Her Rockefeller romance caused a stir, when divorce still had power to shock
“Most people can get a divorce without having the world hang on it,” Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller once told a reporter.
But in 1963, divorce was still a scandal. And she and her husband were not “most people.”
That year, she married Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor and front-runner for the 1964 Republican nomination for president. Their marital history was widely seen as a political drawback that cost him the ticket.
Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller, who ultimately served as the United States’ second lady when her husband became Gerald Ford’s vicepresident, died last week at 88.
In the early 1960s, the sexual revolution was still a distant rumble and divorce was viewed as a disgrace. So when the politically ambitious scion of the oil-rich Rockefeller clan ended his long first marriage to marry a socialite 18 years his junior — someone who had left her husband and four young children to be with him — the headlines were not confined to the society page.
“Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, gambling his political future for his love, married newly divorced Margaretta (Happy) Murphy Saturday,” the Los Angeles Times’ story about their marriage began.
Leading Republicans were unsparingly critical.
“Have we come to the point where a governor can desert his wife and children, and persuade a young woman to abandon her four children and husband?” Prescott Bush, the former U.S. senator who was father of a future president and grandfather of another, told the New York Times.
A divorced man had never won the White House. (That barrier would not be broken until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.)
Rockefeller’s remarriage was generally regarded as a detriment to his political fortunes but a boon to that of his chief rival for the 1964 nomination, Sen. Barry Goldwater.
Although modest and shy, Happy Rockefeller joined her husband on the campaign trail, surprising some observers who expected a femme fatale. Journalist Theodore H. White later wrote that she reminded him of “tennis, not nightclubs; soap, not perfume; sailing, not sport cars.”
Her husband was unable to sway enough voters, though, and withdrew from the race. Goldwater won the nomination but suffered a lopsided loss in the general election to president Lyndon Johnson. Nelson Rockefeller was in his fourth term as New York governor when he became vice-president under Ford in 1974. Happy had hoped her husband would retire from politics after he was done being governor. “I had wanted that to be the end of politics,” she told the Chicago Tribune decades later. “I wanted Nelson to come home so we would have time.”
He died of a heart attack in1979, two years after he and Ford left office.
Happy Rockefeller was also credited with helping to raise awareness about breast cancer. She spoke openly about her two mastectomies, which she underwent shortly after first lady Betty Ford had the same operation.