International Policy. Born in 1925, Christopher died in 2011.
Maurice Greenberg, Vice Chair, 1994–2002, Honorary Vice Chair, 2002–Present
Son of a Jewish candy store–owner, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg was born in 1925. He earned a degree from the University of Miami and a law degree from New York University. In 1962 he was hired to work for American International Group (AIG), and soon rose to the top of the firm, where he worked for over forty years. He helped make AIG the world’s eighteenth-largest public company and the largest insurance and financial services corporation. Greenberg has also been the chair and CEO of C. V. Starr & Company and chair and managing director of Starr International, a diversified financial services company. He also serves as chair of the associated Starr Foundation. By 2006 Greenberg was worth $3.2 billion and ranked number 214 on the Forbes list of wealthy individuals.
While chair and CEO of AIG, Greenberg developed a close relationship with the Rockefeller family and Henry Kissinger, whom he appointed to be on AIG’s International Advisory Board and hired as an adviser on business possibilities in a number of nations. Greenberg was also selected to be a member of the Trilateral Commission, a trustee of the Asia Society, Rockefeller University (where he received an honorary degree), and the Museum of Modern Art, all four institutions founded and heavily funded by members of the Rockefeller family. He also served in executive positions at the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and has been a member of the Business Council and Business Roundtable. At the same time, he became active in the CFR, serving on the board of directors from 1992 to 2002 and from 2004 to 2009. In 2007, Greenberg helped arrange, through the Starr Foundation, a donation of between $10 million and $20 million to the Council.73
In 2005 New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged Greenberg and other AIG defendants with “fraudulent transactions designed to portray an unduly positive picture of AIG’s loss reserves and underwriting performance.”74 Greenberg appealed, and the case was still in the courts in 2014. Greenberg’s career at AIG was over, but he remains a leader at the CFR, which named its Center for Geoeconomic Studies after him.
Richard E. Salomon, Vice Chair, 2007–Present
Richard E. Salomon, an investment adviser, born in 1942, has been a CFR member for decades and a director since 2003. He is managing partner of an investment advisory firm, East End Advisers, but more important, he serves as senior adviser to David Rockefeller, and also works for other wealthy families. His ties to the Rockefeller family appear to be paramount since he is a trustee of Rockefeller University and the Museum of Modern Art, both Rockefeller family institutions. He also serves as vice chair of the trustees and chairs the nominating and governance committees of Rockefeller University. He is a director of Boston Properties, a trustee of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is on the board of the Peterson Institute, and chairs an advisory board of Blackstone. Since Salomon has no known special expertise in foreign policy, his presence as vice chair of the CFR reinforces the view that David Rockefeller, the Rockefeller family, and old wealth generally continue to exercise an important leadership role in the inner workings of the Council. Salomon’s wife is a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal.
David M. Rubenstein, Vice Chair, 2012–Present
The youngest member of our group of CFR leaders, David M. Rubenstein, born in 1949, is a co-founder and managing director of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. In 2011, he had a net worth of $2.6 billion, and was ranked 148th richest American by Forbes magazine. He and his two co-founders of Carlyle shared a payout of $413 million in 2011 according to the Financial Times.75 Rubenstein has all the trappings of a billionaire—mansions in Nantucket and Colorado, a Gulfstream private jet, and an annual income of $135 million in 2012.76
As illustrated by the Financial Times, in 2013 Carlyle was the most geographically diversified of the ten largest U.S. and European private equity firms.77 This meant that among these top firms, Carlyle had the greatest need for intelligence about trends and events around the world, something with which the CFR can obviously help. As examples of the connections of the firm, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s half brother Oliver is a partner at Carlyle, as is former conservative British prime minister John Major.78
Rubenstein’s early life focused on the law, and he earned his law degree from the University of Chicago after undergraduate work at Duke University. During the 1970s and 1980s he practiced law with two leading firms in New York and Washington, and also served as a domestic policy adviser to Jimmy Carter. In 1987 he co-founded Carlyle. Today this firm manages $148 billion, with twenty-nine offices and employing over 500 investment professionals worldwide. Carlyle’s structure as a trust means that, unlike other buyout firms that have gone public, such as KKR and Blackstone, whose leaders are also prominent in the CFR, shareholders do not have the right to elect board members or vote on executive compensation.
Rubenstein joined the CFR in 2004, became a director in 2005, and gave between $5 million and $10 million to the Council in 2007.79 Several other top Carlyle officials are also CFR members, including former IBM chief Louis V. Gerstner Jr., former Air Force chief of staff General John P. Jumper, former Securities and Exchange Commission head Arthur Levitt Jr., and former Internal Revenue commissioner Charles O. Rossotti.
Besides being a Council director and vice chair, Rubenstein also serves on the boards or advisory committees of a number of important institutions, among them Harvard University, University of Chicago, Stanford University, Asia Society, Brookings Institution, Peterson Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies, World Economic Forum, Institute for Advanced Study, Trilateral Commission, and JPMorgan Chase.
SUMMARY
The ten top leaders of the Council discussed above, with the possible exception of the Rockefeller-connected Salomon, are all clearly part of the capitalist class and especially represent the financial sector known as Wall Street. They often have multiple connecting points with this class. David Rockefeller, Douglas Dillon, and Cyrus R. Vance, for example, are not only very wealthy representatives of leading “old” capitalist families, but are also in the Social Register. Peter G. Peterson, Maurice R. Greenberg, and David M. Rubenstein became billionaires more recently, but all are tied to the Rockefeller family through being invited to serve on the boards of one or more Rockefeller family institutions. Robert Rubin is very wealthy through the stock options and bonuses characteristic of those running top financial organizations like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Warren Christopher was the head of a leading law firm. Carla A. Hills has herself been a director of a number of top corporations, and her husband, Roderick M. Hills, during the past forty years has served on the board of directors of twenty different corporations and been the chair or CEO of a number of them. So at least nine of the top ten Council leaders during recent decades are clearly members of the capitalist class, and the remaining individual (Salomon) has made his career as an adviser to David Rockefeller and Rockefeller-connected institutions. Eight of the ten—all except Hills and Christopher—spent a majority of their careers on Wall Street in finance or law. In sum, these individuals illustrate how the top leadership of the CFR has an especially close connection to Wall Street and finance capital.
Also worth noting is an apparent evolution in the CFR top leadership from those involved in commercial and investment banking—such as Rockefeller and Dillon—to leaders focused more on financial trade and speculation, such as Peterson, Rubin, and Rubenstein. The typical activities of Chase Manhattan Bank and Dillon Read during the 1970s and 1980s are clearly different from Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Carlyle in the 1990s and 2000s. Rockefeller and Dillon and their banks often organized loans for capitalist development. The second group of men and one woman often engaged in speculative ventures, like hedge funds and buying and selling securities as well as entire firms or parts of firms. This difference reflects what is happening in the internationalized world of monopoly finance capital during the same era. The top leadership of the CFR has therefore reflected what is happening in the larger capitalist system.
Seven of the ten discussed above—Dillon, Peterson, Vance, Hills, Christopher, Rubin, and Rubenstein—were “in-and-outers,” and six