A city’s uncrowned king

If New York had an uncrowned king, it was surely David Rockefeller. The last remaining grandson of the billionaire oil magnate John D Rockefeller Sr, he presided over the family banking and property empire and exerted unparalleled influence in New York, Washington and around the world.

He was the last leader of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment that set the tone for American life from 1776 onwards.

The Rolodex in his 56th floor office in Rockefeller Centre, New York, contained 150,000 names, who he referred to as ‘‘friends’’.

‘‘One has a relatively short time on this earth and if you want to get something done, you pretty much need to know the people who can get it done,’’ he said.

Rockefeller personified the corporatism prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, freely mixing business for Chase Manhattan Bank with the nation’s diplomacy.

On returning from meeting the Chinese communist leadership, he recalled: ‘‘The door to China had swung open, and Chase was waiting on the other side as American companies began to walk through.’’

Anticipating the age of globalism, in the 60s he founded the Chase International Advisory committee (now the International Council), comprised of prominent businessmen and politicians, which over the years has included Gianni Agnelli, Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair.

He was viewed with suspicion by some as the head of a ‘‘global aristocracy’’, but many hailed him as a force for good in the world. Kofi Annan, when serving as the UN secretary general, said: ‘‘Without internationalists like you, the international system we have today would not be here.’’

Closer to home, he loved his city and left a legacy that changed its architectural face.

He chaired the committee that located Chase headquarters near Wall Street. When the 60-storey complex opened at One Chase Manhattan Plaza in 1961, it was the catalyst that revived the ailing financial district.

His next project, in concert with his older brother Nelson, was to build the World Trade Centre, whose towers were at first dubbed ‘‘David’’ and ‘‘Nelson’’.

At $1.5 billion it was five times over the estimate, but well worth it, he argued.

With a personal worth estimated by Forbes magazine at $2.6 billion, he gave away vast sums, in particular to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded by his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and to Rockefeller University.

By 2006, he had donated $900 million and dozens of important modern artworks. He was disarmingly amiable and understated, brought up to use wealth with ‘‘discretion and restraint’’.

Quiet, small with a nasal voice, he lacked the charisma of his older brothers. He was studious and determined and he was told by a friend of the family after his grandfather’s death in 1937 that he had been JDR Sr’s favourite.

He continued to work at his desk each day at the Rockefeller Center late into his 90s, and would visit Chase Manhattan, now JP Morgan, wandering about with a security badge with ‘‘RETIREE’’ in red.

He retained an endearing modesty despite his wealth and fame, working out in a public gym and bantering with taxi drivers.

His life was not without controversy. He was blamed for the taking of American hostages in Tehran by an Islamist student mob, leading to the fall of President Carter, having pressed the president to allow the exiled Shah to receive cancer treatment in America.

He remained a stalwart friend and defender of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss long after the disgraced civil servant had been abandoned by other friends.

As Chase’s director in charge of overseas expansion, if he saw a commercial advantage he was prepared to talk to despots, among them Fidel Castro, Josip Tito and Saddam Hussein.

His meetings with Leonid Brezhnev led to Chase becoming the first American bank to establish operations in Russia.

To the jibe, ‘‘David hasn’t met a dictator he doesn’t like,’’ he responded, ‘‘My feeling is that one has a much better chance of getting people to make changes if you’re talking to them.’’

David Rockefeller was born in 1915. The family lived in the largest private residence in New York City, 10 West 54th Street, which was later pulled down to make way for MoMA.

Brought up surrounded by his father’s preferred Renaissance paintings in Manhattan, and on family estates in upstate New York and Maine, David was tutored unconventionally, side by side with children of other backgrounds, by the family-funded Lincoln School.

His father was kindly, but emotionally distant. David remembered his grandfather - America’s first billionaire, who had started out earning $5 a week as a clerk in Cleveland - as ‘‘benign and indulgent’’.

He was the quietest of the five sons and one daughter. His brasher older brothers Nelson, later Gerald Ford’s vice-president, and Laurence bullied Winthrop, the second youngest, who was awkward and overweight. Winthrop in turn bullied David.

Rockefeller studied at the London School of Economics, where he was taught by both the Marxist principal, Harold Laski, and the free market champion Friedrich Hayek.

At Harvard, where he graduated cum laude, he studied Fabian socialism, and then for a PhD at the University of Chicago.

In September 1940, he married Margaret ‘‘Peggy’’ McGrath, the daughter of a prominent Wall Street lawyer.

The couple shared a passion for art and gathered a collection of 15,000 pieces. They had six children. David Jr runs Rockefeller Family and Associates and has always been viewed as the most likely to take control of the family business; Abigail is a Marxist economist and feminist campaigner; Peggy set up a radical economic development foundation called Synergos; Neva is an economist; Richard, a physician, who died in 2014; and Eileen, a venture philanthropist.

His wife died in 1996 and he did not remarry.

The Times, London