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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Jay 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. One uncle, Winthrop Rockefeller, moved to an impoverished state in the southern hills--in his case Arkansas--and won two terms as governor, running an honest and reforming administration. Another, Nelson Rockefeller, became governor of the nation's then-biggest state and spent money expansively on generous welfare and gigantic monuments. Jay Rockefeller became governor of what turned out to be America's number one population-losing state of the 1980s, leaving behind a network of roads and highways and a progressive tax structure. Two of the Rockefellers--Nelson and Jay--were mentioned early in their political careers as presidential candidates: Nelson, never very shy about running, finally did so in 1964 at 56, and again in 1968, and served as Vice President from 1974 to 1977. Jay for years avoided projecting his name forward, then almost decided to run in the summer of 1991 at 54, but decided not to enter a contest in which he might have been nominated and elected. The parallels stop here, for Jay Rockefeller lacks the aloof, imperial bearing of his Uncle Nelson; he is affable, full of self-deprecating humor, tall enough so that he stoops to get through doorways and uses hearing aids because of noise damage from frequent helicopter travel. He was careful to work his way up the political ladder. He grew up in New York, graduated from Harvard, and lived and studied in Japan for three years. He first came to West Virginia as a VISTA volunteer in Emmons in 1964. "Although I went to Emmons to help that community," he reminisced in 2002, "they helped me much more. My experience in Emmons set the course for the rest of my life." He was elected to the House of Delegates in Kanawha County in 1966 and as secretary of state in 1968, and 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 $200 million in 2004--and was elected governor in 1976 and, against Moore, reelected in 1980, after which the state was plunged into deep recession. In 1984, he ran for the U.S. Senate and beat Republican businessman John Raese by just 52%-48% after spending $12 million. In his first years in the Senate, Rockefeller deferred to Robert Byrd and compiled a conventional liberal voting record, though somewhat more inclined to free trade because of his experience in East Asia. Then he began to concentrate on health care. With a seat on the Finance Committee, he got a place on the Pepper Commission on long-term health care. As chairman, he got majorities on the commission to back long-term care for all Americans regardless of age and, by 8-7, universal medical insurance coverage. But getting others to agree was harder. Rockefeller talked mostly about health care financing when he was mulling a presidential race, but he warmly endorsed Bill Clinton and applauded his emphasis on health care. He was 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 worked to increase the number of general practitioners, especially in states like West Virginia and Arkansas. Efforts at compromise came far too late, after voters had turned against a government takeover of health care, and the health care bill crashed and burned in September 1994. Rockefeller still would like a system-wide health care reform but recognizes that it cannot pass, and so he works on incremental changes, like the amendment he got passed unanimously in July 2002 to route $6 billion to Medicaid programs in the states. Perhaps his biggest legislative achievement was his 1992 law, passed over furious opposition from Western coal states, which forced union and non-union coal companies and ''reachback'' 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 has worked ever since to continue funding of this program for retired miners and their widows. In 2001, Rockefeller vehemently opposed the Bush tax cuts and argued that West Virginians, with the lowest incomes in the nation, received relatively little. Steel has been a preoccupation of Rockefeller for a long time. He was one of those who helped Weirton Steel, now West Virginia's fourth largest employer, 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 their homes. In 2002, he called for 40% tariffs for four years on steel imports. The Bush administration in March 2002 imposed a 24% tariff in the second year and 18% in the third; Rockefeller complained when the administration made exceptions and when it dropped the quotas. In December 2003, unhappy with a WTO ruling, he proposed setting up a panel of four former federal judges to review WTO decisions. Rockefeller has worked for several years to provide health care benefits to retired steelworkers whose former employers have gone out of business or filed for bankruptcy. He scaled down his original proposal to a $179 million refundable tax credit to cover 70% of health care costs. In May 2002, the Senate voted for this 56-40; not enough for approval, which required 60 votes. On the Aviation Subcommittee, Rockefeller passed a measure in 1999 increasing discretionary funding of small- and medium-sized airports; in May 2003 he got provisions for small airport aid in the FAA reauthorization. Included were $5.2 million in grants for Charleston's Yeager Airport, the 150th largest in the country. When the reauthorization bill was tied up in September 2003 over administration insistence on opening some air traffic controller jobs to private competition, Rockefeller worked to get a partial temporary reauthorization. In May 2004 he sponsored a bill for $700 million for better intelligence sharing, cargo security and air marshal programs. At home he worked with business leaders to set up the West Virginia Venture Connection Inc., a venture capital firm made possible by a law providing $25 million in EDA loans to such firms. In January 2003 Rockefeller became vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. The previous October he wrote to Pat Roberts, who became chairman, suggesting that if Democrats retained the majority he might fire all staff members and hire partisan staff. In July 2003 he argued that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and not just CIA Director George Tenet, should be blamed for the "sixteen words" about British intelligence in Africa in George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. But at the same time he was criticized by some Democrats for not being a partisan "team player" and for not opposing Roberts's opposition to a far-ranging investigation of intelligence before September 11 and on Iraq. In June 2003, when John Kerry said Bush had "lied" about intelligence, Rockefeller said, "The Senator is running for president. And I think that Pat Roberts and I make a distinction between people who are running for president and therefore need to capture attention and what we on the Intelligence Committee have to do." Later Roberts decided to hold hearings and in October 2003 he agreed with Rockefeller to include witnesses from the State and Defense Departments as well as the CIA. On November 4, radio talk show host Sean Hannity obtained a copy of a memo by Democratic committee staffers recommending that Democrats "pull the majority along" in extracting damaging disclosures from Democratic officials and then "pull the trigger" in 2004 to use the material to discredit Bush. Rockefeller said he never passed the memo along but declined to apologize for it, and approached Roberts with a letter promising not to let partisan motives affect the hearings. Roberts was not mollified. On November 12 he cancelled the committee's weekly assessment meeting and the next day he wrote in The Washington Post, "The Democrats planned to undermine the integrity of the committee by conducting a partisan attack, which threatens to destroy the credibility of an institution that has served the U.S. Senate and the nation well for nearly 30 years. I oppose them, and I make no apologies." Rockefeller responded, "One has to confront the very real possibility that this whole war was predetermined, so that the intelligence had to fit with the policymaking plans. So the Republicans just pounce on this little, pathetic stolen memo as the perfect opportunity to cover up whether there was White House manipulation of intelligence or whether there was [a] predetermined plan for war." In October 2002 Rockefeller had voted for the Iraq war resolution, so bitterly opposed by his West Virginia colleague Robert Byrd. In March 2004 he said, "If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it. I have admitted that my vote was wrong. … The decision got made before there was a whole bunch of intelligence. I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped." Nonetheless, some comity was restored; the committee agreed unanimously in May 2004 to abolish the eight-year limit on committee service. Rockefeller is in strong shape politically--strong enough that he no longer spends any of his own money and wins handsomely. He won by 63%-37% in 2002.
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