to improve the “public image” of the Rockefellers and their institutions like the Chase Manhattan Bank: “The manner in which an institution gives expression to its relationship with the community has an important bearing on its public image. I was eager to have Chase perceived as a modern, progressive, and open institution. To forge a new ‘image’ … I wanted to transform our uncoordinated corporate charitable giving into a broad-based and carefully conceived program.”48
Memoirs also starkly reveals the culture of illegality, corruption, and extreme commodification that pervades the higher circles of U.S. society. There is a sense that money rules and can buy everything and everybody, and that the rich are above the law. For over a decade, 1969–80, David Rockefeller was the Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan, the Rockefeller family bank. David Brooks, a “moderate” Republican columnist of the New York Times, stated that Rockefeller, “the leading corporate statesman of his day … spent much of his career at Chase doing business with tyrants…. Rockefeller was soiled by his close embraces with these thugs.”49 One illuminating example of the practices of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the larger corporate ruling class comes from this period. When Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger were establishing U.S. ties to China in 1971–2, Rockefeller was very interested in gaining a top position for Chase Manhattan Bank there as a key part of expanding the bank’s presence in Asia. As Rockefeller recounted in Memoirs:
I asked Henry Kissinger for advice on the best way to get permission to enter China. He told me to contact Ambassador Huang Hua, the PRC’s permanent representative to the United Nations and the senior Chinese diplomat stationed in the United States…. It took more than a year to arrange an invitation. Henry’s support was certainly crucial, but astute marketing by one of the bank’s officers also contributed significantly to my success…. Leo Pierre … filled a suitcase with $50,000 in cash and spent all day in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel waiting for the Chinese delegation to arrive. When they finally turned up, he presented himself to the Ambassador, explained his purpose for being there, and handed over the suitcase, politely refusing even to accept a receipt for the instant loan. Huang was impressed by Leo’s gesture, and soon afterward the Chinese mission opened an account with Chase.50
Rockefeller then went on to point out how this initial contact led to his trips to China and eventually a correspondent bank relationship with the Bank of China. He clearly encouraged and approved of bribery of foreign officials to successfully gain favor, despite the law and the supposed “moral code” of the Rockefeller family. This illustrates a current fact about the United States, namely that the top economic and political leadership consider themselves to be, and often are, above the law.
Rockefeller also recounts in Memoirs his long behind-the-scenes role as a semi-official representative of the United States and its capitalist class, acting as a “diplomatic go-between” in China and the Middle East, especially while chairman of both the Chase Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to one of his many trips to China, he met with President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and carried messages from them to the Chinese leadership.51 Rockefeller also used the Council as a means to promote the interests of his Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1977 he was invited to visit China by the People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs
in my capacity as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, with whom they wanted to establish closer ties. I accepted the invitation with the understanding that I would also be able to discuss banking matters with Chinese officials. Nurturing the relationship between PIFA and the CFR was important to me, but I was more interested in prodding the Chinese to be a bit more imaginative about Chase’s operations.52
In the Middle East, where Chase had major interests due to “its close and longtime association with the major U.S. oil companies,” Rockefeller often met with many of the dictatorial and repressive rulers of the regimes there, including King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Nasser and Sadat of Egypt, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, giving and taking back messages to President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger.53 Rockefeller preferred this unofficial, behind-the-scenes role rather than entering the U.S. government in an official position. Both Nixon and Carter asked him to serve as treasury secretary, and Carter wanted to appoint him Federal Reserve board chairman, but Rockefeller declined all of these requests, although he did successfully recommend Paul Volcker for the latter job. Volcker had worked for Rockefeller and Chase as a vice president, as well as the New York Federal Reserve Board, and, of course, was a director of the CFR.54
Another topic discussed in Memoirs is the tensions within the ruling class between old and new money, between “self-made” (often with the help of the already rich) and inherited capitalist wealth. The latter group is often listed (as David and other Rockefellers are) in the Social Register. David recounts how John J. (Jack) McCloy, a key Wall Street lawyer for Millbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, a law firm closely connected to the Rockefeller family and its interests for many decades, and who preceded Rockefeller as chairman of both Chase and the CFR, repeatedly told a story in public that, David wrote, “always made me feel uncomfortable.” Rockefeller said that McCloy told this story “in my presence a hundred times, the last time … when I succeeded him as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.” David felt that the story demonstrated “ambivalence … even latent hostility” toward Rockefeller and his family:
Jack was born, as he often recalled, on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Philadelphia. His father died when he was quite young, and it was only by dint of hard work and exceptional ability that he made his way through Amherst College and Harvard Law School, and on to a distinguished career. Despite his own great achievements, Jack seemed wary, perhaps even resentful, of what I appeared to represent in financial and social terms…. He had worked his way through college and law school in part by tutoring during the summer and had traveled to Maine in the summer of 1912, three years before I was born, hoping to get a job on Mount Desert Island. One of the families he decided to contact was mine. Jack always imparted the story at great length—walking the quarter mile from the main road up to the Eyrie, knocking on the massive door, and explaining to the butler why he was there, only to be turned away.55
As a professional who had risen through hard work into the capitalist class, McCloy obviously did harbor some resentment toward those, like David Rockefeller, who were born into vast inherited wealth, and therefore had their path through life made relatively easy and trouble free.
In 2012 David was at the center of a significant event in Rockefeller family history, the formalization of the long-standing informal cooperation between two of the wealthiest families in world history, the U.S.-based Rockefellers and the European-based Rothschild family. In May of 2012, the Rothschild Investment Trust, RIT Partners, announced that it would purchase a 37 percent stake in Rockefeller & Company, the Rockefeller family wealth advisory and asset management group, with $34 billion under management. Lord Jacob Rothschild joined the board of directors of the Rockefeller firm, on which David Rockefeller Jr. sits, and of which David Rockefeller Sr. is honorary chair. At the time of the Rothschild purchase, David Sr. stated: “Lord Rothschild and I have known each other for five decades. The connection between our two families remains very strong. I am delighted to welcome Jacob and RIT as shareholders.”56 The Rockefeller family also remains strong in the CFR; the Council’s 2013 Annual Report lists David and four other Rockefellers, joining his daughter Peggy Dulany as members of the organization.57
Peter G. Peterson, Chairman 1985–2007
The second long-term chairman of the CFR was the “in and outer” Peter G. Peterson, who served even longer than David Rockefeller. Whereas Rockefeller is a third-generation billionaire, Peter G. Peterson did not inherit vast wealth; rather he served at the cabinet level in the federal government and engaged in various business enterprises, including especially the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm that he co-founded in 1985, eventually becoming a billionaire.
