NEW YORK: The Rocky Roll

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5,000,000 Sq. Ft. A week after graduation ('30), he married Philadelphia Socialite Mary Todhunter Clark (sniffed a Main Line matron: "A young New York man is marrying into the Clark family"). Wedding present from the groom's parents: a year's trip around the world. Armed with letters of introduction to government officials and Standard Oil executives, Nelson and "Tod" Rockefeller journeyed from Europe to India to the Far East, spent most of their honeymoon discussing world problems with Prime Ministers and potentates.

Home again, Rockefeller got a business challenge from his father. To provide a site for a new opera house, John D. Jr. had bought up a dozen acres of mid-Manhattan brownstones just off Fifth Avenue. The opera house fell through. Undaunted, John D. Jr. decided to erect an integrated system of office buildings, courts and shops. Floor after grey granite floor of what was to become the 15-building Rockefeller Center was rising. Nelson Rockefeller's task: to rent at the depths of the Depression no less than 5,000,000 sq. ft. of floor space. He did it by luring potential tenants with more attractive rents and facilities, sped their entry into Rockefeller Center by buying up their long-term leases in other buildings. Rival landlords fumed, one filed a $10 million damage suit. But tempers cooled and the suit was dropped when Rockefeller Center set up a subleasing office, found tenants for the space from which it had drawn its own clientele.

Beyond the Fence. In 1935 Rockefeller visited South America on a trip that changed his life. In Venezuela he discovered the abysmal difference between the standard of living inside the U.S. oil compounds and outside. Few U.S. executives knew Spanish; as a result, their companies had little contact with the Latin American world beyond the fence. To Rockefeller the environment needed working on. Home again, he enrolled at the Berlitz School (Rockefeller Center class), studied Spanish two hours a day for three months. Returning to Venezuela as a director of Standard Oil's subsidiary, Creole Petroleum, he hopped from Creole compound to compound, persuaded the company to improve conditions on the outside, urged U.S. oilworkers to learn the language.

To Nelson Rockefeller's mind, the oil companies were not alone in neglecting Latin America. The U.S. itself had scant contact south of the border, and with war coming, as he saw it, needed Western Hemisphere neighbor nations it hardly knew. Rockefeller put the blame on the State Department for not following up U.S. business entries into Latin America with higher-type diplomacy, said as much in a report he forwarded to White House Chamberlain Harry Hopkins. Hopkins read the report, showed it to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt asked the 32-year-old Rockefeller to visit him. Upshot of the call: Rockefeller's appointment as coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the beginning of an intermittent 15-year government career.