Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

On January 27, Nelson Rockefeller’s publicist announced that the former New York governor, working alone late the previous night in his Rockefeller Center office on a book about his art collection, had died of a heart attack. The next day, the spokesman issued a correction: the magnate had actually expired five blocks away, in his Manhattan apartment. “It’s one of those stupid goofs,” he apologized. “I had the wrong office.” Next, it emerged that he hadn’t been alone; he was with his thirty-one-year-old “staff assistant and coordinator of his art books,” Megan Marshack. Then that Marshack was “out of town and unavailable for interviews”; and was not thirty-one but twenty-five; and that Rockefeller had hired her away from a $15,000 job as a night editor at AP Radio at a salary of $60,000 even though she had no apparent expertise in art, and afforded her a $45,000 interest-free “loan” to buy an apartment two doors down from his town house; and, finally, that one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America had died naked amid boxes of unfinished Chinese food and a bottle of Dom Perignon, found by authorities wearing pants but no shoes. His panicked mistress had tried to put some on the corpse. But the feet were already too swollen.