Correction appended.
Nelson Rockefeller '30 may have graduated from Dartmouth and gone on to serve as governor of New York and vice president of the United States, but he privately struggled with dyslexia all his life, acclaimed biographer Richard Norton Smith, who is completing Rockefeller's biography, said Friday during a lecture in Loew Auditorium.
In one speech, Smith said Rockefeller defined the average family income of the 1950s as $100,000, far above the contemporary average. While Smith said some journalists used the speech to portray Rockefeller as a rich heir, out of touch with middle-class America, he said it was in fact because his dyslexia caused him to read $10,000 as $100,000.
"There has never been a better time to revisit the Rockefeller era in order to reintroduce this great, thundering paradox of a man," Smith said.
As a politician, Rockefeller was a man ahead of his time, supporting a universal health care policy and environmental conservation efforts in the 1950s, Smith said -- issues still debated in politics today.
Smith is writing the biography to push Rockefeller's image beyond that of a wealthy politician, Smith said. For instance, few people know of Rockefeller's passion for the arts, he said. By the end of his life, Rockefeller had collected some 16,000 pieces and had helped create the National Endowment for the Arts.
"All his life, Nelson Rockefeller went against the grain," Smith said. "What appears contradictory about him becomes much less so if we see him not as a politician who collected art, but as a frustrated artist who turned to politics."
As governor of New York from 1959 through 1973, Rockefeller brought the creativity of the arts to public policy, Smith said. Rockefeller implemented policies Smith hailed as visionary and artistic, such as the expansion of the State University of New York system and the creation of the New York State Urban Development Corporation.
"'What an artist imagines, an architect implicates,'" he said, quoting psychologist Erich Fromm. "Rockefeller did both. His entire public life was an exercise in doing something about [social issues]."
Rockefeller was also far from a stoic politician, Smith said, mentioning Rockefeller's response to a companion who asked him to identify his favorite piece of art in his collection.
"My china," Rockefeller answered, according to Smith. "Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night just to set the table."
Smith, a 1975 graduate of Harvard University, contributes regularly to C-SPAN and The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. His first book, "Thomas E. Dewey and His Times," was a 1983 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Smith is currently a scholar in residence at George Mason University.
Smith's lecture was a third of the Centennial lecture series, celebrating Nelson Rockefeller's 100th birthday and the Rockefeller Center's 25th anniversary.
The Center was lucky to have a lecturer of Smith's caliber, whom the Rockefeller Center staff found through searching "biography of Nelson Rockefeller" on Google, Andrew Samwick, director of the Rockefeller Center, said.
"Smith makes history alive and relevant for a mass audience," Samwick said. "This is the book he was born to write."
The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Andrew Samwick is the former director of the Rockefeller Center. In fact, he is the current director. The article also incorrectly referred to Smith as Wilson on one instance.
