Coming and going: the peculiar death of Nelson Rockefeller
You know, there’s the age-old cliché that powerful people, whether they’re a Kennedy or a Rockefeller, are invariably horny freaks that are driven to achieve that power because feeling like that gets them hard. It’s probably true, but not in the way that most people think it is.
It’s probably less that those who get into politics are obsessed with fucking and more that basically everyone is (apart from our asexual comrades, shouts to you!), and when you get to a position of power, people are invariably going to be interested in your personal life. What’s more, you get put under the kind of scrutiny that forces your darkest desires and secrets into the open. People want to find the gory details that undermine your image, and they’ll do whatever they can to find them.
It’s how you get stories like J Edgar Hoover’s (alleged) crossdressing habit. John F Kennedy’s sex addiction and constant affairs. Prince Charles and his fascination with being a tampon (look, if I don’t get to forget that mental image, neither do you). There may be a little bit of othering at work here, “look at all these degenerates running the world”, and all that. However, I think why we’re really fascinated with them is because it makes them feel more like us than any “at home with the family” profile ever could.
In a strange way, it just gets worse the more that these people try to deny it. We’ve all seen something that, despite all their money and celebrity, they can’t take back. We know they’re just like us, and the more they try to use their wealth to deny it, the more fake and cowardly they seem. Arguably the best example of this one’s from Nelson Rockefeller. One of the most successful scions of one of the most successful families in history.
Yet we all know that he died while boning his mistress.
But who was Nelson Rockefeller, really?
Nelson Rockefeller is one of the great “what if?” US Presidents of the 20th century.
He ran unsuccessfully three times in the 1960s as a moderate Republican (back when that could be anything resembling a real platform) while serving a successful tenure as governor of New York. He stepped down in 1973 when Gerald Ford picked him as his running mate for his successful bid for the presidency in 1974, becoming vice president of the United States at the age of 66.
What people didn’t know was Rockefeller was a consumate adulterer, consistently carrying on with anything a skirt. This continued long after his political career came to an end in 1977, when he stepped down as Ford’s running mate for his unsuccessful bid for a second term in the White House. Two years later, reports broke that Rockefeller had died of a heart attack at his desk in Rockefeller Center. It didn’t take long before the real news story broke, though, and showed just how much of a cover-up that initial story was.
The truth was that, while Rockefeller had died of a heart attack, it had been one he’d suffered at a townhouse of his. He hadn’t been alone, either. All the updated reports would say was that Rockefeller was “in the company of” an aide of his called Megan Marshack, nearly 50 years his junior. Anyone with a brain stem could put two and two together, yet seemingly, his own family weren’t able to do that simple math.
Which is understandable, really. No one likes thinking about a blood relative popping their clogs in the middle of doing the nasty.