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. |