING CALLED HERETICAL: Ross Douthat is a generally conservative Catholic who writes for the New York Times. He is insightful and obviously a balancing voice for his paper. A recent column before the finish of the Synod on the Family accused the Pope and other Bishops of a plot to change Catholicism. I found it quite overblown in terms of his assessment of Pope Francis. This embroiled him in an argument with several Catholic theologians who very much would like to change fundamental teachings of the Church on sexuality (e.g. the goodness of homosexual relations, the dissolubility of certain marriages, and female ordination). Those academics wrote a short multi-authored letter objecting to Mr Douthat's qualifications and his accusing the "reformers" of heresy. Douthat responded.

Bishop Robert Baron answered the offended academics.

A woman student from Boston College Theology Department wrote a stinging insider's story of the scandalous and oppressive environment created by several of the writers so upset about charges of heresy. Her two years with liberal theologians is an indictment of the sexual revolutionaries who call themselves Catholic theologians and the bishops who let them continue the masquerade. The letter writers know if they were really outed as heretics, they might lose their jobs. Mr. Douthat should turn his guns on the heresy of academics who have undermined our purity codes. They want to hide behind the Holy Father. Douthat's misplaced charges are allowing them cover.

David Mills looks at 'conservative" dissent against Pope Francis as bitter sons.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

WHO WILL DEFEND CHRISTIANS IN THE MIDEAST - THE CASE FOR PUTIN: Obama or Putin, with excellent historical links on the relations of Putin's post-communist Russia and Christian Orthodoxy.

SAUDI PLAN FOR EXTERMINATION OF SHIA - BRITISH MI6 HEAD SPEAKS: Sir Richard Deerlove, head of British MI6 from 1999-2004, gives a revelatory speech about Saudi intentions against the Shia-led Iraq government. The author compares the Nazi approach to Jews with ISIS approach to Shia. Sir Dearlove's speech advocated less security resources directed against Islamic terrorism by Britain. His argument is that the real danger is in the Mideast AMONG MUSLIMS. The country most responsible is Saudi Arabia. He compared the war in Syria with the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, which became a battleground for the struggle between Communism and Christianity. The larger struggle in the Mideast which he underestimated until 2014 was the Sunni-Shia war, and the drive of Saudis to maintain their place in the Mideast by supporting the authority of Wahhabi Islam throughout the region as the keepers of the Holy Cities and definers of what it means to be a Muslim. Meanwhile an execution looms to accentuate this fundamental Salafist-Shia conflict.

III. U.S. POLITICS AND SOCIETY ROUND UP

STRATEGY, POLICY, AND THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE: President Obama promised among other things to "reset" with Russia, use diplomacy not military threats with countries like Iran, and "tilt" toward Asia. Has he demilitarized foreign policy?

Dr Ben Carson on Seventh Day Adventists and female ordination.

FIGHTING CRIME - THE OFFICERS AND THE CITIZENS: FBI Director James Comey warns that aggressive anti-police movements are deterring the kind of aggressive policing needed to keep public order in large cities.

FIGHTING PRAYER - THE COACH AND THE SCHOOL BOARD: No praying at high school football games and we mean it.

IV. POLISH ELECTIONS

A CATHOLIC PRESIDENT AND NOW PARLIAMENT IN POLAND: Here is one take on the stunning victory of nationalist Catholics (Law and Justice Party) in Polish Parliamentary elections.

Friday BookReview: "[No other poet] has the kind of deep, gut vitality that Roethke's got"

James Dickey insisted that no American had ever written better verse than Theodore Roethke (who died in the summer of 1963).

Dickey writes: "I think Roethke is the finest poet not so much because of his beautifully personal sense of form ... but because of the way he sees and feels the aspects of life which are compelling to him.”

Normal everyday Joes give him high marks as well.

                                             

Years ago I came across 'My Papa’s Waltz':

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   

Slid from the kitchen shelf;   

My mother’s countenance   

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle;   

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   

With a palm caked hard by dirt,   

Then waltzed me off to bed   

Still clinging to your shirt.

Here's an audio of Mr. Roethke reciting the following poem:

"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;   
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:   
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,   
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;   
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;   
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;   
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;   
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;   
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,   
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:   
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.   
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: 
(I measure time by how a body sways)."




[Here is the comment of poet and translator William Seaton:
"Roethke’s well-known lyric 'I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,' is as perfect as a troubadour song or an Elizabethan sonnet. If the poem breaks no new ground for the language, it is nonetheless a rare achievement. Using erotic energy, one of the most traditional poetic dynamos, Roethke manages to devise new locutions to express the oldest and simplest themes."]

Whenever I visit the indoor tropical garden at Como Zoo, I stop to stare at the sloth in the tree -- and think of this poem:

"In moving slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word                  

                         

There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
He will assume that you have Heard

A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He'll sigh and hive his Branch a Hug;

Then off again to Sleep he goes,
Still swaying gently by his Toes,

And you just know he knows he knows."

This is from 'Four for Sir John Davies':

Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, —
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

                                                                               


 "The Pike"

The river turns,
Leaving a place for the eye to rest,
A furred, a rocky pool,
A bottom of water.

The crabs tilt and eat, leisurely,
And the small fish lie, without shadow, motionless,
Or drift lazily in and out of the weeds.
The bottom-stones shimmer back their irregular striations,
And the half-sunken branch bends away from the gazer's eye.

A scene for the self to abjure!-
And I lean, almost into the water,
My eye always beyond the surface reflection;
I lean, and love these manifold shapes,
Until, out from a dark cove,
From beyond the end of a mossy log,
With one sinuous ripple, then a rush,
A thrashing-up of the whole pool
The pike strikes.

                                 

"Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line." 
                                                                    (Roethke)

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, October 31

by David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch 


I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE SYNOD

Pope Benedict XVI explained the misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council as a pitting of the "Council of the Fathers against the Council of the Media." Pope Pius IX said Church councils are interpreted first by Satan, then by man, then by the Holy Spirit.

From October 4-25, 2015, the fourteenth General Synod of Bishops since Vatican II met to discuss the mission and vocation of the family. Two hundred and seventy-nine priests, bishops, and male representatives of religious orders voted by paragraph to accept the 94 paragraphs of the final document. All paragraphs received 2/3 of the synod fathers' vote. We will see the full English translation soon. Until then, concluding that the synod is ambiguous about the indissolubility of marriage by highlighting the translations of 3 or 4 paragraphs on the pastoral care of the divorced might be an overreach.

One text we do have is the Oct 17th one that Pope Francis gave as a commemorative address on the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI creating Synods to carry on the work of the Council. It was an important talk about the nature of the Church and was especially significant to the Eastern Orthodox Churches for whom questions about the Petrine office and a Eucharistic Bishop-centered ecclesiology are essential. Pope Francis, who always refers to himself as the Bishop of Rome, understands this. Catholics who know that the great decentralization of Christianity is the Catholic insistence on the full Presence of Paschal Mystery at every Mass on the planet through the last two millennia also understand this definition of decentralization. You can bet that Eucharistic interpretation was not quite what the American media had in mind when they headlined: "Pope calls for more decentralization."

The address by an Eastern orthodox Bishop to the Council, Russia's Metropolitan Hillarion, shows why the Synod of the Fathers is much more compelling than the synod of the press. The alliance between the Russians and Americans as Christian nations has been proposed both for the war to defend the family and the war to defeat ISIS and the Salafist jihadists.

This really was a synod in the likeness of Pope Francis. His closing address again forced our eyes outward to humanity where Christ offers His mercy. When he says this is the central mission of the Church, he then quotes Pope Benedict and St. Pope John Paul II. But you must read his talk, not a report of it. How strange that St. John Paul II who integrated Divine Mercy Sunday into the Liturgical Year and elevated the devotions of St. Faustina and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy is never castigated for not understanding the "limitations of Mercy."

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

MIDEAST - OUR REAL STRATEGIC ALLIES ARE NOW ON THE GROUND WITH US: The US is embedding ground troops with Iraq soldiers which puts us shoulder-to-shoulder, soldier-to-soldier with Iranian troops who have already shed real blood in the war against ISIS. Russia has seriously integrated its forces with Syria in fighting the Salafist Sunni movements that would eliminate religious freedom for Shiites and Christians. We are now aligned with the right allies though our Congress hasn't acknowledged this. The great strategic task ahead is to support a Sunni force that will organize a new government in the war zone territories of Syria/Iraq. That Sunni entity would be better organized by Jordan than Saudi Arabia, who continues their aerial persecution of the Shiites of Yemen.

III. PIVOT TO ASIA

A QUANTUM LEAP IN FREEDOM IN CHINA ON ONE CHILD POLICY WHILE US THREATENS THEIR MARITIME BOUNDARIES: Under Mao Tse-tung (d. 1976), China had a vigorous pro-natal policy. The fertility rate (projected births per woman during child bearing years) in China in 1970 was 5.5. In 1980 the one child policy was adopted as part of the modernization reform movement led by Deng Xiaoping. Many of his practical policy changes led to a spectacular reform. Not so the brutal restriction of family life. In 1984 there was a change in policy to allow many rural couples more children. The news of the policy change came from the central news agency reporting the decisions of an October 2015 meeting of top party leaders known as the Fifth Plenum. China's legislature meets in March 2016 when the plan will be outlined. China's population is 1.37 billion. Last year 116 boys were born for every 100 girls. The worldwide ratio is 105 boys to 100 girls.

China has built new islands off its shores to extend its claims in the South China sea. The US recently sent a US warship to sail within 12 miles of the new islands to show we do not accept their territorial claims. Are those infrastructure additions where we want to draw a line with China? The so called "realists" who now shape foreign policy thinking in the US government and academia treat all emerging powers as natural enemies of the dominant power (that would be the US). This social Darwinist theory of the nations informs both the neoconservatves of the Republican Party and interventionist liberals of the Democrats.

IV. SATAN AND THE SEXUAL INVERSION

SATAN SHOWS HIS FACE: Senseless violence is not an adequate description of the mass killings plaguing our nation.

FEMALE COMMAND - REFORM IS NOT PERMITTED: "You want toxic, I will show you toxic" - Fort Carson and Colonel Tammy.

Friday BookReview: Nelson Rockefeller

The result of good breeding, shored up by piles of gold

Yes, folks, that is America's vice-president during her bicentennial year -- as he salutes student demonstrators in Binghamton, New York.

Behind Mr. Rockefeller at the campaign stop is Bob Dole, whom President Ford had chosen as his running mate (they would be defeated by Carter/Mondale).


The recent biography by Richard Norton Smith has received high praise. Mr. Smith has been the director of five of the presidential libraries. Here are excerpts from a review in the 'Wall St Journal':

It was the most memorable scene from the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco: Nelson Rockefeller standing tall on the speakers’ platform, insistent on having his say—“This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen”—as conservative yahoos below sent up a roar of hatred to this embodiment of the despised Eastern Establishment who dared denounce extremism. Operatives of the party’s impending presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, aware of the damage the nationally televised scene was doing to his image, frantically tried to quiet the delegates, but to no avail. 

So the scene made its fateful impression, not only of extremism on display but of its brave antagonist. Rockefeller, wrote Norman Mailer in 'Esquire' later that year, “had an odd courage which was profound—he could take strength from defying a mob. Three hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago, some gorilla must have stood up to an enraged tribe and bellowed back and got away alive and human society was begun. So Rocky finally had his political moment which was precisely right for him.” 

Richard Norton Smith builds a 20-page prologue around that telling moment in his splendid biography of Rockefeller. On His Own Terms is a clear-eyed, exhaustively researched account of a significant and fascinating American life. 

In retrospect, Rockefeller’s moment in San Francisco told of more than his courage and a changing GOP. It also vividly suggested that, if he wanted to be president, he was in the wrong party. It was not the first such suggestion. Franklin D. Roosevelt had tried to get Rockefeller, his coordinator of inter-American affairs during World War II, to change his political affiliation. Harry Truman, too, had urged him to become a Democrat. Rockefeller’s answer: “If I became a Democrat, I’d always be in the position of holding the party back, whereas if I stayed a Republican, I’d be pushing the party forward.” He wanted the presidency but, as Mr. Smith’s title suggests, on his own terms. 

When Rockefeller made his entry into elective politics, running for governor of New York in 1958, he proved a terrific campaigner, plunging into crowds, heartily offering a “Hiya fella!” to one and all, enthusiastically eating blintzes and giving voters the impression that he was a backslapping regular guy. In a year in which the GOP nationally suffered its worst defeat since 1936, he crushed incumbent Democratic Gov. Averell Harriman by 557,000 votes. 

In contrast with his New York campaigns, Rockefeller’s repeated efforts to win the presidency in the 1960s “appeared amateurish,” Mr. Smith notes... 

But Rockefeller was unmistakably different, not least in his strong support for the civil-rights movement. (He provided money to Martin Luther King Jr. and his crusade at various junctures, such as when he helped pay the bail costs for hundreds of youngsters who had been jailed after marching in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.) “The struggle for racial equality is as much a part of his family lineage as oil wells and art museums,” Mr. Smith observes. Rockefeller’s grandfather had endowed Atlanta’s Spelman College to educate black women; his father had supported the United Negro College Fund and the Urban League. When Rockefeller was vice president under Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s, his support for filibuster reform in the Senate and for a tough Voting Rights Act fired Southern opposition and, by some accounts, led to his being dropped from the 1976 ticket. 

During Rockefeller’s 35 years of public life, two things were kept largely hidden. One was his compulsive philandering, which only began to come to light in 1979 with his sensational death in the company of his latest mistress. (It had not taken an aggressive press long to shred the official fiction that his fatal heart attack had occurred when he was at his desk, working in his office, alone except for a security aide.) The other hidden trait was his dyslexia, a condition that is generally characterized, as Mr. Smith says, by “poor reading, writing, and spelling skills, the misuse of words, and the transposition of numbers.” This difficulty helped to shape his approach to public life, giving him a preference for the visual over the written and a pronounced inclination to rely on supposed experts as a kind of “intellectual security blanket.” 

Rockefeller liked to use visual aids to get his points across. Early in the Eisenhower administration, when he became undersecretary at the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, he insisted on a bigger conference room, opening up his own wallet to equip it. He turned the large space into “the Chart Room” and took over an adjoining room to serve as a staging area, from which the charts could be rolled out on tracks. 

His difficulty reading persuaded him that, as he said, “the best way to read a book is to get the author to tell you about it.” When he was governor of New York and trying to fathom the moral complexities of abortion, he saw a reference to Thomas Aquinas in a newspaper editorial and asked a staffer to arrange a meeting with the eminent theologian. 

When venturing forth to meet a new challenge, Rockefeller resorted almost reflexively to summoning experts to advise him. After he left HEW in late 1954, he became a special assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower for “psychological warfare” (or, as Ike later described it, for “Cold War strategy”), with a vague mandate to explain America to the world. Taking the mandate and, to the dismay of the State Department, running with it, Rockefeller assembled a panel of academic heavyweights in advance of the 1955 Geneva Summit. The group’s brainstorming led to Eisenhower’s proposal there for “open skies” aerial inspection of military facilities on American and Soviet soil. Rejected by the Soviets, the proposal proved a propaganda coup for the U.S., showing the Soviets to be not as committed to nuclear disarmament as they pretended. The brainstorming group’s success, Mr. Smith observes, “foreshadowed [Rockefeller’s] later reliance, as governor of New York and would-be president, on a dizzying array of study groups, commissions, and grand planners.” Yet doubts arose about the practice. “He is too used to borrowing brains instead of using his own,” Ike once observed... 

Rockefeller had no liberal guilt about his inherited wealth. Once, on the campaign trail, a young woman asked him how it felt to be rich. “Fine!” he replied. “How’s it feel to be good-looking?” 

... After his death, no less a conservative than William F. Buckley, long impressed by Rockefeller’s staunch anticommunism and more recently by his ability as governor to learn from his mistakes, wrote—in a judgment that would have appalled the yahoos at the 1964 convention—that it was “altogether possible” that Rockefeller “would have been a great president.”

Here are some lines by Mark Tooley, from his interesting profile of Nelson Rockefeller as Social Gospel Christian: "He was an enthusiast for American democracy and hated Communism. One campaign aide who worked for him, Reagan, and Goldwater claimed Rockefeller was the most passionately anti-Soviet of all of them."

"The grandson of America’s first billionaire, Rockefeller was born into a pious Baptist home where liquor, smoking and profanity were prohibited, family prayers were a daily ritual, and the Sabbath always sacred. His grandfather, John Sr., the builder of an oil empire, was a conventional but not very theologically minded Baptist. His father, John Jr., the heir and only son, was devout but committed to modernizing Christianity under the guidance of experts he would fund. His counsel for philanthropy was Raymond Fosdick, a backslidden Baptist who championed cautiously progressive causes. Fosdick was brother to the great liberal preacher Harry Emerson, a zealous foe of 'fundamentalism' who had survived a Presbyterian heresy trial.

"John Jr. so admired Rev. Fosdick that he funded his tracts and built a cathedral for him on New York’s upper West side, Riverside Church, where Protestantism and modernity were merged together by Fosdick’s sermons and the church’s progressive iconography. The church was and is next door to Union Seminary, once Baptist, and long an academy of liberal Protestantism, also supported by the Rockefellers. In the same neighborhood in the late 1950s the Rockefellers also built the soaring Interchurch Center as headquarters for liberal Protestant denominational and ecumenical agencies.

"Earnest, chaste, sober, punctilious, generous, and committed to social uplift, John Jr. and his more exuberant wife Abby raised their five sons to be conventionally moral but theologically liberal Baptists who would perpetuate the family tradition of high-minded philanthropy..."

UPDATE: This is a 1932 photo of Nelson with his grandfather -- John D. Rockefeller (bottom right) -- the founding patriarch. Take a look at this five-minute video.

[Nelson's father, John Jr., is in the center. He spent his life as a philanthropist, and died in 1960.
Richard Norton Smith -- in this lengthy interview with Brian Lamb -- said of John Jr.: "I think, of all the Rockefellers, he was probably the most complicated figure."

Mr. Smith also tells of Richard Nixon's secret visit to Rockefeller in July 1960, as he unsuccessfully urged him to be his vice-presidential running mate. The NY governor asked for two changes in the party platform: a stronger civil rights plank, and a promise to spend more on defense. He had not been happy with President Eisenhower's cost-cutting measures.]