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David Rockefeller (born June 12, 1915) is a prominent American banker, philanthropist and world statesman and the current patriarch of the renowned Rockefeller family. He is the youngest and only surviving son and grandson, respectively, of the prominent philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and the billionaire oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil. His five deceased siblings are: Abby, John D. 3rd, Nelson, Laurance and Winthrop. Early life He was born in New York City, at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, a nine-story mansion owned by his father, then the largest private residence in the city; which was subsequently donated by the family as a site for the complex of the Museum of Modern Art. He spent much time as a child at the vast family estate of Pocantico (see Kykuit), where he recalls visits by, among many other famous visitors, the adventurers Admiral Richard Byrd (whose Antarctic expeditions had been funded by his father) and the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. He graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1936 and studied for a year at the London School of Economics - which had strong links to the family through his father and the family's foundation; it was also where he first met John F Kennedy - although he had been his contemporary at Harvard - and briefly dated his sister Kathleen.He received his Ph.D. from the family created (1889) University of Chicago in 1940; his dissertation was entitled: "Unused Resources and Economic Waste". In that year, in order to gain experience in government service, he became secretary to New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia for eighteen months in what is known as a "dollar a year" public service position. In 1943 he enlisted in the war effort and entered Officer Candidate School; he was ultimately promoted to captain in 1945. During World War II he served in North Africa and France (he spoke fluent French) for military intelligence and set up political and economic intelligence units, while also serving for seven months as an assistant military attaché at the US Embassy in Paris. During this period he would call on family contacts for assistance, establish contacts of his own, and come to highly regard the invaluable potential of "networking". The consummate networker After the war he returned to the family office, Room 5600, in Rockefeller Center, where he joined up with his brothers in their reorganisation of this pivotal family establishment; attended as secretary to the regular brothers' meetings; and participated in some of their myriad business and philanthropic ventures. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as a director in 1949, the youngest to be appointed to that position up to that time. It was later established however that his connection to the Council predated this directorship. He had earlier played a role in the Council's deliberations as the secretary of the CFR Study Group on "Reconstruction in Western Europe", that met over the years 1946-47. The deliberations of that group are credited with influencing the Truman Administration's decision to reconstruct war ravaged Europe with US financial aid, subsequently known as the Marshall Plan. Thus began a lifelong association with this prestigious Council, which had already been financially supported for its establishment, in 1921, by his father, as well as ongoing financial support from the family's Rockefeller Foundation and family-created oil companies; along with a Standard Oil executive's widow providing the mansion for its expanded New York headquarters, Harold Pratt House, in 1944. Through his extended membership, including as the prominent long term chairman, he met all the major foreign policy figures of successive presidential administrations from Truman onwards to the present day - for example, the current Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice and the vice-president, Richard Cheney, are longtime Council members. Another connection he developed in the 1950s was with the CIA. As well as knowing Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles since his college years, it was in Room 3603 in Rockefeller Center that Allen Dulles had set up his WW11 operational center after Pearl Harbor, liaising closely with MI6 who also had their principal US operation in the Center. He also knew and associated with the former CIA director Richard Helms, as well as Archibald Roosevelt, a Chase Bank employee and former CIA agent, whose cousin was the CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, involved in the Iran coup of 1953. Moreover, in Cary Reich's biography of his brother Nelson, a former CIA agent states that David was extensively briefed on covert intelligence operations by himself and other Agency division chiefs, under the direction of David's "friend and confidant", CIA Director Allen Dulles. A committed internationalist, due to the strong influence of his father, he further spread his connections when he was invited to attend the inaugural (and subsequently highly influential} Bilderberg Group meetings, starting with the Holland gathering in 1954. It was a dissatisfaction with the failure of this group to include Japan that subsequently led to him forming the Trilateral Commission in 1973, influenced by, among others, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor under Carter. This Commission was to come under media scrutiny (and become the focus ever after of conspiracy theorists) when it was later disclosed that Carter appointed 15 former Commission members (who must resign before taking up government positions) to senior positions in his Administration. Moreover, it also came out that Carter himself was a former Trilateral member. (The Clinton Administration, by contrast, had close to a dozen Commission members, including Clinton himself; both Gerald Ford and George Bush Sr were also Trilateralists.) In November, 1979, while chairman of the Chase Bank, Rockefeller became embroiled in an international incident when he and Henry Kissinger, along with John J. McCloy and Rockefeller's aides, persuaded President Jimmy Carter through the State Department to admit the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into the US for hospital treatment for lymphoma. This action directly precipitated what is known as the Iran hostage crisis and placed Rockefeller under intense media scrutiny (particularly from The New York Times) for the first time in his public life. President Jimmy Carter offered him the positions of Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman but he declined both positions, preferring a private role (recommending Volcker instead as Fed Chairman, who was subsequently appointed). Another offer he declined was from his brother Nelson, who offered to appoint him to Robert Kennedy's Senate seat after Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, a post Nelson also offered to their nephew Jay Rockefeller. In his private capacity he has worked with every US president since Eisenhower, at times serving as an unofficial emissary on high-level diplomatic missions (an "ambassador without portfolio"). In addition, he has acted as spokesman for the U.S. business and financial community and the New York City business community to US Presidents on several notable occasions, notably the occasion of New York City's budgetary crisis of 1975. In his extensive world travels, flying from country to country in his private Grumman Gulfstream jet, he has met a vast range of world leaders, including Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev and, notably, Saddam Hussein. Other notable figures whom he has counted amongst his personal friends include members of the Rothschild, Henry Ford and Dulles families, along with such high profile individuals as Katharine Graham, of the Washington Post, Brooke Astor, Nelson Mandela and Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, who succeeded Rockefeller as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1985. Another prominent American public official with whom Rockefeller has had a longstanding relationship was his brother Nelson's one-time protege, Henry Kissinger, whose wife, Nancy Kissinger, (née Maginnes) was a former foreign policy aide to his brother. They apparently first met in 1957, when Kissinger chaired a seminal Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons, of which David was a member.He collaborated with Kissinger on numerous occasions and fully supported his "opening of China" initiative as it afforded banking opportunities for the Chase Bank. In 1992, at a Council of the Americas sponsored forum, Rockefeller proposed a "Western Hemisphere free trade area", which subsequently became the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in a Miami summit in 1994. His chief liaison to the then President Clinton in order to garner support for this initiative was through Clinton's chief of staff, Thomas McLarty, who now sits on the board of directors of Rockefeller's Americas Society in New York. Career at the Chase Bank In 1946, David became the family's first and only banker when he joined the staff of the longtime family-associated Chase National Bank (the "Rockefeller Bank"), whose chairman at that time was his uncle Winthrop Aldrich, the brother of his mother, Abby Aldrich. Chase National subsequently became the Chase Manhattan Bank in 1955, now JP Morgan Chase & Co. He worked his way up through the ranks - but was never a teller and never made a loan - becoming president in 1960. He was chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan from 1969 to 1980 and chairman till 1981. He was also, as recently as 1980, the single largest individual shareholder of the bank, holding 1.7% of its shares.. The Chase was primarily a wholesale bank, dealing with other prominent financial institutions and major corporate clients such as General Electric (which had leased space and become a crucial major tenant of Rockefeller Center, rescuing that project in 1930). The bank also is closely associated with and has financed the oil industry, having board directors' connections to the successor companies of Standard Oil, especially Exxon Mobil. It was only through the 1955 merger that the bank shifted significantly into consumer banking. In 1960 a new bank headquarters was constructed under his direction at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, on Liberty Street in downtown Manhattan, directly across from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At 60 stories, it was at the time the largest bank building in the world, and had, five floors below ground, the largest bank vault then in existence. The Chase Bank's principal competitor - then and now - was National City Bank of New York, now Citibank and a division of the holding company Citigroup. Ironically, National City had a long association with the Rockefeller family through James Stillman of Standard Oil and David's great-uncle William Rockefeller. When their children intermarried they became the Stillman Rockefellers and James Stillman Rockefeller was chairman of National City (beginning in 1959) when David became Chase president in 1960. In the 1960's he and others formed the Chase International Advisory Committee, consisting of prominent and respected businessmen throughout the world, many of whom were his personal friends; he was subsequently to become chairman until he retired from that position in 1999. After the J. P. Morgan merger, this committee became the International Council, for which he was a director in 2000, along with other notable figures then and since, such as Kissinger, Riley P. Bechtel and George Shultz, the current chairman. Under his stewardship the Chase spread internationally and became a central pillar in the world's financial system, including being the leading bank for the United Nations. It has a global network of correspondent banks that has been estimated to number about 50,000, the largest of any bank in the world. A notable achievement was the setting up of the first branch of an American bank at One Karl Marx Square, near the Kremlin, in the then Soviet Union, in 1973. This was also the year Rockefeller travelled to China, resulting in his bank becoming the National Bank of China's first correspondent bank in the US. The bank also had a strong connection to the World Bank, as three presidents (John J. McCloy, Eugene Black and George Woods) all worked at Chase before taking up positions at the international bank. A fourth president (James D. Wolfensohn) is also closely associated with Rockefeller, serving as a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, amongst other family-created institutions. The Chase was also the bank Paul Volcker worked for before he became Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker has had a long association with Rockefeller, becoming a member of the Trust Committee of Rockefeller Group, Inc., the real estate firm run by the family, after he left that prominent financial institution. The family estate: Pocantico Further to Rockefeller's numerous Chase Bank and Council on Foreign Relations connections, he hosted annual luncheons at the family's Westchester County 3,400 acre Pocantico estate for senior officials from the World Bank and IMF, which were also attended by John D 3rd up until his death in 1978. This is just one of many instances of innumerable visits of many prominent world leaders, kings and presidents and other personages to the vast estate and its central mansion (see Kykuit), in addition to visits to his own residence there, "Hudson Pines" - President Ronald Reagan, to give just one example, stayed overnight at the family estate in 1986. The Kykuit area of the family estate is also the location of The Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) - set up by David and his four brothers and one sister in 1940 - which was created when the Fund leased the area from the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1991. It provides a setting where the Fund and other nonprofit organizations and public sector institutions can bring together people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives to engage in critical issues. Family patriarch Following the deaths of his brothers, John D 3rd in 1978, Nelson in 1979, and Laurance in 2004, David became sole head of the family and hence of Room 5600, the family office based on the 54 -56th floors of the landmark GE Building in Rockefeller Center. This is the historical seat of all the family's affairs, with hundreds of staff advisors and assistants handling all the personal, legal, real estate, accounting, investment and philanthropic interests of the six-generation clan, numbering now an estimated 150 direct blood relatives. In addition, the prominent Rockefeller-associated law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy (John J. McCloy being the last named partner), located in the JP Morgan Chase headquarters building at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, has served as the family's private legal advisors - and is also legal counsel for the Chase - since the days of David's father, John D. Jr. David ensured that selected members of the fourth generation - known generically as the Cousins, 24 in all with 21 still living - also became directly involved in the family's institutions, including Room 5600 and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the principal foundation established in 1940 by the five brothers and their sister. They also became involved in their own philanthropic organisation, formed in 1967, called the Rockefeller Family Fund. Overall family cohesion is maintained through ritual annual meetings held in June and December of each year at the “Playhouse” on the family estate at Pocantico (see Kykuit). In 2000 he presided over the final sale of Rockefeller Center to Jerry Speyer's Tishman Speyer Properties, along with the Crown family of Chicago, which ended the more than 70 years of family financial association with the landmark New York complex. It later turned out that he had a long association with Jerry Speyer through the Museum of Modern Art, so there was still an enduring partnership in operation, though not financial in nature. In 2003, he served as "honorary member" of the Jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. This was appropriate as he had created and chaired the original Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association that had initiated the Center, along with major backing from his brother, Nelson Rockefeller, who was the New York governor at the time. In 2005, at age ninety, he gave $100 million to the Museum of Modern Art and $50 million to Rockefeller University, two of the most prominent family institutions. David's hobbies include having a dedicated and lifelong interest in entomology, as well as being a frequent sailor on his private yacht. A prodigious networker, he possesses a famous Rolodex in his office at Room 5600 in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, containing up to one hundred thousand entries of the most powerful people in the world. His net wealth is estimated at 2.5 billion dollars, making him the 215th wealthiest person in the world. Initially, most of his wealth had come to him via the family Trusts that his father had set up, which were administered by Room 5600 and the Chase Bank. In turn, most of these Trusts were held as shares in the successor companies of Standard Oil. As recently as 1998, he and other family members were still minority shareholders of the primary Standard Oil offshoot, Exxon Mobil and David was keeping tabs on the company's progress. His Memoirs were published in 2002, the first and only time a member of the six-generation clan has written an autobiography. Notably, it was over ten years in the writing, with many personal staff in Room 5600 involved, including Fraser P. Seitel, a former head of public affairs at the Chase Bank and one of the premier public relations professionals in America. Seitel is the author of the acclaimed textbook The Practice of Public Relations, and a senior counselor for the leading public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, a division of WPP, one of the world's largest communication services companies. Some positions held/institutions founded during his lifetime Awards Awards created by or named after Clubs Quotations Further reading Children David married Margaret "Peggy" McGrath (1915-1996) in September, 1940 and they had six children. As of 2002, he had ten grandchildren. A granddaughter, Miranda Duncan, came to media attention in April, 2005, when she publicly resigned, without disclosing reasons, from her position as a senior investigator for the UN Iraq Oil-for-Food Probe, conducted by Paul Volcker, into the possible involvement of Kofi Annan. See also | |||||||
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