Winthrop Paul Rockefeller

Mr. Rockefeller, one of the country’s richest men, was a great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, a founder of Standard Oil. His father, Winthrop, was a two-term governor of Arkansas and the brother of John D. III, Nelson, Laurance and David. The elder Winthrop moved to Arkansas from New York in 1953 after a bitter and, by the standards of the day, expensive divorce from Barbara Sears Rockefeller, a socialite and the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. Winthrop Paul was the couple’s only child. The elder Winthrop died of pancreatic cancer in 1973. In 1996, the son undertook the political path of the father and captured two-thirds of the vote in a special election for lieutenant governor. Mr. Rockefeller later won the two full four-year terms Arkansas law allows before starting his campaign for governor. He was then diagnosed with myeloproliferative disorder, a bone marrow malfunction in which excessive numbers of red or white blood cells are manufactured and which can lead to leukemia. With that announcement, Mr. Rockefeller ended his campaign for the Republican nomination for governor in Arkansas and began treatment Mr. Rockefeller’s uncle Nelson was elected governor of New York four times before resigning to become vice president under President Gerald R. Ford. John D. Rockefeller IV, a cousin, won two terms as governor of West Virginia and four terms in the United States Senate. He is survived by his wife, Lisenne Dudderar Rockefeller, whom he married in 1983, and by eight children, three from his first marriage, to Deborah Cluett Sage, which ended in divorce in 1979 after seven years. Mr. Rockefeller’s mother, 90, who moved to Arkansas from Manhattan in 2005, also survives him, as do a stepsister, Anne Bartley of San Francisco, and a stepbrother, Bruce Bartley of Little Rock. Mr. Rockefeller was the sole heir of his father’s estate, which, compared with his numerous cousins’ shares, made his part of his family’s enormous fortune all the larger. Forbes magazine, in its annual list of the wealthiest Americans, routinely reported Mr. Rockefeller’s assets at $1.2 billion, an estimate he just as routinely dismissed as greatly exaggerated.