Kykuit on the Hudson
Nelson Rockefeller was once the governor of New York state. He never carried cash, people said, and when I met him in the ’60s at the State Fair, I was a Girl Scout. He was eating a coney (which he did not pay for), and it made the news. Later, when I moved to Washington, DC, in the ’70s, I worked for a congressman with the memorable name of Herman T. Schneebeli who had been Rockefeller’s freshman roommate at Dartmouth,. Rocky would come by, and in his low gravely unmistakable voice say that he wanted to see “Herm, that old SOB.” I was young then and such language from a public figure probably shocked me.
Little about the Rockefeller Estate, Kykuit, shocked me until we got to the basement. Kykuit means “lookout” in old Dutch, and the estate was built by patriarch John D. Rockefeller and…
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