David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller (June 12, 1915 – March 20, 2017) was an American economist and investment banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation. He was the oldest living member of the Rockefeller family from 2004 until his death in 2017. Rockefeller was the fifth son and youngest child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

He was noted for his wide-ranging political connections and foreign travel, in which he met with many foreign leaders. His fortune was estimated at $3.3 billion at the time of his death.

Rockefeller was born in New York City, where he grew up in an eight-story house at 10 West 54th Street, the tallest private residence ever built in the city at the time. Rockefeller was the youngest of six children born to financier John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and socialite Abigail Greene "Abby" Aldrich. His father John Jr. was the only son of Standard Oil co-founder John Davison Rockefeller Sr. and schoolteacher Laura Celestia "Cettie" Spelman.

His mother Abby was a daughter of Rhode Island U.S. Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich and Abigail Pearce Truman "Abby" Chapman. David's five elder siblings were Abby, John III, Nelson, Laurance, and Winthrop.

Rockefeller attended the experimental Lincoln School at 123rd Street in Harlem. The school, which was associated with Columbia University, was founded with the help of Rockefeller's educational philanthropy, the General Education Board.

In 1936, Rockefeller graduated cum laude from Harvard University, where he worked as an editor on The Harvard Crimson. He also studied economics for a year at Harvard and then a year at the London School of Economics (LSE) under Friedrich von Hayek. He once dated Kathleen Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington. During his time abroad, Rockefeller briefly worked in the London branch of what was to become the Chase Manhattan Bank.

After returning to the United States to complete his graduate studies, he received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1940.

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 the vacant office of the deputy mayor. From 1941 to 1942, Rockefeller was assistant regional director of the United States Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services.

Rockefeller enlisted in the United States Army and entered Officer Candidate School in 1943. He was promoted to Captain in 1945. During World War II he served in North Africa and France (he spoke fluent French) for military intelligence, setting up political and economic intelligence units. He served as a "Ritchie Boy" secret unit specially trained at Fort Ritchie, Maryland. For seven months, he served as an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Paris. During this period, he called on family contacts and Standard Oil executives for assistance.

In 1946, Rockefeller joined the staff of the longtime family-associated Chase National Bank. The chairman at that time was Rockefeller's uncle Winthrop W. Aldrich. 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 is closely associated with and has financed the oil industry, having longstanding connections with its board of directors to the successor companies of Standard Oil, especially ExxonMobil. Chase National 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 in the foreign department. There he financed international trade in a number of commodities, such as coffee, sugar and metals. This position maintained relationships with more than 1,000 correspondent banks throughout the world. He served in other positions and became president in 1960. He was both the chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan from 1969 to 1980 and remained chairman until 1981. He was also, as recently as 1980, the single largest individual shareholder of the bank, holding 1.7% of its shares.

During his term as CEO, Chase spread internationally and became a central component of the world's financial system due to its global network of correspondent banks, the largest in the world. In 1973, Chase established the first branch of an American bank in Moscow, in the then Soviet Union. That year Rockefeller traveled to China, resulting in his bank becoming the National Bank of China's first correspondent bank in the U.S.

Rockefeller traveled widely and met with both foreign rulers and U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower. At times he served as an unofficial emissary on high-level business. Among the foreign leaders he met were Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1968, he declined an offer from his brother Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, to appoint him to Robert F. Kennedy's Senate seat after Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, a post Nelson also offered to their nephew John Davison "Jay" Rockefeller IV. President Jimmy Carter offered him the position of United States Secretary of the Treasury but he declined.

Rockefeller was criticized for befriending foreign autocrats in order to expand Chase interests in their countries. The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2002 that Rockefeller "spent his life in the club of the ruling class and was loyal to members of the club, no matter what they did." He noted that Rockefeller had cut profitable deals with "oil-rich dictators", "Soviet party bosses" and "Chinese perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution".

Rockefeller met Henry Kissinger in 1954, when Kissinger was appointed a director of a seminal Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons, of which David Rockefeller was a member. He named Kissinger to the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and consulted with him frequently, with the subjects including the Chase Bank's interests in Chile and the possibility of the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. Rockefeller supported his "opening of China" initiative in 1971 as it afforded banking opportunities for the Chase Bank.

Though a lifelong Republican and party contributor, he was a 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 hardline contenders.

In 1964, along with other American business figures such as Sol Linowitz, Rockefeller founded the non-profit International Executive Service Corps, which encourages developing nations to promote private enterprise. In 1979, he formed the Partnership for New York City, a not-for-profit membership organization of New York businessmen. 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.

Rockefeller had a lifelong association with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) when he joined as a director in 1949. 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 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. He was a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, including in 1948, when Alger Hiss was president.

Displeased with the refusal of Bilderberg Group meetings to include Japan, Rockefeller helped found the Trilateral Commission in July 1973.

After the war and alongside his work at Chase, Rockefeller took a more active role in his family's business dealings. Working with his brothers in the two floors of Rockefeller Center known as Room 5600, he reorganized the family's myriad business and philanthropic ventures. The men kept regular "brothers' meetings" where they made decisions on matters of common interest and reported on noteworthy events in each of their lives. Rockefeller served as secretary to the group, making notes of each meeting. The notes are now in the family archive and will be released in the future. Following the deaths of his brothers, Winthrop (1973), John III (1978), Nelson (1979), and Laurance (2004), David became sole head of the family (with the important involvement of his elder son, David Jr.).

Rockefeller ensured that selected members of the fourth generation, known generically as the cousins, became directly involved in the family's institutions. This involved inviting them to be more active in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the principal foundation established in 1940 by the five brothers and their one sister. The extended family also became involved in their own philanthropic organization, formed in 1967 and primarily established by third-generation members, called the Rockefeller Family Fund.

In the 1980s, Rockefeller became embroiled in controversy over the mortgaging and sale of Rockefeller Center to Japanese interests. In 1985, the Rockefeller family mortgaged the property for $1.3 billion, with $300 million of that going to the family. In 1989, 51 percent of the property, later increased to 80 percent, was sold to Mitsubishi Estate Company of Japan. This action was criticized for surrendering a major U.S. landmark to foreign interests. In 2000, Rockefeller presided over the final sale of Rockefeller Center to Tishman Speyer Properties, along with the Crown family of Chicago, which ended the more than 70 years of direct family financial association with Rockefeller Center.

He published Memoirs in 2002, the only time a member of the Rockefeller family has written an autobiography.

In 2004, with his daughter Peggy Dulany, he established the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, a non-profit farm, education, and research center, with a high-end farm-to-table restaurant. It is located in Pocantico Hills, New York, on the land which was once part of the family estate and later, of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve. In the 1970s, his wife, Margaret "Peggy" McGrath Rockefeller, had a successful cattle breeding operation there, and the center was established as a memorial for Peggy Rockefeller, who died in 1996. David's move to carve off a segment of the already donated land for a personal, albeit charitable, project caused disagreement on the part of other Rockefeller family members, as it ran contrary to the family's conservation policy. Inclusion of a commercial entity, a restaurant, was an additional point of internal friction. David, the patriarch of the family, prevailed. Ultimately, the positive public image of the Stone Barns Center as an international beacon for sustainable agriculture and culinary innovation secured it as a successful part of the Rockefeller legacy.

Throughout his life, Rockefeller was accused of being part of an internationalist conspiracy seeking to undermine the interests of the United States and promote a more unified global order. One of Rockefeller's most prominent accusers was Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, who in the 1975 book, The Rockefeller File, wrote:

The Rockefellers and their allies have, for at least fifty years, been carefully following a plan to use their economic power to gain political control of first America, and then the rest of the world.

Do I mean conspiracy? Yes, I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.In response to accusations of this type, David Rockefeller himself wrote in his 2003 book, Memoirs:For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

In 1940, Rockefeller married Margaret "Peggy" McGrath, who died in 1996. They had six children:

David Rockefeller Jr. (born July 24, 1941) – vice chairman, Rockefeller Family & Associates (the family office, Room 5600); chairman of Rockefeller Financial Services; Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation; former chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller & Co., Inc., among many other family institutions.