Happy Rockefeller's Marriage to Nelson Was WORSE Than America Believed

In April 1963, Margaretta Murphy was thirty-six, a doctor's wife, and the mother of four. Five weeks before she married Nelson Rockefeller, she gave up custody of all four of those children in a closed Idaho courtroom. The agreement was sealed and its terms have never been published. What happened next is on the record, date by date. Her own family had known the Rockefellers for years - her first husband was a virus researcher at the Rockefeller Institute, his father had worked there for nearly forty years, and the family lived next door to David Rockefeller. The judge who waived the three-day waiting period so the wedding could go ahead quickly was the same judge who, eighteen months later, heard her attempt to get the children back and turned it down. All four stayed with their father. When the ruling came, their father embraced his lawyer and kissed him on the cheek. She stood in the corridor and smoked one cigarette after another. Eleven years later she found a lump in her own breast in the same weeks the country was talking about the First Lady's surgery, and had an operation that changed how American women were treated. And on a Friday night in January 1979, the family gave one account of her husband's death, then another, then another. The New York Times counted the versions and printed the contradictions. We walk through them in order and stop where the documents stop.