Olivia: The most hated man at the 1964 Republican National Convention wasn't a Democrat. He was a Rockefeller. And after being booed off the stage by his own party for five straight minutes, he walked away, turned to his aide, and said with a grin, "I had the time of my life." Jackson: Whoa, hold on. A Rockefeller getting booed by Republicans? That sounds like a scene from an alternate political universe. What is the story there? Olivia: It's the central drama in what many critics call the definitive biography on him, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by the historian Richard Norton Smith. And to give you a sense of the depth here, Smith spent over a decade—fourteen years—digging through newly released family archives to piece this entire puzzle together. Jackson: Fourteen years! Okay, he must have found something good. Let's start right there in the middle of the fire. Why on earth was a Rockefeller, the living symbol of American capitalism, public enemy number one for the GOP?

Olivia: To understand that, you have to picture the scene. It's July 1964, in a venue in San Francisco ironically called the Cow Palace. And it's not just a convention; it's a revolution. The conservative wing of the party, led by the Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, is staging a hostile takeover. The old guard, the moderate, East Coast establishment, is being pushed out. Jackson: And Rockefeller is the face of that old guard. Olivia: He's the king of it. He's the four-term governor of New York, a giant of the party. But to this new, fiery conservative base, he represents everything they're fighting against. They see him as a liberal in Republican clothing. So when he gets up to speak, trying to add a plank to the party platform that denounces extremism, the floor erupts. Jackson: So this wasn't just some polite disagreement. We're talking about raw, visceral anger. What was he even saying that got them so fired up? Olivia: He was condemning extremist groups like the John Birch Society, which Goldwater's campaign was actively courting. He was defending civil rights. He was, in essence, telling the party not to lurch so far to the right that it became unrecognizable. And for five solid minutes, they just booed him. The sound was deafening. The convention chairman tried to get him to stop, to yield the podium. Jackson: But he didn't, did he? Olivia: He absolutely refused. He just stood there, waiting for a lull, and then leaned into the microphone and said, "This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen." He was defiant. He was telling them, "You don't own this party, and you can't silence me." The book describes Jackie Robinson, the baseball legend who was there as a Rockefeller supporter, having to physically step in to stop a delegate from assaulting someone. It was chaos. Jackson: That is just incredible. It's one thing to be opposed by your rivals, but to be shouted down with that level of fury by your own people… that’s brutal. And I remember reading that his personal life played a role in this too, right? The book mentions his divorce. Olivia: It was a huge factor. He had recently divorced his wife of over thirty years and married a much younger woman, Margaretta "Happy" Murphy, who had just divorced her own husband to be with him. In the early 1960s, for a presidential contender, this was political poison. It gave the Goldwater conservatives a moral weapon. They could paint him not just as a political liberal, but as a decadent, untrustworthy elite who couldn't be trusted with the country. Jackson: So it was a perfect storm of political and personal attacks. He was the wrong kind of Republican with the wrong kind of personal life for that moment. Which brings me back to that unbelievable quote. His reaction to all this was… enjoyment? "I had the time of my life." What does that even mean? Is he a political masochist? Olivia: That is the million-dollar question, and it’s the key to his entire personality. To understand why a man would find joy in a moment of such intense public humiliation, you have to rewind. You have to go back to the very beginning and understand what it means to be born a Rockefeller in the first place.

Jackson: Right, because the name itself comes with so much baggage and so many assumptions. We just think of bottomless wealth. Olivia: Exactly. And the book has this incredible quote from his wife, Happy, that just cuts right to the heart of it. She said, "Once a small creature came into the world. He took the largest fortune in the world and decided to enjoy it." Jackson: Okay, that quote is fascinating. "Decided to enjoy it." It sounds so simple, but for a Rockefeller, that must have been a radical act. It’s like he was deliberately breaking from the family script of quiet, solemn, almost guilty philanthropy. Olivia: You've nailed it. The book paints a sharp contrast between him and his father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. His father was famously austere, almost tormented by the "burden" of the family fortune. He was obsessed with the duty of giving it away responsibly, almost as an act of moral cleansing for how it was made. Jackson: The classic "sins of the father" complex. Olivia: Precisely. But Nelson saw it differently. For him, the fortune wasn't a burden to be managed; it was fuel to be burned. It was power to be used. The book points out that he had severe dyslexia, so he struggled in a traditional academic setting. He wasn't a bookish intellectual. He was a man of action, of grand gestures, of big, tangible projects. Jackson: That makes so much sense. He wasn't built for the library; he was built for the construction site or the campaign trail. I remember another quote from the book, something he told one of his top aides: "You make the spitballs and I’ll throw them." Olivia: Yes! That’s pure Nelson. It shows he didn't want to be the aloof financier pulling strings from behind a desk. He wanted to be in the arena, covered in mud, throwing the punches himself. Or the spitballs, as it were. He wanted to build things, to lead people, to win fights. Jackson: And that connects everything back to the Cow Palace. Standing on that stage, taking the abuse from the Goldwater crowd… that wasn't a humiliation for him. It was the ultimate expression of his power. Olivia: It was his version of "enjoying it." He was using the independence his fortune gave him to fight for his vision of the Republican Party and for America. He couldn't be threatened, he couldn't be bought, he couldn't be primaried out of a job he didn't need. He was there because he chose to be, fighting for a principle. For a man driven by action and conflict, that was the time of his life. It was the ultimate luxury his wealth afforded him: the freedom to be completely, utterly defiant.

Jackson: So when you put the two pieces together—the defiant fighter at the convention and the young man who decided to 'enjoy' his fortune—you get this picture of someone who was fundamentally built differently. He was, in a way, immune to the normal pressures of political life. He couldn't be controlled because he didn't need anything from anyone. Olivia: That's the core insight of Richard Norton Smith's book. It presents Rockefeller as one of the last of a magnificent, now-extinct species: the powerful liberal Republican. He was a figure whose immense wealth gave him the freedom to be fiercely, almost recklessly, independent. And the central tragedy of his story is that the very party he so desperately wanted to lead was transforming, in real time, into an organization that had absolutely no place for a man like him. Jackson: It's a stunning political story. He was trying to steer a ship whose crew was in the middle of a mutiny, and they saw him as the enemy captain. It makes you wonder if that kind of politician, someone so independent of party orthodoxy, could even exist today. It feels like a relic from a completely different political ecosystem. Olivia: It's a powerful question to leave our listeners with. The book is a biography, but it reads like a political eulogy for a certain kind of American leader. What do we lose when our political parties become so ideologically pure that there's no room for a Rockefeller, a figure who complicates the narrative? Jackson: We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Does this story make you nostalgic for a different era of politics, or does it just prove that the battle for the soul of a party is a timeless, and often brutal, story? Let us know what you think. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.