John Wheeler was the inventor of quantum gravity – not as a formal program for uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics, but as the potential key to a theory of everything. In this talk, I will show how he first imbued quantum gravity with this new role in the 1950s and then how (and why) he ultimately abandoned this approach in favor of a non-spatiotemporal (“pregeometric”) approach to a final theory in the 1970s.