Democrat Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia's senior senator, chairs the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and combines an abiding interest in modernizing health care and technology with an old-fashioned devotion to guarding his state’s coal industry. He announced on Jan. 11, 2013 that he would not seek a sixth term, touching off what is expected to be a heated Republican effort to capture his seat in 2014. "I've gotten way out of whack in terms of the time I should spend with my wife and my children and my grandchildren," he told The Associated Press.

Rockefeller’s full name, John D. Rockefeller IV, has a familiar ring to those who remember his great-grandfather as the oil billionaire who was America’s richest man, and his grandfather as the heir who had more than enough money to build New York’s Rockefeller Center, restore Colonial Williamsburg, and found the Museum of Modern Art during the Depression of the 1930s. Jay Rockefeller’s father and uncles were men of impressive achievement in different fields. Father John D. Rockefeller III was the head of the family’s philanthropic efforts and founder of the Asia Society. Uncle David Rockefeller was the head of Chase Manhattan Bank. Two uncles became governors—Nelson, governor of New York for 15 years and a man of great building projects and fitful presidential ambitions; and Winthrop, who moved to impoverished and out-of-the-way Arkansas and served four years as a reform governor when the state needed it most. At various points in his life, Jay Rockefeller has followed the example of each, with emphases and achievements of his own. Read More

Democrat Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia's senior senator, chairs the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and combines an abiding interest in modernizing health care and technology with an old-fashioned devotion to guarding his state’s coal industry. He announced on Jan. 11, 2013 that he would not seek a sixth term, touching off what is expected to be a heated Republican effort to capture his seat in 2014. "I've gotten way out of whack in terms of the time I should spend with my wife and my children and my grandchildren," he told The Associated Press.

Rockefeller’s full name, John D. Rockefeller IV, has a familiar ring to those who remember his great-grandfather as the oil billionaire who was America’s richest man, and his grandfather as the heir who had more than enough money to build New York’s Rockefeller Center, restore Colonial Williamsburg, and found the Museum of Modern Art during the Depression of the 1930s. Jay Rockefeller’s father and uncles were men of impressive achievement in different fields. Father John D. Rockefeller III was the head of the family’s philanthropic efforts and founder of the Asia Society. Uncle David Rockefeller was the head of Chase Manhattan Bank. Two uncles became governors—Nelson, governor of New York for 15 years and a man of great building projects and fitful presidential ambitions; and Winthrop, who moved to impoverished and out-of-the-way Arkansas and served four years as a reform governor when the state needed it most. At various points in his life, Jay Rockefeller has followed the example of each, with emphases and achievements of his own.

John D. Rockefeller IV grew up in New York, graduated from Harvard, and lived and studied in Japan for three years (evidence of his father’s Asiaphilia). He worked for a year in Washington D.C. running the early Peace Corps program in the Philippines. Then, like so many of the elite of those years, he turned his attention from abroad to home, and in 1964 went to the impoverished hill country of West Virginia to work as a VISTA volunteer in Emmons on the Big Coal River. “Although I went to Emmons to help that community,” he has reminisced. “They helped me much more. My experience in Emmons set the course for the rest of my life.” He moved on, more quickly than his uncles Nelson and Winthrop, to electoral politics. He was elected to the state House of Delegates from Kanawha County in 1966 and as West Virginia secretary of state in 1968. Rockefeller then had the chastening experience of losing a 1972 race for governor to Republican Arch Moore. He served three years as president of West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, and became more practical, dropping his opposition to strip mining. He was not shy about spending his own millions—his net worth was estimated at nearly $99 million in 2009—and was elected governor in 1976 and re-elected in 1980. In 1984, he ran for the U.S. Senate and beat Republican businessman John Raese by just 52%-48% after spending $12 million.

Rockefeller has been a consistent Democratic vote. He began his career inclined toward free trade because of his experience in East Asia, but is a strong supporter of organized labor who regularly earns 100% on the AFL-CIO’s annual legislative scorecard. He is sensitive at times to the cultural conservatism of his state, supporting a 2006 constitutional flag desecration amendment and another proposed amendment to allow voluntary prayer in schools. Though he has done his share to shape the Democratic message as well as attack Republican policies, he is known in the Senate for his civility. He laments the extreme polarization of politics, especially as practiced by Republican-leaning Fox News and the liberally oriented MSNBC. “There’s a little bug inside of me which wants the (Federal Communications Commission) to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye,’’’ he said at a November 2010 hearing. “It would be a big favor to our political discourse, to our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people.”

As Commerce Committee chairman, Rockefeller has championed consumers’ rights. He helped secure $7.2 billion in economic stimulus money to upgrade broadband infrastructure, telling the Charleston Daily Mail in 2009, “It’s a basic part of our belonging to the future of this world.” He held hearings on electronic commerce practices that pass on customers’ information to other companies and introduced legislation in 2010 to prohibit some Internet companies’ misleading sales practices. In 2011, he sponsored a bill to give consumers the ability to block companies from tracking their online activity, a measure that privacy advocates hailed while Internet companies warned would hamper their ability to tailor services to customers. Rockefeller also spent much of 2010 working to eventually get a NASA authorization bill into law, laboring for months to bridge the substantial differences between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans. And in 2009 he pushed an unsuccessful bill—which he re-introduced in 2011—to re-regulate the railroad industry.

Rockefeller played a part in shaping the Democrats’ health care overhaul of 2010, though not as central a role as he would have liked. As chairman of the Finance Committee’s health subcommittee, he introduced his own bill in July 2009 creating an optional public health insurance plan to compete with private insurers. He sharply criticized the parallel efforts of the more centrist Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Baucus ended up excluding Rockefeller from the bipartisan “Gang of Six” that fruitlessly met through the summer of 2009 trying to craft a deal. The Finance Committee rejected Rockefeller’s proposal in September, but he remained confident that a public option would pass. When it became clear by December that that would not occur, he told the Daily Mail he felt “sadness and agony.” He still got several provisions into the Senate-passed legislation that eventually became law, including requiring insurers to spend 80% to 85% of all premiums to pay for actual medical care and not other costs.

Health care has long been a passion of Rockefeller’s. He is motivated in part by anger at his mother’s treatment during a long terminal illness—an experience that would be much worse for people of ordinary incomes, he thought—and he has sought to increase the number of general practitioners, especially in states like West Virginia and Arkansas. As he was working on health issues, Rockefeller in 1991 gave serious consideration to running for president. He was 54, about the same age as his uncle, Nelson, when he made his second attempt at running; and, Rockefeller by then had developed an expertise on an issue that seemed likely to be a major domestic priority. After he decided against running, he warmly endorsed Democrat Bill Clinton and applauded his emphasis on health care. When the Clinton health care bill crashed and burned in September 1994, Rockefeller worked for incremental changes. One of his biggest legislative achievements was a 1992 law, passed over furious opposition from Western coal states, that forced union and non-union coal companies, as well as companies that had gone out of the coal business, to pay for the exploding cost of the United Mine Workers’ health care trust funds. He also was at the fore of Democratic efforts to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Rockefeller’s efforts on health care earned him deep admiration from liberals. But they have been less enthralled with his efforts to protect West Virginia’s coal industry from legislation to curb global warming. In 2003, he supported cap-and-trade legislation to allow energy efficient companies to trade credits to larger greenhouse gas emitters as a way to reduce overall levels of carbon dioxide emissions. But after Democrats took control of the Senate and sought to craft a bill, Rockefeller was reluctant to back it. Then in 2010, he pushed legislation to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from some sources. In 2011, he differed publicly with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska about the extent to which the EPA should be regulated under the bill. At the same time, he said in a February 2011 speech to the West Virginia Coal Association that the industry needed to stop “fighting for the status quo.”

Steel has been another longtime preoccupation for Rockefeller. He helped Weirton Steel become employee-owned in 1984. In the late 1990s, he called for aid to steel makers in the face of what he regarded as a flood of subsidized steel imports, arguing that workers and companies that have “played by the book” should get government help to allow them to continue in their jobs and to stay in their homes. In 2002, he called for 40% tariffs for four years on steel imports. The Bush administration in 2002 imposed a 24% tariff in the second year and 18% in the third. Rockefeller complained loudly when the administration made exceptions and then dropped the quotas. He got a tax credit into law in 2008 providing an incentive for companies to recycle hazardous byproducts from steelmaking. His desire to put a moratorium on EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is in part motivated by the fact that steel production plants would be among the facilities regulated.

During the Bush administration, Rockefeller was extremely active on the Intelligence Committee. Some Democrats criticized him in 1983 for not being a partisan team-player and for not countering Republican Chairman Pat Roberts’ opposition to a far-ranging investigation of intelligence before the September 11 attacks. But the bipartisan working relationship between the two was not to last. In December 2005, after The New York Times revealed National Security Agency surveillance of communications between terrorist suspects abroad and people in the United States, and that Rockefeller had been informed of the program several years before, Rockefeller charged that administration officials were misstating the facts and that they never offered him the opportunity to approve or disapprove of the program. Rockefeller protested vigorously that month when Roberts adjourned a committee meeting after Democrats demanded an inquiry into the NSA surveillance program.

After Democrats won majority control of the Senate, Rockefeller in 2007 ascended to the chairmanship of Intelligence. Roberts rotated off the committee and the new vice chairman was Republican Christopher (Kit) Bond of Missouri. Rockefeller agreed to accept Bond’s suggestions that it investigate shortcomings in human intelligence and radical Islamist ideology. In October 2007, Rockefeller produced a compromise on the issue of immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated in the government’s secret surveillance of people in the United States. It provided that the companies be able to assert as a defense that they were told by the administration that the surveillance was legal. After stepping down as chairman, Rockefeller told The Charleston Gazette in April 2011 that his earlier support for the Iraq war was “one of the worst votes in my life” and that U.S. troops should leave the country that year. He also expressed serious misgivings about military operations in Afghanistan and Libya.

Rockefeller has been in strong shape politically—strong enough that since 1984, he has not self-financed any of his campaigns and has still been re-elected by handsome margins. In 2008, he ran for a fifth term. He spent $5.9 million to his Republican opponent’s $123,000 and won 64%-36%, carrying 52 of 55 counties.