REVIEW / BOOKS; A SENSITIVE PORTRAIT OF NELSON ROCKEFELLER; THE IMPERIAL ROCKEFELLER: A BIOGRAPHY OF NELSON A. ROCKEFELLERBY JOSEPH; E. PERSICO. SIMON & SCHUSTER. 352 PP. $16.50 FIRST Edition

• Published in: The Boston globe
• Main Author: Whitman, Alden
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, Mass Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC 21.02.1982
• ISSN: 0743-1791

A throwaway investment in Creole Petroleum, a Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil in 1935, turned his attention to Latin America - and so provided a stepping stone to public life. "In the budding Nelsonian style, he immediately gathered about him a coterie of oil and other experts for a first- hand look at his new holding. He conducted his own fact-finding mission to Latin America, and fell in love with the continent," John E. Persico notes in this nuanced and insightful biography. A Republican in a Democratic administration, who also belonged to the Eastern Establishment, Nelson was easily branded a liberal; yet, as Persico shows, he was deeply conservative. Only the style was liberal. He held very simple views of the world, and his notions of foreign policy did not go beyond an unquenchable belief that the greatest enemy of mankind was Soviet communism. This was an attitude given form and shape when Henry Kissinger became an adviser; he made the phrasing of Rockefeller's views less cutting, but he also reinforced them. Persico handles Rockefeller's spectacular death with good taste. As in other areas of the book, he does not deal in gossip for its own sake; there is no malice, only an attempt to understand an extraordinarily complex figure. He has written a book of substance. Its keen etching of Rockefeller's appeal, his contradictions, is the work of a sensitive observer - and a compassionate one.