David Rockefeller is arguably the longest-lived power behind the throne in American history.
He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1940. Yes, his grandfather had provided money to create the school, but the economics department was rigorous. He did not get a free ride academically. Yet he showed no signs of that department’s moderate free market outlook.
He served as chairman of Chase-Manhattan Bank (1969-81), a giant bank in his day, which merged with a giant, J. P. Morgan-Chase. Wikipedia writes:
Under his term as CEO, Chase spread internationally and became a central pillar in the world’s financial system; Chase has a global network of correspondent banks that has been estimated to number about 50,000, the largest of any bank in the world. In 1973, Chase established the first branch of an American bank in Moscow near the Kremlin, in the then Soviet Union. That year Rockefeller traveled to China, resulting in his bank becoming the National Bank of China’s first correspondent bank in the United States.
He did not bother with minor temporary positions.
In a private capacity Rockefeller has met with and advised every American President since Eisenhower and has even at times served as an unofficial emissary on high-level diplomatic missions. President Jimmy Carter offered him the positions of United States Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman but he declined both instead preferring a private role.
He has close connections with the Dulles family.
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As well as knowing Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles–who was an in-law of the family–since his college years, it was in Rockefeller Center that Allen Dulles had set up his WWII operational center after Pearl Harbor, liaising closely with MI6 which also had their principal U.S. operation in the Center. He also knew and associated with the former CIA director Richard Helms, as well as Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt Jr., a Chase Bank employee and former CIA agent whose first cousin CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. was involved in the Iran coup of 1953. Also, in 1953, he had befriended William Bundy, a pivotal CIA analyst for nine years in the 1950s, who became the Agency liaison to the National Security Council, and a subsequent lifelong friend. Moreover, in Cary Reich’s biography of his brother Nelson, a former CIA agent states that David was extensively briefed on covert intelligence operations by himself and other Agency division chiefs, under the direction of David’s “friend and confidant”, CIA Director Allen Dulles.
It is not just that he had connections. They had him as their connection.
Throughout his life, Rockefeller has participated in and even created a number of policy groups aimed at responding to domestic and international concerns. In 1947, Rockefeller was invited to join the board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; serving on the board were such figures as Alger Hiss, John Foster Dulles (chairman), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and IBM President Thomas J. Watson. He accepted the prestigious appointment and was subsequently instrumental in relocating the Endowment’s headquarters to a site opposite the new United Nations headquarters building, with a Chase Bank branch on the ground floor . . .Rockefeller began a lifelong association with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) when he joined as a director in 1949, the youngest member appointed to that position yet. He would later become head of the nominating committee for future membership and after that the chairman of this foreign policy think-tank . . .
In 1992, he was selected as a leading member of the Russian-American Bankers Forum, an advisory group set up by the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to advise Russia on the modernization of its banking system, with the full endorsement of President Boris Yeltsin.
He founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973.
He adopted this approach to criticisms from the Right: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” In his 2002 Memoirs, he wrote:
“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
He was probably the most influential private citizen in the world in the second half of the twentieth century.
He was named the Honorary Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.
