also recounts in Memoirs his long behind-the-scenes role as a semi-official representative of the United States and its capitalist class, acting as a “diplomatic go-between” in China and the Middle East, especially while chairman of both the Chase Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to one of his many trips to China, he met with President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and carried messages from them to the Chinese leadership.51 Rockefeller also used the Council as a means to promote the interests of his Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1977 he was invited to visit China by the People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs
in my capacity as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, with whom they wanted to establish closer ties. I accepted the invitation with the understanding that I would also be able to discuss banking matters with Chinese officials. Nurturing the relationship between PIFA and the CFR was important to me, but I was more interested in prodding the Chinese to be a bit more imaginative about Chase’s operations.52
In the Middle East, where Chase had major interests due to “its close and longtime association with the major U.S. oil companies,” Rockefeller often met with many of the dictatorial and repressive rulers of the regimes there, including King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Nasser and Sadat of Egypt, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, giving and taking back messages to President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger.53 Rockefeller preferred this unofficial, behind-the-scenes role rather than entering the U.S. government in an official position. Both Nixon and Carter asked him to serve as treasury secretary, and Carter wanted to appoint him Federal Reserve board chairman, but Rockefeller declined all of these requests, although he did successfully recommend Paul Volcker for the latter job. Volcker had worked for Rockefeller and Chase as a vice president, as well as the New York Federal Reserve Board, and, of course, was a director of the CFR.54
Another topic discussed in Memoirs is the tensions within the ruling class between old and new money, between “self-made” (often with the help of the already rich) and inherited capitalist wealth. The latter group is often listed (as David and other Rockefellers are) in the Social Register. David recounts how John J. (Jack) McCloy, a key Wall Street lawyer for Millbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, a law firm closely connected to the Rockefeller family and its interests for many decades, and who preceded Rockefeller as chairman of both Chase and the CFR, repeatedly told a story in public that, David wrote, “always made me feel uncomfortable.” Rockefeller said that McCloy told this story “in my presence a hundred times, the last time … when I succeeded him as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.” David felt that the story demonstrated “ambivalence … even latent hostility” toward Rockefeller and his family:
Jack was born, as he often recalled, on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Philadelphia. His father died when he was quite young, and it was only by dint of hard work and exceptional ability that he made his way through Amherst College and Harvard Law School, and on to a distinguished career. Despite his own great achievements, Jack seemed wary, perhaps even resentful, of what I appeared to represent in financial and social terms…. He had worked his way through college and law school in part by tutoring during the summer and had traveled to Maine in the summer of 1912, three years before I was born, hoping to get a job on Mount Desert Island. One of the families he decided to contact was mine. Jack always imparted the story at great length—walking the quarter mile from the main road up to the Eyrie, knocking on the massive door, and explaining to the butler why he was there, only to be turned away.55
As a professional who had risen through hard work into the capitalist class, McCloy obviously did harbor some resentment toward those, like David Rockefeller, who were born into vast inherited wealth, and therefore had their path through life made relatively easy and trouble free.
In 2012 David was at the center of a significant event in Rockefeller family history, the formalization of the long-standing informal cooperation between two of the wealthiest families in world history, the U.S.-based Rockefellers and the European-based Rothschild family. In May of 2012, the Rothschild Investment Trust, RIT Partners, announced that it would purchase a 37 percent stake in Rockefeller & Company, the Rockefeller family wealth advisory and asset management group, with $34 billion under management. Lord Jacob Rothschild joined the board of directors of the Rockefeller firm, on which David Rockefeller Jr. sits, and of which David Rockefeller Sr. is honorary chair. At the time of the Rothschild purchase, David Sr. stated: “Lord Rothschild and I have known each other for five decades. The connection between our two families remains very strong. I am delighted to welcome Jacob and RIT as shareholders.”56 The Rockefeller family also remains strong in the CFR; the Council’s 2013 Annual Report lists David and four other Rockefellers, joining his daughter Peggy Dulany as members of the organization.57
Peter G. Peterson, Chairman 1985–2007
The second long-term chairman of the CFR was the “in and outer” Peter G. Peterson, who served even longer than David Rockefeller. Whereas Rockefeller is a third-generation billionaire, Peter G. Peterson did not inherit vast wealth; rather he served at the cabinet level in the federal government and engaged in various business enterprises, including especially the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm that he co-founded in 1985, eventually becoming a billionaire. Born in Nebraska in 1926, Peterson is the son of a Greek immigrant father who owned a small restaurant. After being expelled for cheating at MIT, he still attended and graduated from a top private university, Northwestern, near Chicago.58 He was then able to land corporate jobs and move up the ranks due to his intelligence, work ethic, and, of course, conformity to the needs and desires of the corporate capitalist class. One of those key needs is always growth, the endless accumulation of capital. Early in his career, Peterson worked his way to the top of Chicago’s Bell & Howell Corporation, saying in Forbes magazine that his company was “committed to growth.”59 His friendship with Charles Percy, the prior head of Bell & Howell, led to Peterson’s coming into closer contact with leading members of the Rockefeller family. One event was the 1967 wedding of John D. Rockefeller IV, currently U.S. senator from West Virginia, and Charles Percy’s daughter Sharon. Another contact was through the Bell & Howell and Chase Manhattan Bank relationship, whereby Peterson became friends with David Rockefeller. A little more than a year after the wedding, John D. Rockefeller III invited Peterson to Rockefeller family headquarters at Pocantico Hills in New York’s Hudson River Valley for a meeting that included John J. McCloy, then chair of both the CFR and the Chase Manhattan Bank, and C. Douglas Dillon, another CFR leader, a close friend of John D., and head of the investment banking firm of Dillon Read. Rockefeller wanted Peterson to organize and lead a major commission that would propose “reforms” to head off looming congressional restrictions on the foundations of the super-rich. Peterson stated in his memoirs that with this meeting he, a “Greek country boy,” knew that he had connected with the top tier of the “American establishment.” As Peterson expressed it:
But any look at American foundations necessarily involved the inner sanctums of what was then the American establishment. Indeed, Jack McCloy … was widely proclaimed by people in the know in corporate boardrooms, the business press, and the lush apartments on New York’s Park and Fifth Avenues to be the unofficial chairman of the Establishment, of this network of elite Northeasterners. Doug Dillon was certainly on its executive committee, as were the Rockefellers. This establishment had great entrée to the corridors of power and used their access and control with quiet discretion and great effectiveness. Their grip on America’s major philanthropic institutions was particularly strong. To call upon a forty-two-year-old Midwestern outsider indicated they saw a serious problem, one that required a set of fresh eyes from outside the Eastern establishment.60
Asserting his independence, Peterson declined to head the suggested Rockefeller-funded commission until he had had a chance to fully investigate the situation. After meetings in Washington with leading congressmen, he determined the situation was serious and required a different approach. He again traveled to New York for a meeting with Messrs. Rockefeller, McCloy, and Dillon, this time at Rockefeller Center. Peterson recounted what happened at this second meeting:
I told them I was deeply flattered by what they wanted me to do, but I felt the problem