When David was Goliath

Anyone familiar with the Rockefeller story will probably be surprised to find that David Rockefeller has written his memoirs. Since the depredations of the Standard Oil Trust in the late 19th century -- the family’s version of original sin -- the unexamined life has been not only worth living for the Rockefellers but also an absolute necessity. John D. Rockefeller Sr. once tried to defend himself from the attacks that made him America’s economic “Evil One” by blurting out, “God gave me my money.” After that, he and his heirs gave up trying publicly to justify their wealth and power and lapsed into a silence that has lasted until now.

That 87-year-old David Rockefeller, survivor of this 150-year saga, has set about recollecting his life in tranquillity suggests the family is not the radioactive metaphor it once was in America and, indeed, may have become a little passe. Certainly, times have changed since the 1960s, when the vulgar Marxism of the New Left portrayed the Rockefellers as a sort of executive committee of the ruling class, practicing social control at home through proprietary institutions ranging from the Population Council to the Council on Foreign Relations, while working insidiously abroad to get the U.S. into Latin America, South Africa and Vietnam. All malicious occurrences could be explained with two words: the Rockefellers. On this, the paranoid right agreed with the paranoid left, adding the twist that the family’s tentacles stretched into the sinister conspiracies it imagined being propounded behind closed doors by the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission.

But all those C. Wright Millsian analyses of the power elite and the ingeniously nutty diagrams of interlocking directorates with the Rockefeller name at their nexuses are artifacts of the past. Other conspiracy theories have taken hold; a far wealthier class has arisen to supplant the intergenerational ancien regime established by robber baron money. It is at last safe for a Rockefeller to come out of hiding.

In writing about his life, Rockefeller does not attempt to gild his persona. He is saturnine, self-satisfied and obtuse -- all survival traits in this family -- and still very much the cosseted last child whose grand passion as an adolescent was his world-class collection of beetles, to which he added at the rate of 30 species a night at the family’s Pocantico Hills Estate in New York’s Hudson Valley. He doesn’t have much new to say about the iconic John D. Sr., except to insist that he was the old man’s favorite grandchild. He insists that he was also the favorite of his mother, Abby Aldrich, who warmed the Rockefellers’ chilly Baptist souls and brought Picasso into lives previously very Rembrandt. David does not claim to be the favorite of his father, John D. Jr. (“Mister Junior” to the large Rockefeller staff), a stern man who was often submerged in neurasthenia by the magnitude of the task fate had given him: cleaning the oil stains off the family name.

But David appreciates the pivotal dynastic role that his father played in the family. In spending roughly a billion dollars -- about what the first John D. originally made -- in strategic philanthropy for what he grandly called “the well-being of mankind,” the second John D. helped create the institutional world awaiting David and his brothers, John D. III, Nelson, Laurance and Winthrop, when they burst on the postwar scene as the most famous brother act in American life.

David tells us disappointingly little about his youthful relationship with his siblings (who also included a sister, Abby, known as Babs), although he does hint that, at any early age, Nelson made it clear that he at least would fight his way out of the Rockefeller cocoon and become the leader of his generation by challenging Mister Junior and pushing aside elder brother John D. III and all presumptions of primogeniture. It is not that the author is hiding the intimate details of his growing up; the brothers were probably not very intimate, and he was probably not paying attention. In any case, the steady subject of the “Memoirs” is “The Making of David Rockefeller,” and its rhetoric is mobilized to dispel the notion that his self-hood and success were assured by his gilt-edged birthright.

He stolidly takes us through his days at Manhattan’s Lincoln School (one of those “democratizing” experiences his father used to normalize the boys) and Harvard; his travels through Europe with chums on the eve of war; his time at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago; his marriage to Peggy McGrath and his reluctant entry into the Army (his mother shamed him into joining). The portrait he draws is of a socially awkward and self-protective young man anxious to keep the Rockefeller name at bay but nonetheless eager to use the family’s far-flung network of institutions and influential individuals for his upward climb. We learn how he assumed his “citizenship duties” in the postwar world, sitting on the boards (as all his brothers did) of such family-built organizations as the Rockefeller Institute and the Museum of Modern Art and fretting over the future of Rockefeller Center.

But his consuming interest is telling about his career at Chase Manhattan Bank. Here the book becomes David’s “apologia pro vita sua,” a tale of his rise (less certain than the Rockefeller conspiracy theories assumed) in this family-dominated institution. He tells of starting as a “subway strapper” making $3,500 a year; his trouble with his predecessor at the helm of the bank, the rough-hewn “wise man” John J. McCloy, who, unfairly in David’s opinion, regarded him as a spoiled rich kid; his struggle over leadership of the bank with George Champion, whose rise from the lower ranks was real, not virtual, as David’s was; and then, once he finally made it to the top, his difficulties, including an inexplicable failure to keep the bank from becoming dangerously overextended by bad loans in the late 1970s before he managed to save the situation at the last minute and achieve a career “redemption.”

It is a Rockefeller version of a rags-to-riches story, but, in telling it, David proves himself to be no Horatio Alger, let alone a Jack Welch. Chase is his “MacGuffin”: Alfred Hitchcock’s term for that plot device which interests the protagonist intensely and the spectator scarcely at all. Instead of the shrewd and astringent insights one expects from a lifetime in the cockpit of a cutthroat business, we get vintage Rockefellerisms: “I am a pragmatist who recognizes the need for sound fiscal and monetary policies to achieve optimum economic growth. I recognize, however, that otherwise sound policies that ignore real human needs are not acceptable and that safety nets have an essential place in our society.”

Rockefeller even manages to make his foreign travels uninteresting, a difficult task considering that he was the figurehead of the American ship of state in the 1960s and ‘70s, when he sailed into the Soviet Union, China and the Middle East to do business for Chase and, unofficially, for the U.S. State Department. He talks about personal meetings with such figures as Nikita Khrushchev, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Deng Xiaoping and how he collaborated with Nelson’s protege, “Henry” (A. Kissinger). Yet there is a whiff of the downloaded appointment book in this section of “Memoirs,” a ceremonial figure talking with other ceremonial figures in scenes that conjure the empty intellectual spaces of a Rene Magritte canvas.

But if at times David seems to have sleepwalked through a life he keeps assuring us was monumentally interesting, the narrative does come alive toward the end of the book, when he decides to get up close and personal with his family. The section on his brother Nelson’s last years, for instance, is fascinating. David draws a picture of his omnivorous elder brother as a force of nature, especially powerful in a denatured family, and admits being drawn along by him most of his life, at least until Nelson divorced Mary Todhunter Clark to marry his second wife, Happy. (“I have always identified it as the beginning of my disillusionment with Nelson,” David says prissily, “when the scales fell from my eyes and I no longer saw him as the hero who could do no wrong but as a man who was willing to sacrifice almost everything in the service of his enormous ambition.”)

David describes Nelson’s decline after President Ford, acting on the advice of his chief of staff, Donald H. Rumsfeld, decided to drop him from the Republican ticket as vice president in 1976. Low on money after having financed a lifetime in politics but retaining his predator’s nose for fresh meat, Nelson returned to New York and engaged in a fratricidal war for control of the family and its assets, the last political arena open to him. Still wounded by the way he had been elbowed aside when they were young, the chronically repressed John D. III opposed him, and the other brothers tried to design a containment policy that would protect them from Nelson’s hurricane force. It was a struggle that resulted in abraded feelings and threatened lawsuits -- both previously unheard of in the Rockefeller realm -- and ended only with Nelson’s death in 1979 while in flagrante with a young female aide.

David also takes the reader into another part of the family’s inner sanctum when he gives an account of the revolt of the fourth Rockefeller generation: “the cousins.” (Here, I must disclose an interest. The catalyst for this struggle was “The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty,” a 1976 book I wrote with David Horowitz that drew on the fears and angers of the children of David and his brothers in creating a portrait of the family.) Rockefeller says, “The portrait drawn by Collier and Horowitz showed an unhappy, conflicted group of people, many of them attracted to radical social causes and revolutionary ideals, who were eager to distance themselves from their reactionary and unsympathetic parents.” He claims that this information was obtained from the cousins under false pretenses, but he acknowledges that the fourth generation might have been talking with its elders through the authors and admits “there had to be some truth in what they said, which made the book very painful reading for Peggy and me.”

According to David, this book played into the larger sibling rivalry. (John III supported the cousins in their rebellion; Nelson viewed them only slightly more benignly than he had the rioting prisoners at Attica in 1971, when he was governor of New York.) What appears to have been an inter-generational free-for-all ensued, a cataclysmic occurrence for a family that had always nurtured its emotional distances. David himself slipped into a crisis of confidence: “I have often wondered whether I simply did not have much talent as a father, because my efforts to establish a connection with my children often misfired.”

Out of this chaos arose something absent from the stately minuet of Rockefeller domestic life for three generations: honest communication. And eventually, there was a cautious rapprochement between the brothers and the cousins that otherwise would never have occurred. Today, David says of his once-disaffected children, “They have embraced their heritage as strongly as I did and used their resources to improve the world or at least try to change it.”

Equilibrium having been restored and emotional turbulence vanquished, David concludes his “Memoirs” as he began them, on a note of calm certainty. He feels requited in his old age as he watches the family move on, having finally slipped outside the claims of history into a day-to-dayness it was never before able to enjoy. David is pleased with his status as the last Rockefeller.