David Rockefeller
Philanthropist and bank chairman who promoted ‘constructive engagement’ in international affairs
DAVID ROCKEFELLER, who has died aged 101, was a billionaire philanthropist in the tradition of his grandfather, John D Rockefeller, and one of America’s best-known bankers as the longserving chairman of Chase Manhattan.
David Rockefeller was a prince of the aristocracy of American money. His grandfather was the pious but ruthless creator of Standard Oil, the company which exploited nearmonopoly control of America’s nascent oil industry until it was broken up in 1911 by Theodore Roosevelt’s “trustbusters”. By then it had made John D Rockefeller the richest man in the world, and provided an extraordinarily gilded and wellconnected inheritance for his descendants.
The dynastic patriarch also bequeathed a high sense of public duty. Although David never held public office – turning down two invitations to become Secretary of the Treasury in Richard Nixon’s administration, and one to succeed to the assassinated Robert Kennedy’s Senate seat – he created a unique role for himself as a promoter of “constructive engagement” between America and the rest of the world.
As the chairman of a powerful international bank – and as a Rockefeller – he had access to heads of state, and clout with business leaders, wherever he travelled. In numerous countries he could claim to have been on tea-drinking terms with every president or prime minister since the Second World War. He was a friend of the Shah of Iran – interceding with the Carter White House in the hope of securing his stay in the US for medical treatment after the fall of Tehran – and engaged in lively dialogue with, inter alia, Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev: the Soviet leader assured him that the next generation of Rockefellers would live under a communist system.
Rockefeller was particularly influential in US relations with Latin America, but his network of contacts was global, and assiduously maintained. He was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading foreign affairs think tank, and one of the first participants in the secretive Bilderberg meetings of European and American politicians and business chiefs. In 1973 he helped found another elite group, the Trilateral Commission, to promote co-operation between North America, Europe and Japan.
Those who had dealings with Rockefeller in these and other spheres noted his exquisite and unvarying courtesy. The former Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black called him “the apogee, the ultimate American gentleman”.
Rockefeller’s patience was often tested over the years – by the internal politics of Chase Manhattan, and by family strife caused by the radicalism of his children in the 1960s and the egotism of his brother Nelson, who was Gerald Ford’s vice president before dying in the arms of a 27-yearold mistress in 1979. But David once said of himself: “Only once in my life was I on the edge of incivility.” His personal fortune was estimated at $2.5 billion.
David Rockefeller was born in New York City on June 12 1915, the youngest of six children of John D Rockefeller Jr and his wife Abby, the daughter of Senator Nelson Aldrich, the Republican majority leader. Their nine-storey family home on West 54th Street was the largest private residence in the city and was filled with great works of art and distinguished guests – though John D Jr was an austere and distant father. But old John D, by then in his eighties, doted on young David and considered him to be the grandchild who most resembled himself.
David was educated at the Lincoln School in Manhattan and Harvard University, where he wrote his thesis on Fabian socialism. He went on to do postgraduate studies at Harvard and the LSE before taking a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. As a student traveller, his name brought him introductions everywhere; in Vienna, he called on Sigmund Freud; in London for a holiday in 1932, he had barely reached his hotel before he was invited to the Duke of York’s ball at St James’s Palace.
His first job, in 1940, was as an unpaid secretary to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia; his duties included finding commercial tenants for the newly built domestic airport terminal, which was to be named after the mayor.
He then served as an assistant regional director of the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Service before enlisting in the army in 1942. He rose to captain and served in North Africa and France, where he was an assistant military attaché in Paris and was awarded the US Legion of Merit and the French Legion of Honour.
After the war David Rockefeller joined the Chase National Bank, then the largest commercial bank in the United States. It was not, as was commonly thought, controlled by the Rockefellers, but their influence was strong: John D Jr was the largest individual shareholder, and David’s maternal uncle Winthrop Aldrich was chairman. David Rockefeller began as an assistant manager in the foreign department and was responsible for Latin America from 1950, opening new offices in Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico and Buenos Aires. In 1952 he became a senior vice president in charge of the New York area.
In 1955 Chase National merged with the Bank of Manhattan to form Chase Manhattan and two years later Rockefeller became vice chairman responsible for administration and planning, acquiring a reputation as a bold moderniser, which brought him into conflict with more conservative colleagues. He became president in 1961 and was chairman from 1969.
The bank survived difficult times during the oil and real estate crises of the mid-1970s, but Rockefeller was credited with keeping a steady hand on the tiller and leading a successful international expansion into more than 70 countries. He retired from the chair in 1981, though he continued to travel extensively on the bank’s behalf.
At home in New York, he was involved over several decades in the fortunes of the Rockefeller Center, the Manhattan landmark built by his father. He oversaw the modernisation of the complex in the early 1980s and arranged to buy the 12 acres of land beneath it from Columbia University; during the real estate boom of the later part of that decade, 80 per cent of it was sold to Mitsubishi of Japan. But in the slump that followed – to the embarrassment of the family, who still held 20 per cent – Rockefeller Center went bankrupt in 1995. David Rockefeller assembled a group of investors to buy it back, eventually selling it again at a price which tripled his personal stake.
He also led regeneration schemes elsewhere, including the redevelopment of lower Manhattan that led to the building of the World Trade Center in the 1970s, and was chairman of the New York City Partnership, which persuaded the business sector to contribute to school and housing projects.
He was chairman of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) and a life trustee of the University of Chicago, both established by his grandfather. With his four brothers he established the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which provides support for projects in the fields of conservation, urban development and scientific research.
From his mother he inherited a passion for art; he was chairman of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which she had helped to create, and a discerning collector in his own right. In his office suite at the Rockefeller Center hung works by Picasso, Manet, Gauguin, de Kooning and Rothko. Perhaps less predictably, a childhood fascination with insects led him to build up a celebrated collection of 40,000 beetle specimens.
In 2002 Rockefeller published Memoirs, which offered a frank but forgiving account of fierce power struggles between the brothers in the 1970s over the leadership of their charitable ventures and the “Family Office”, and the disposition of the great Rockefeller estate at Pocantino Hills in Westchester County, New York.
David Rockefeller married, in 1940, Peggy McGrath, who died in 1996; they had two sons and four daughters. The eldest son, David Jr, emerged as the leader of the dynasty’s next generation.