Chapter VIII

The Banker

Rockefeller Junior's youngest child, David. was the only heir born after the 1915 Ludlow Massacre. After graduating from Harvard and attending the London School of Economics he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1940 from the University of Chicago and then became a trustee of the institution his grandfather founded. He served for eighteen months as an unpaid secretary to the mayor of New York City, and then as a Housing Administrator for the Office of Defense. In 1942, he joined the Army where he rapidly rose as an intelligence officer to the rank of Assistant Military Attache in the American Embassy in Paris. He was duly admitted to the French Legion of Honor in 1945.

His real ambition in life was international banking. Immediately after the War, David went to work for the Chase National Bank, of which his uncle. Winthrop W. Aldrich, was then Chairman of the Board. As an assistant manager of the foreign department, David specialized in opening branches and expanding the bank's influence in the areas of Latin America in which his elder brother had established interests. The former co-ordinator, Nelson, had quietly transferred the operation of the wartime Rockefeller Office to two Rockefeller-owned entities IBEC (International Basic Economics Corporation). a profit-making corporation which was investing in agriculture and marketing companies in South America, and taking full advantage of the network of businessmen which Rockefeller had assembled during the War, and AIA, the American International Association for Economic and Social Development which encompassed non-profit activities such as grants and scholarships, thus maintaining liaisons between local government officials and leading members of the Latin American Press. David was also successful in establishing a close working relation in Panama with the closely-knit financial and political families that more or less ran the government of that country.

With Rockefeller interests owning the largest block of stock in Chase, and two seats on its Board of Directors, David rapidly ascended to the presidency of the bank in 1961, when he was only 44. The Chase Manhattan Bank, as it was called after it absorbed the Manhattan Bank in 1955, was even then one of the three most powerful banks in the United States with assets over $10 billion. As head of this international financial institution, David criss-crossed the world numerous times during the Sixties, dining with kings and heads of states, and compiling index cards of some 20,000 acquaintances on whom he could possibly call for assistance. A member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations since 1942 and an active participant in the public and private gatherings of the so-called Eastern Establishment, David became the single most effective spokesman for the entire American business community.

Questions? Email me at edepstein@worldnet.att.net
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