Phil Reisman: Where have you gone, Nelson Rockefeller?

The median age in the United States is 37, which means that half the present-day population was either unborn or in early infanthood when Nelson Rockefeller died in 1979.

Some may only know him vaguely.

Minimally, they may recall that he was a governor as well as a scion to the great Rockefeller fortune. They may ask: Wasn't he the guy who had a fatal heart attack while making love to his much younger mistress?

On the subject of Rockefeller's ignominious death, the historian Richard Norton Smith says, "The sad thing was that for a generation, for several years at least, it defined him. That's terribly unfair. No one deserves to be remembered for the worst hour in their lives."

Smith is the author of the just published "On His Own Terms, A Life of Nelson Rockefeller," (Random House), a 721-page opus that critics have praised as the definitive biography of a man who was New York's governor from 1959 to 1973 and then briefly vice president under Gerald Ford.

Throughout those years, the liberal Rockefeller's great ambition was to become president, but his path to the White House was continually blocked by bad timing and the Republican party's dramatic shift to the right, which was in full display at the 1964 GOP convention in San Francisco where Rockefeller was booed and discarded in favor of Barry Goldwater. More than once, he flirted with the idea of becoming a Democrat, according to Smith, who on Wednesday was visiting the offices of WVOX radio in New Rochelle.

Rockefeller achieved big things, and as such seems a head taller than the men who followed him in office.

"The people of New York knew him as this blintz-eating, back slapping, tax raising force of nature who was the governor for 15 years, much as Franklin Roosevelt was president for 12 years" Smith said. "There's a whole generation of New Yorkers who equate this man with the office."

In his book, Smith's mission was to reintroduce him to the public as a complex, three-dimensional political figure, whose boundless optimism and unbridled altruism was summed up by Rockefeller himself when he said, "I believe that if you don't have a good education and good health then society has let you down."

That's not the kind of talk you hear from people in either party these days — at least not from those who realistically expect to get elected.

It took 14 years for Smith to get the book written, the first draft of which he wrote in longhand. The delay was caused in part by the surprise discovery of 120 boxes of collected papers marked "family and friends."

"Well, you can imagine that's the gold," Smith said. "I tore up the first 70,000 pages of my manuscript."

Despite the long wait, the book's release may have come at just the right time, when voters are beginning to focus on a contentious gubernatorial campaign. It is also a time when many Americans have lost faith in public and private institutions — and Rockefeller was nothing if not a builder of institutions.

His legacy includes the expansion of the state university system, the building and improvement of the state highway system, the creation of state parks, tackling water pollution and revamping public transportation. The list goes on and on. Sometimes it seemed he did the impossible.

"He took a terrible railroad, the LIRR, and made it a decent railroad," Smith said.

Smith said Rockefeller believed in giving people hope and a stake in the private economy. At the same time he managed to convince voters that their taxes were well-spent.

"Can you imagine doing that today?"

Rockefeller was not a perfect man. The Attica Prison riot in 1971, in which 43 people were killed, was a blot on his legacy. He had dyslexia, but didn't know the meaning of the word until he was 50.

And of course, he had a penchant for womanizing. He died "in the saddle," as an aide said of his fatal tryst, but Smith has concluded that Rockefeller's health was so poor that he might have died that night no matter what he was doing.

Smith recalled that Meade Esposito, the Brooklyn political boss, once said that Rockefeller never became president because he was too liberal for Republicans and too conservative for the Democrats. Rockefeller himself said he had a Republican head and a Democratic heart. In Smith's view, this made him a centrist.

Is such a political breed extinct? Smith doesn't think so.

In fact, he believes that many Americans are Rockefeller Republicans but either do not know it or are reluctant to admit it.

"Guess what?" Smith said. "There's still a middle of the road in this country."

Reach Phil Reisman at preisman@lohud.com. Twitter: @philreisman.