After being expelled for cheating at MIT, he still attended and graduated from a top private university, Northwestern, near Chicago.58 He was then able to land corporate jobs and move up the ranks due to his intelligence, work ethic, and, of course, conformity to the needs and desires of the corporate capitalist class. One of those key needs is always growth, the endless accumulation of capital. Early in his career, Peterson worked his way to the top of Chicago’s Bell & Howell Corporation, saying in Forbes magazine that his company was “committed to growth.”59 His friendship with Charles Percy, the prior head of Bell & Howell, led to Peterson’s coming into closer contact with leading members of the Rockefeller family. One event was the 1967 wedding of John D. Rockefeller IV, currently U.S. senator from West Virginia, and Charles Percy’s daughter Sharon. Another contact was through the Bell & Howell and Chase Manhattan Bank relationship, whereby Peterson became friends with David Rockefeller. A little more than a year after the wedding, John D. Rockefeller III invited Peterson to Rockefeller family headquarters at Pocantico Hills in New York’s Hudson River Valley for a meeting that included John J. McCloy, then chair of both the CFR and the Chase Manhattan Bank, and C. Douglas Dillon, another CFR leader, a close friend of John D., and head of the investment banking firm of Dillon Read. Rockefeller wanted Peterson to organize and lead a major commission that would propose “reforms” to head off looming congressional restrictions on the foundations of the super-rich. Peterson stated in his memoirs that with this meeting he, a “Greek country boy,” knew that he had connected with the top tier of the “American establishment.” As Peterson expressed it:
But any look at American foundations necessarily involved the inner sanctums of what was then the American establishment. Indeed, Jack McCloy … was widely proclaimed by people in the know in corporate boardrooms, the business press, and the lush apartments on New York’s Park and Fifth Avenues to be the unofficial chairman of the Establishment, of this network of elite Northeasterners. Doug Dillon was certainly on its executive committee, as were the Rockefellers. This establishment had great entrée to the corridors of power and used their access and control with quiet discretion and great effectiveness. Their grip on America’s major philanthropic institutions was particularly strong. To call upon a forty-two-year-old Midwestern outsider indicated they saw a serious problem, one that required a set of fresh eyes from outside the Eastern establishment.60
Asserting his independence, Peterson declined to head the suggested Rockefeller-funded commission until he had had a chance to fully investigate the situation. After meetings in Washington with leading congressmen, he determined the situation was serious and required a different approach. He again traveled to New York for a meeting with Messrs. Rockefeller, McCloy, and Dillon, this time at Rockefeller Center. Peterson recounted what happened at this second meeting:
I told them I was deeply flattered by what they wanted me to do, but I felt the problem foundations face went far deeper than they might have imagined. A commission on foundation reform, supported by foundation money and foundation staff, would have no credibility. If I were to chair the body they envisioned, it would have to raise its own, non-foundation money, hire its own staff, and not include members from the foundation world. Total independence was a must. I saw John D. blanch as I spelled out these requirements. I don’t know if it shook him to hear how badly the foundations were viewed in Washington, or to hear me insist on an independent commission. He probably thought he had made a mistake to propose this brash young Midwesterner, that I was presumptuous to look his gift horse of a well-intended offer in the mouth. To that point, Jack McCloy had sat quietly…. Now he cleared his throat and spoke into the resulting silence. “John, I have to admit frankly I’m embarrassed,” he said thoughtfully. “I believe this young fellow is proposing the wise course. I should have thought of these concerns myself.” “Do you really think so, Jack?” John D. asked. “Yes, I certainly do.” Doug Dillon quickly weighed in with Jack McCloy, and John D. made it unanimous. We set about to name our organization: The Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy.61
Peterson’s contacts, his success in the foundations work and in other instances, together with his Republican politics (he was a leader of Illinois citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon, for example) later brought him to the attention of President Nixon. In 1971 Nixon tapped Peterson to head up the cabinet-level Council on International Economic Policy, with advisory responsibility to the president. Peterson soon became known as the “economic Kissinger.” Peterson’s natural focus was on foreign trade, monetary policy, and U.S. economic expansion abroad. In January 1972 Nixon appointed Peterson to be Secretary of Commerce. In that post, he supported the general free-market approach to political economy, including increased government support for multinationals, relaxing antitrust laws, tax cuts, financing for exports, and business-oriented government-financed research and development. In his early career, he was active in both the “conservative” Committee for Economic Development and the “liberal” Brookings Institution. Working as a leader in both organizations he made additional important friends and contacts. In 1971 he applied for and was accepted into membership in the CFR.
Peterson became close friends and a political partner with Henry Kissinger, but clashed with the far-right Republicans in the Nixon administration, resulting in his exit from Washington.62 When he left in 1973, he was brought into Lehman Brothers as vice chairman. Later the Wall Street firm became Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb, with Peterson as chair and CEO until the end of 1983. Two years later he was a co-founder, with fellow CFR member Steven A. Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, which soon became a prominent firm specializing in private equity, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, and investment (especially for pension funds). Blackstone also created a more liquid and speculative branch, a fund of hedge funds called Blackstone Alternative Asset Management. Peterson became a billionaire while serving as chairman of Blackstone. In 2007 alone, the year Blackstone went public, he was paid $1.85 billion. While at Blackstone, part of the largely unregulated but vast “shadow banking” system, Peterson also served as head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 2000 to 2004, as well as chair of the Council.
Over the years, Peterson developed very close ties to David Rockefeller and the Rockefeller family. He has served as a trustee or board member of at least three Rockefeller family–dominated organizations—the Japan Society, the Museum of Modern Art, and Rockefeller Center Properties, Inc. Consequently, Peterson has had only good things to say about the Rockefellers. John D. III was “dedicated to maintaining one of America’s premier legacies and converting family wealth to public good.”63 David was “a special person…. He seemed to have met every famous person in the world, and he spoke of global political and economic matters with great command.”64 In addition, Peterson said, “I have always been a so-called Rockefeller Republican, a rapidly vanishing species. I joke that there are only two of us left, David Rockefeller and myself.”65 In addition, “I was no longer young when David Rockefeller asked me to chair the Council in 1985…. That I, the son of Greek immigrants from a small, rural town in Nebraska, could follow David was a rare privilege.”66
For decades Peterson has been a strong advocate of reducing the federal budget deficit, even critiquing his own Republican Party for overspending, stating in 2004: “I remain a Republican, but the Republicans have become a far more theological, faith-based party, not troubling with evidence.” He is the founding chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Concord Coalition, and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, donating large sums to each organization. These bodies, especially the latter two, focus on fiscal sustainability issues, especially trying to set the stage for cuts to what Peterson and other elements of the capitalist class call “entitlements.” But these so-called entitlements are actually programs like Social Security and Medicare that rank-and-file workers have fully paid for with their taxes. The federal government has borrowed heavily from the Social Security trust fund, threatening the system by leaving only IOUs behind. Peterson and the organizations he has founded and funded are trying to kill these and other programs that help working people survive, drumming up hysteria about budget deficits as a means to try to accomplish this end. This hysteria also aims to lower taxes on corporations and the rich.
