David Rockefeller
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| David Rockefeller | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 12, 1915 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Residence | Sleepy Hollow, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | A.B. in 1936 & Ph.D. in 1940 |
| Alma mater | Harvard University London School of Economics University of Chicago |
| Occupation | Banker, philanthropist |
| Years active | 1940–present |
| Net worth |  US$ 2.7 billion (2013)[1] |
| Board member of | Rockefeller Brothers Fund |
| Spouse(s) | Margaret McGrath (m. 1940–1996) |
| Children |
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| Parents | |
| Relatives |
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| Family | Rockefeller family |
David Rockefeller (born June 12, 1915) is an American businessman and philanthropist who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Bank. The most senior member of theRockefeller family, David is the only surviving child ofJohn Davison Rockefeller, Jr. and Abigail Greene "Abby" Aldrich, and the only surviving grandchild of oil tycoon John Davison Rockefeller, Sr. (founder ofStandard Oil) and Laura Celestia "Cettie" Spelman. His five siblings were Abby, John D. III, Nelson,Laurance and Winthrop.
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[hide]Early life
Rockefeller was born in New York City, and grew up in a nine-story house at 10 West 54th Street, then the largest private residence in the city. The home contained rare, ancient, medieval and Renaissancetreasures collected by his father— with some, such as the Unicorn Tapestries, held in an adjoining building at 12 West 54th Street. On the seventh floor was his mother Abby's private modern art gallery. The house was subsequently donated by David's father as a site for a sculpture garden in his wife's name and memory, now part of the Museum of Modern Art.
He spent much time as a child at the family estate Kykuit, where, in his memoirs, he recalls visits by associates of his father, including General George C. Marshall, the adventurer Admiral Richard Byrd(whose Antarctic expeditions had been funded by the family), and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.[2]Summer vacations were spent at the Eyrie, a 100-room house in Seal Harbor on the southeast shore of Mount Desert Island, in Maine. The house was demolished by the family in the early 1960s.
Rockefeller attended the experimental Lincoln School at 123rd Street in Harlem. The school was the brainchild of Abraham Flexner, who had structured the institution after the educational philosophy ofJohn Dewey. It opened in 1916 and was operated by the Teachers College at Columbia University, with crucial funding in its early years from the Rockefellers' General Education Board, a philanthropic educational institution later rolled into the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 1936, Rockefeller graduated cum laude from Harvard University. He did a postgraduate year in economics at Harvard and then a year at the London School of Economics. It was at the LSE that he first met John F. Kennedy (although he had earlier been his contemporary at Harvard) and briefly dated Kennedy's sister Kathleen.[3] During his time abroad, Rockefeller briefly worked in the London branch of what was to become the Chase Manhattan Bank. Having returned to the United States to complete his graduate studies, in 1940 he received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His dissertation was entitled Unused Resources and Economic Waste.
After completing his studies in Chicago, he became secretary to New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia for eighteen months in a "dollar a year" public service position. Although the mayor pointed out to the press that Rockefeller was only one of 60 interns in the city government, his working space was, in fact, the vacant office of the deputy mayor.[4]
From 1941 to 1942, Rockefeller then served as assistant regional director of the United States Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services. After war broke out, he enlisted in the war effort and entered Officer Candidate School in 1943; he was ultimately promoted to captain in 1945. DuringWorld War II he served in North Africa and France (he spoke fluent French) for military intelligencesetting up political and economic intelligence units. For seven months he also served as an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Paris. During this period, he would call on family contacts and Standard Oil executives for assistance, establish contacts of his own, and come to value the potential of networking.[5]
Career at the Chase Bank
In 1946, Rockefeller joined the staff of the longtime family-associated Chase National Bank. The chairman at that time was Rockefeller's uncle Winthrop Aldrich, the son of the powerful U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and the brother of Rockefeller's mother. The Chase Bank was primarily a wholesale bank, dealing with other prominent financial institutions and major corporate clients such as General Electric (which had, through its RCA affiliate, leased prominent space and become a crucial first tenant of Rockefeller Center in 1930). The bank also is closely associated with and has financed the oil industry, having longstanding connections with its board directors to the successor companies of Standard Oil, especially Exxon Mobil. Chase National subsequently became the Chase Manhattan Bank in 1955 and shifted significantly into consumer banking. It is now called JPMorgan Chase.
Rockefeller started as an assistant manager (the lowest rank) in the Foreign Department. There he financed international trade in a number of commodities, such as coffee, sugar and metals. This position also maintained relationships with more than 1,000 correspondent banks throughout the world. He worked his way up through the ranks and became president in 1960. He was chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan from 1969 to 1980 and chairman until 1981. He was also, as recently as 1980, the single largest individual shareholder of the bank, holding 1.7% of its shares.[6]
In 1954, Rockefeller became chairman of the committee charged with deciding the location of the bank's new headquarters. The following year his decision to erect the building in the Wall Street area was accepted; it was subsequently seen as a decision that directly revived the City's downtown financial district. In 1960 the headquarters was completed 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 that time the largest bank building in the world; it also had, five floors below ground, the largest bank vault then in existence.
In the 1960s Rockefeller and other businessmen formed the Chase International Advisory Committee (IAC) — which by 2005 consisted of twenty-eight prominent and respected businessmen from 19 nations throughout the world, many of whom were his personal friends. Rockefeller subsequently became chairman until he retired from that position on the IAC in 1999. After the Chase's merger with J. P. Morgan, this committee was renamed the International Council, and contains prominent figures such as Henry Kissinger, Riley P. Bechtel (of the Bechtel Group), Andre Desmarais, Lee Kuan Yew and George Shultz, the current chairman. Historically, prominent figures on the IAC have included Gianni Agnelli (a longtime associate, who spent thirty years on the Committee), John Loudon (Chairman of Royal Dutch-Shell), C. Douglas Dillon, David Packard andHenry Ford II.[7]
Under his stewardship Chase spread internationally and became a central pillar in the world's financial system; Chase 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. That year Rockefeller also traveled to China, resulting in his bank becoming the National Bank of China's first correspondent bank in the United States. In November 1979, while chairman of the Chase Bank, Rockefeller became embroiled in an international incident when he andHenry Kissinger, along with John J. McCloy and Rockefeller aides, persuaded President Jimmy Carter through the United States Department of State to admit the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into the United States 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.[8]
Political life
In a private capacity Rockefeller has interfaced with every United States president since Eisenhower and has even at times served as an unofficial emissary on high-level diplomatic missions. President Jimmy Carter offered him the positions of United States Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman but he declined both instead preferring a private role. He at an earlier point declined an offer from his brother Nelson 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.[9] On account of his personal, political, and professional connections and his family name, Rockefeller has been able to act as bridge to various interests around the world—even controversial leaders such as Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein.
In Henry Kissinger, Rockefeller found a political operative with an international and domestic perspective similar to his. They first met in 1954, when Kissinger was appointed a director of a seminal Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons, of which David was a member.[10] The relationship developed to the point that Kissinger was invited to sit on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Rockefeller consulted with Kissinger on numerous occasions, as for example in the Chase Bank's interests in Chile and the threat of the election of Salvador Allende in 1970,[11] and fully supported his "opening of China" initiative in 1971 as it afforded banking opportunities for the Chase Bank.[12]
Though a lifelong Republican and party contributor, like his father in the dynastic line, he is a committed member of the moderate "Rockefeller Republicans" that arose out of the political ambitions and public policy stance of his brother Nelson. In 2006 he teamed up with former Goldman Sachs executives and others to form a fund-raising group based in Washington, Republicans Who Care, that supported moderate Republican candidates over more ideological contenders.[13]
Rockefeller also reportedly has connections to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As well as knowingAllen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles — who was an in-law of the family [14] since his college years,[15] it was in Rockefeller Center that Allen Dulles had set up his WWII operational center after Pearl Harbor, liaising closely with MI6 which also had their principal U.S. operation in the Center.[16] He also knew and associated with the former CIA director Richard Helms, as well asArchibald Roosevelt, Jr., a Chase Bank employee and former CIA agent, whose cousin was the CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., involved in the Iran coup of 1953.[17] Also, in 1953, he had befriendedWilliam Bundy, a pivotal CIA analyst for nine years in the 1950s, who became the Agency liaison to the National Security Council, and a subsequent lifelong friend.[18] 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.[19]
Additionally, he serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the Bilderberg Group.[20]
Policy groups
Throughout his life, Rockefeller has participated in and even created a number of policy groups aimed at responding to domestic and international concerns. In 1947, Rockefeller was invited to join the board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; serving on the board were such figures as Alger Hiss, John Foster Dulles (chairman), Dwight D. Eisenhower and the president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson. He accepted the prestigious appointment and was subsequently instrumental in relocating the Endowment's headquarters to a site opposite the new United Nations headquarters building, with a Chase Bank branch on the ground floor.[21] In 1964, along with other prominent American business figures such as Sol Linowitz, Rockefeller founded the non-profit International Executive Service Corps which focused on bringing prosperity and stability through private enterprise to some of the world's poorest places. In 1967, he formed The Business Committee for the Arts, Inc. (BCA), which is a national not-for-profit based in New York that established the annual Business in the Arts Awards, awarded to businesses who have formed exemplary partnerships with the arts community; this organization is co-sponsored by Forbes Magazine.[22] In 1979, he formed the Partnership for New York City, which is another not-for-profit membership organization consisting of a select group of two hundred CEOs ("Partners") from New York City’s top corporate, investment and entrepreneurial firms. They are elected annually and committed to working closely with government, labor and the nonprofit sector to enhance the economy and maintain New York City’s position as the global center of commerce, culture and innovation. Through its roster of blue-chip corporations, Rockefeller sits at the core of a network of the most powerful and influential businessmen and women in corporate America.[23] In 1992, he was selected as a leading member of the Russian-American Bankers Forum, an advisory group set up by the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to advise Russia on the modernization of its banking system, with the full endorsement of President Boris Yeltsin.[24]
On the world stage, influenced by the globalist perspective of his father, Rockefeller involved himself in a number of policy organizations focused on improving international relations. Rockefeller began a lifelong association with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) when he joined as a director in 1949, the youngest member appointed to that position yet. He would later become head of the nominating committee for future membership and after that much the chairman of this influential foreign policy think-tank.[25] In 1965, Rockefeller and other businessmen formed the Council of the Americas to stimulate and support economic integration in the Americas. In 1992, at a Council 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 and the Council's chief liaison to President Bill Clinton in order to garner support for this initiative was through Clinton's chief of staff, Mack McLarty, whose consultancy firm Kissinger McLarty Associates is a corporate member of the Council, while McLarty himself is on the board of directors.[26]
Displeased with the failure of the Council on Foreign Relations to include Japan, Rockefeller helped found the Trilateral Commission in July 1973. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisorunder Carter and fierce advocate for international cooperation, became the inaugural United States director. Perhaps the most important aspect of the Commission is their commitment to facilitating high-level international dialogue.
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