Happy Rockefeller -- RIP

Happy Rockefeller
(Image: wikipedia.com)

Happy Rockefeller, whose marriage to Nelson Rockefeller became a Sixties cause celebre, passed away earlier this week at age 88. The New York Times' sympathetic obituary of the second Mrs. Rockefeller noted that she maintained an active, dignified life in New York's philanthropic circuits.

When then-Margareta Fitler Murphy (a/k/a "Happy") and Rocky dumped their respective spouses and became Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller, the nation (especially Republican voters) was scandalized. Divorce just wasn't done among respectable people and certainly not among people of quality. In a wholly unplanned and unwanted way, Happy Rockefeller led the way for women's emancipation. She quite ably worked political campaigns with her husband. She endured the philistine criticism of her martial choices. She maintained an active public life after Rocky dropped dead, allegedly in the arms of a paramour.

Shirley Chisholm
(Image: wikipedia.com)

Today, American women aspire to the highest political offices. Hillary Clinton found out the hard way in 2008 just how much misogyny exists in the American electorate (and that's among "progressive" Democrats!). Other women, such as Carly Fiorina, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, have openly expressed their presidential ambitions. In the mid-1960s, none of these women (nor Mrs. Clinton) would have had a puncher's chance of being taken seriously as potential Commanders-in-Chief. (Ironically, African-American congresswoman Shirley Chisholm did run for the presidency in 1972, and did win votes.)

Happy Rockefeller's experience as a "political" wife seems like an afterthought in the annals of women's political advancement. Her marriage to the "Chase Manhattan Bank made flesh," as Gore Vidal once characterized Governor Rockefeller, entwined with Rocky's lust for the presidency, became a particularly dreadful form of American moral theatre. Smart minds like to assert the nation has "moved on" from those dim days. However, will America permit its presidential candidates. such as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the right to moral privacy?