David Rockefeller

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David Rockefeller (1953)

David Rockefeller Sr. (born June 12, 1915 in New York City , † March 20, 2017 in Tarrytown , New York ) was an American banker and statesman . The billionaire coined as head of the Rockefeller family in particular, the economic success of Chase Manhattan Bank .

Life

Training and World War II

David Rockefeller was born in 1915 to billionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr. and grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Sr. in the private infirmary in his parents' home in New York City. He grew up in the largest private residence in town, a nine-story house on 10 West 54th Street. The house was stocked with rare antique, medieval and renaissance art treasures from his father. His mother Abby Aldrich Rockefeller ran a private modern art gallery on the seventh floor . The house was later donated by David's father as a location for a sculpture garden on behalf of and in memory of his wife Abby as part of the New York Museum of Modern Art .

Kykuit Castle, NY, built by John D. Rockefeller Sr. , Rockefeller family seat

As a child, he spent a lot of time at his parents' country estate "Kykuit" in Pocantico Hills in Westchester County .

Rockefeller attended Lincoln School on 123rd Street in Harlem . Founded in 1916 and operated by Columbia University , the school was the brainchild of Abraham Flexner , a director of the General Education Board, and was based on the philosophy of reform educator John Dewey .

David Rockefeller's grandfather John D. Rockefeller Sr. and father John D. Rockefeller Jr.

In 1936 graduated from Rockefeller the College of Harvard University with cum laude . This was followed by a one-year university course in economics at the same position and then a year at the London School of Economics . Here he met John F. Kennedy for the first time , although they had already studied at Harvard at the same time. Rockefeller worked in the London branch of Chase Manhattan Bank during this time. To complete his studies, he returned to the United States and received his PhD from the University of Chicago with his dissertation Unused Resources and Economic Waste (Eng .: "Unused resources and economic waste") .

After completing his studies, he became secretary to New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia for 18 months . The position, paid with a symbolic annual salary of one dollar and shown as an internship, actually corresponded to the vacant post of deputy mayor.

From 1941 to 1942, Rockefeller served as assistant to the director of the United States Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare Service . After the outbreak of the Second World War , he signed up for military service, first attended the officers' school in 1943 and was finally promoted to captain in 1945 . He served the military secret service in North Africa and France to build up intelligence structures, where his fluent French and his family's pre-war contacts in France helped him. For seven months he served as Assistant to the Military Attaché at the United States Embassy in Paris .

Career at Chase Manhattan Bank

Rockefeller began his senior career in 1946 as an assistant manager in the overseas department of the Chase National Bank , which financed the international trade in goods such as coffee, sugar and metals. This position also included maintaining relationships with more than 1,000 correspondent banks around the world. He made his way through the ranks and in 1960 became president of the financial group, which has since been renamed Chase Manhattan Bank , and thus the successor to his former patron, John J. McCloy . From 1969 to 1980, Rockefeller was the bank's chief executive officer . At that time he held 1.7% of the shares and was thus the largest single shareholder in Chase Manhattan .

One Chase Manhattan Plaza (right), 40 Wall Street in the background

As chairman of the committee for a new bank headquarters , Rockefeller decided in 1955 to build the new headquarters of the Chase National Bank directly opposite the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in close proximity to Wall Street under his direction. In 1961, the new headquarters, One Chase Manhattan Plaza , opened on Liberty Street in the heart of Lower Manhattan . The 60-story, 248-meter-high skyscraper was the largest bank building in the world at the time and hid the world's largest bank vault five floors below ground.

In the 1960s, Rockefeller and other business people formed the Chase International Advisory Committee , which until 2005 consisted of 28 prominent and respected business people from 19 nations. Rockefeller had a personal friendship with many of them. He was chairman of the committee until he retired in 1999. After Chase's merger with JP Morgan to become JPMorgan Chase & Co., this committee was renamed the International Council and continues to host prominent figures such as Henry Kissinger , Riley P. Bechtel (Chairman of Bechtel Corporation ), Andre Desmarais, Lee Kuan Yew and the current ones Chairman George P. Shultz ( Treasury Secretary to President Richard Nixon ). Other international members of the IAC were the longtime Chase banker and Fiat boss Giovanni Agnelli , John Loudon (Chairman of the Royal Dutch Shell ), C. Douglas Dillon (US Treasury Secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson ), David Packard (founder of Hewlett-Packard ) and Henry Ford II . The Rockefeller and Rothschild families have had close ties since the 1960s . In May 2012, Jacob Rothschild and his bank RIT Capital Partners PLC joined Rockefeller's Rockefeller Financial Services as a shareholder .

Under Rockefeller's leadership, the Chase Manhattan Bank broadened its international footprint and became a central pillar of the international financial system. At times it owned around 50,000 correspondent banks and is the largest bank in the world. In 1973 it was the first American bank to set up a branch in what was then the Soviet Union near the Moscow Kremlin .

In 2003, Rockefeller was an honorary jury member for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. In 1958 he became the founder and chairman of the Downtown - Lower Manhattan Association , which initiated the construction of the World Trade Center . At the time, his brother Nelson , the then governor of New York , and the most influential urban planner in New York history, Robert Moses , were at his side .

capital

Rockefeller was ranked 491st among the richest people in the world in 2012, with an estimated personal fortune of $ 3.1 billion. He owned a large collection of contemporary and modern art as well as one of the largest collections of beetles in the world. In May 2018, a three-day auction of Rockefeller's art collection took place at Christie's in Rockefeller Center , generating a record $ 830 million. This makes it the most expensive private collection that has ever been auctioned. The money raised is to be donated to the Museum of Modern Art , which his mother Abby co-founded, and Rockefeller University . David Rockefeller had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to arts, medicine, and education during his lifetime.

Policy advice

Rockefeller acted in 1946/1947 as secretary of a discussion group organized by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) under the title Reconstruction of Western Germany . and was director from 1949 to 1985, vice president from 1950 to 1970, and chairman of the board from 1970 to 1985 of the CFR. With Henry Kissinger , whom he met in 1954 at the CFR working group on nuclear weapons , he shared a similar political perspective. The relationship between the two developed and Kissinger became a board member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund . Rockefeller consulted with Kissinger on numerous occasions, such as the interests of Chase Manhattan Bank in Chile and the threat posed to the bank by the election of Salvador Allende as president in 1970. Rockefeller also consulted Kissinger and assisted him in opening it up of China "initiative in 1971, which included providing opportunities in China to banks such as Chase Manhattan Bank . Rockefeller supported several US presidents as an unofficial emissary at the highest level in diplomatic missions. Jimmy Carter offered him the positions of US Treasury Secretary and chairmanship of the US Federal Reserve , which Rockefeller always refused. Because of his connections he was able to build bridges all over the world despite different interests, even to personalities like Fidel Castro , the Shah of Persia , Nikita Khrushchev , Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein .

In 1979, Rockefeller, along with McCloy, Kissinger and others, convinced US President Jimmy Carter to allow the severely cancerous former Shah of Persia into the country so that he could be treated at the New York Presbyterian Hospital . This humanitarian gesture was instrumentalized by the Khomeini regime for anti-American agitation, so that a little later Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 US diplomats hostage for 444 days .

In 1952, the New York doctor and McCarthy supporter Emanuel Josephson published a pamphlet against the alleged " internationalist " Rockefeller, whom he accused of abusing his economic power and his diverse relationships. Since then, Rockefeller has repeatedly been the subject of conspiracy theories , which imputed him to strive for world domination together with the Soviet Union . When Rockefeller protested in an article in the New York Times in 1980 against being portrayed as the "mastermind of an international conspiracy", conspiracy believers took this only as further evidence of his guilt. With the end of the Cold War, the focus of the allegations changed: It was now alleged that Rockefeller and the Council on Foreign Relations were striving for a socialist one-world government , with the right-wing extremist John Birch Society in particular standing out.

Awards

family

Nelson Rockefeller

David Rockefeller married Margaret "Peggy" McGrath (born September 28, 1915, † March 26, 1996) on September 7, 1940, daughter of a partner in a befriended Wall Street law firm. They had six children together and ten grandchildren by 2002:

  • David Rockefeller Jr. (born July 24, 1941) with Ariana & Camilla
  • Abby Rockefeller (* 1943) with Christopher
  • Neva Rockefeller Goodwin (* 1944) with David & Miranda
  • Peggy Dulany (* 1947) with Michael
  • Richard Rockefeller (1949–2014) with Clay & Rebecca
  • Eileen Rockefeller Growald (* 1952) with Danny & Adam

David Rockefeller had four older brothers:

Rockefeller had owned a Manhattan ( Upper East Side ) townhouse at 146 East 65th Street since 1948 and a Hudson Pines mansion in Sleepy Hollow, New York .

Works

  • David Rockefeller: Memories of a World Banker. Autobiography. Finanzbuch-Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-89879-327-8 .

literature

  • David Horowitz : The Rockefellers. An American Dynasty , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-550-07341-0 .
  • William Hoffmann: For example David Rockefeller. Portrait of a Mighty One , Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1973, ISBN 3-455-03510-8 .
  • Ferdinand Lundberg: Die Mächtigen und die Supermächtigen (original title: The Rockefeller Syndrome , 1968, translated by Hans-Joachim Maass ), rororo 7174: rororo-Sachbuch , Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3-499-17174-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan Kandell: David Rockefeller, Philanthropist and Head of Chase Manhattan, Dies at 101 New York Times, March 20, 2017
  2. ↑ Rockefeller Gives Harvard $ 100 million. In: New York Times. April 25, 2008.
  3. ↑ David Rockefeller: Memoirs. Random House, New York 2002, p. 85.
  4. ↑ History of the University of Chicago at: uchicago.edu .
  5. ^ John Ensor Harr, Peter J. Johnson: The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1988, p. 392.
  6. ↑ David Rockefeller: Memoirs. Random House, New York 2002, p. 113.
  7. ↑ 1.7% of the shares in Chase Bank. see: The Change at Davids Bank. In: Time Magazine. September 1, 1980.
  8. ^ Historical members of the Chase International Advisory Committee. In: David Rockefeller: Memoirs. Random House, New York 2002; Pp. 205-209.
  9. ^ Former Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, has a longtime personal relationship with the Rothschilds. In: Forbes. May 30, 2012.
  10. ^ History of the JPMorgan & Chase representative office in Moscow
  11. ↑ JPMorgan & Chase-Office, 1 Karl-Marx-Square
  12. ↑ The Height of Ambition. In: New York Times. September 8, 2002: The genesis of the World Trade Center Twin Towers .
    History of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association
  13. ↑ a b c Forbes, September 13, 2012
  14. ↑ tagesschau.de on May 11, 2018: $ 830 million for Rockefeller collection , Neue Zürcher Zeitung on May 11, 2018: Rockefeller auction breaks all records
  15. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur on May 11, 2018: Record auction at Rockefeller auction
  16. ↑ Michael Wala: Winning the Peace - American Foreign Policy and the Council on Foreign Relations, 1945-1950; The emergence of the Council on Foreign Relations. Franz Steiner Verlag with the support of the University of Hamburg, pp. 120ff. ( online in Google Book Search)
  17. ^ Official list of former board members and directors of the CFR from 1921–2012 Homepage of the CFR.
  18. ^ Walter Isaacson: Kissinger: A Biography. Simon & Schuster, New York 2005, p. 84.
  19. ^ Walter Isaacson: Kissinger: A Biography. Simon & Schuster, New York 2005, p. 289.
  20. ↑ Chase in China. In: Johannes Donald Wilson: The Chase: The Chase Manhattan Bank, NA, 1945-1985. Harvard Business School Press, Boston 1986, pp. 229/230.
  21. ↑ David Rockefeller: Memoirs . Random House Trade Paperbacks, ISBN 0-8129-6973-1 , pp. 356-375.
  22. ^ Emanuel Josephson: Rockefeller, "internationalist": The Man Who Misrules the World. Chedney Press, New York 1952, pp. 4, 204, and the like. ö.
  23. ↑ See also: Chip Berlet, Matthew N. Lyons: Right-Wing Populism in America. Too Close for Comfort. Guilford Press, New York 2000, pp. 195 f .; Marlon Kuzmick: Council on Foreign Relations. In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia. ABC Clio, Santa Barbara / Denver / London 2003, vol. 1, p. 210 f.
  24. ↑ Larry Schweikart: Rockefeller Family. In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia. ABC Clio, Santa Barbara / Denver / London 2003, Vol. 2, p. 624.
  25. ^ Conspiracy Theories in American History. An Encyclopedia, Volume 1. ISBN 1576078124 , p. 210.
  26. ↑ David Rockefeller, billionaire philanthropist, dies aged 101 . In: The Guardian . Retrieved March 20, 2017. 
  27. ↑ a b c David Rockefeller . In: The New York Times . Retrieved March 20, 2017. 
  28. ^ Member History: David Rockefeller. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 22, 2018 .
  29. ^ Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Receive Marshall Foundation Award . In: PRWeb . Retrieved March 20, 2017. 
  30. ^ Tamar Lewin: Leading Philanthropists Get Carnegie Medals . In: The New York Times . Retrieved March 20, 2017. 
  31. ^ The International Who's Who 2004 . Psychology Press, 2003, ISBN 9781857432176 , p. 1426.
  32. ↑ David Rockefeller's historic Upper East Side mansion lists for $ 32.5M. Retrieved August 23, 2020 (American English).
  33. ↑ Michela Tindera: Inside Late Billionaire David Rockefeller's Will: Picassos, A Beetle Collection And A Maine Island . In: Forbes . ( forbes.com [accessed June 4, 2017]).
  34. ^ Lisa W. Foderaro: Spending a Day at the Rockefellers' . In: The New York Times . February 23, 2007, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed June 4, 2017]).

Web links

Commons : David Rockefeller  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Rockefeller, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rockefeller, David senior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American bank manager and philanthropist
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , United States
DATE OF DEATH 20th March 2017
Place of death Pocantico Hills , Tarrytown , New York , United States