Leadership Quote by Nelson Rockefeller

Rockefeller is doing a very American kind of moral bookkeeping: if the nation wants to keep spending power like a credit card, it has to keep paying interest in legitimacy. The line turns on a tidy contrast between “power” and “promise,” “extraordinary in might” and “exemplary in meaning.” That parallel structure isn’t decoration; it’s a warning dressed up as civic uplift. He’s telling listeners that muscle alone is politically expensive. It breeds resentment abroad, cynicism at home, and eventually a credibility gap that no arsenal can patch.

The intent is as much managerial as inspirational. Rockefeller, the patrician Republican who governed New York and later served as Ford’s vice president, was a Cold War pragmatist with a reformer’s self-image. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate 1970s, “America as example” reads like triage: the country’s symbolic capital had been badly depleted. To argue that America must be “exemplary” is to concede, indirectly, that it hasn’t been. The subtext is reputational repair.

There’s also a conservative-liberal hybrid at work: he keeps the premise of American exceptionalism (“extraordinary”) but conditions it with ethics (“meaning”). That’s not anti-power; it’s a bid to moralize power so it can be used more freely. “Promise” suggests a contract, and contracts imply breach. Rockefeller’s sentence is an establishment figure trying to rebind the national narrative: not less dominance, but dominance with a story the world can stomach and citizens can believe.