Rockefeller’s new ‘Memoirs’ recounts long, varied career

MEMOIRS, by David Rockefeller, Random House, New York, 2002, 517 pages, $35 ($65 in leather binding).

In the depths of the Depression, when David Rockefeller was a freshman at Harvard, his father sent him a letter containing some bad news: The way things were going, it was very likely that he was going to have to “work for a living.”

Well, he has worked for a living all his life – and he now is 87 – in a fine mixture of business and philanthropy, leaving time for world travel, appreciation of painting and sculpture, and a good bit of sailing along the Maine coast with his wife of 56 years, Peggy, who died in 1996.

In his “Memoirs,” he tells the whole story, including some bad patches, often in gripping detail. Bankers will relish the ups and downs of his career at the Chase Manhattan Bank, including his 14-year feud with his co-chairman, George Champion, and how he helped break up a drunken fistfight, at a “unity meeting,” between the bank’s president and its comptroller.

Developers will marvel at his leadership in the renewal of downtown New York and the family’s troubles in disentangling from the brilliant but troubled Rockefeller Center. Financiers may admire his daring risk taking, such as his impulsive loan of $250 million over lunch with the head of the Bank of Italy, who suddenly needed help to pay for oil imports.

Art lovers will enjoy his troubles over his choice of a huge composition of automobile bumpers for the bank’s lobby, the family’s troubles over a Diego Rivera mural that unexpectedly featured a portrait of Lenin, and his struggle to keep the Museum of Modern Art modern but not too modern.

Yes, David Rockefeller has worked for a living – but with a difference. Like many an ambitious young man, he went to work for his uncle. But his uncle was president of Chase National Bank, the largest bank in the world, and his father was the largest shareholder.

Young Rockefeller was thus off to a good start after stints as secretary to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York and as a bureaucrat at one of the pre-World War II defense agencies. (A family friend, Secretary of Labor Anna Rosenberg, steered him to both jobs.) Soon after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army as a private, “even though father could have used his influence to get me a commission.” After a rather solitary childhood and a life in private schools and Harvard, he wondered how he could fit in with ordinary folks. But boot camp was a breeze, and later he did so well at painting the officers’ quarters that he “realized I wasn’t as inept as I had feared.” And the other enlisted men “were amazed that a Rockefeller was willing to do manual labor.” Within a year, he was a second lieutenant in intelligence.

He soon was assigned to Algiers and, with the help of family friends such as a Standard Oil official and Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King, formed a network of acquaintances including Ambassador Robert Murphy, William Paley, the founder of CBS, and C.D. Jackson, later publisher of Fortune magazine. Reassigned to France, he checked on reported German troop movements in the southwest and managed occasional trips to Paris, where he had lunch with Pablo Picasso.

So by the time he got to the Chase, Rockefeller had acquaintances in key spots. With further travel, he expanded this personal network to include financial and government leaders all over the world. He has more than 100,000 entries in his electronic Rolodex. These contacts meant business for the bank, but they sometimes caused trouble for himself and the bank. He tells in great detail about his and Henry Kissinger’s efforts to help the exiled shah of Iran find a home and get medical care.

Then he suggests that that the hostage crisis might have been avoided if President Carter had treated the shah better. It bugs Rockefeller that The New York Times keeps concentrating on his involvement with the shah each time it updates his obituary.

His close association with Kissinger and with a powerful Chilean newspaper publisher, Augustin (Doonie) Edwards, helped shape his views of the bloody revolution in which the leftist Allende government was overthrown and Gen. Augusto Pinochet began his long and repressive dictatorship. Rockefeller writes: “Despite my own abhorrence of the excesses committed during the Pinochet years, the economic side of the story is a more constructive one.” He explains that Pinochet brought in some young pragmatic economists and made Chile a model for its neighbors.

Similarly, he seems to have formed his judgments on the Vietnam War largely from talks with Kissinger, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. He concludes that the war was worth the effort but ended in a tragedy.

But we needn’t look for that sort of wisdom in Rockefeller’s memoirs. It contains nuggets about managing wealth for personal, business, community and national benefit. In the personal category, he writes: “A family advisor once said the two most expensive things a Rockefeller can do are run for public office and get divorced. Nelson did both.” In another passage, which may prove painfully true to some other wealthy families, he recognizes his own good fortune in having inherited “substantial means” and goes on: “I realize, too, that inherited wealth unaccompanied by the guidance of wise parents can be a curse rather than a benefit.”

Above all, this thick book contains a lot of good yarns, a lot of anecdotes about almost any famous person you can think of, and a frank account of a remarkable career – one that is still going strong.