Rocky!

George Will (and Richard Norton Smith) remember Nelson Rockefeller. An excerpt:

Like Lyndon Johnson, who also was born in 1908, Rockefeller as a young man experienced wartime Washington mobilizing the nation's productivity. Like Johnson, Rockefeller may have embraced the misconception that a free society could and should perform in peacetime the sort of prodigies that the United States accomplished in 1941-1945 as a garrison state. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson exclaimed: "We're in favor of a lot of things, and we're against mighty few." As one of Rockefeller's top assistants said of him, "He'd have solutions going around looking for problems." Rockefeller was, Smith says, "Too busy doing to entertain doubts." And he was "a serial alarmist," trumpeting crises in order to justify spending.