For the right, it was a cabal operating as a global government the left saw an unaccountable rich man’s club, promoting free markets to the exclusion of all else. But that fuss is nothing compared with the suspicions once aroused by the Trilateral Commission. Today, there’s much hyperventilating about the secretiveness of the Bilderberg Group (another collection of worthies favoured by David). To that end, in 1973 he set up the Trilateral Commission, featuring the West’s great and good, and soon found himself the butt of conspiracy theorists around the globe. From the outset, too, David was a committed internationalist. “I’m more apt to get through on the telephone to somebody.” Part perhaps also reflected his much-praised work in US wartime intelligence in Europe, between 19.Īll of this made him a networker of epic proportions (his Rolodex, in that pre-smartphone age, read like a global Who’s Who) not surprisingly the journalist and former LBJ aide Bill Moyers once called him “the unelected but indisputable chairman of the American establishment”. “Having the name can be an advantage,” he once said. Part was due to merely being a Rockfeller. Part of that went with the job of chairman of Chase Manhattan, which David sought to make a global bank.
He was never elected to any political office, but in his heyday, in the 1970s and 1980s, he seemed to know every politician who mattered on the planet. And in his day, Nelson notwithstanding, he was probably the most influential of them all.ĭavid Rockfeller flourished at the intersection of business, high finance and international diplomacy. Laurance Rockefeller, an airline magnate, survived until 2004. Abigail, David’s only sister, died in 1976, followed by John in 1978, and by Nelson – his most famous sibling, governor of New York and Gerald Ford’s vice-president – in 1979. Winthrop, a former governor of Arkansas, died in 1973. The others of John Rockefeller Jnr’s six children are now long gone.
Compared with that, Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are distant also-rans.įrom almost the moment of his birth, on 12 June 1915, in the embers of the Gilded Age, David was the favourite grandchild: the one, according to “Senior”, who was “most like myself”.
When he died in 1937, “Senior”, the founder of Standard Oil and a contender for the world’s richest ever individual, was reckoned to have assets equal to 1.5 per cent of US GDP, about $250bn today.
#David rockefeller memoirs quotes Patch
Even the family’s total wealth, much of it locked away in trusts, is put at a relatively modest $10bn – enough to buy fleets of yachts, private jets and a couple of mansions in Belgravia, but not a patch on his grandfather John D Rockefeller. These days he is pretty low in the billionaires’ pecking order: 603rd according to Forbes magazine, the chronicler of such matters, with a fortune of “only” $3.2bn. Being a Rockefeller these days ain’t what it used to be.ĭavid, patriarch of that family and of a vanished Wasp establishment, celebrated his 100th birthday. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I’m proud of it.”Īlthough the name ‘Rockefeller’ still retains its resonance, its influence is fading. He says: “Some even believe are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterising my family and me as ‘internationalists’ conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. Their aim is to create an international world order under a single umbrella, to deal with global issues, initiated and controlled by western countries. Obviously such a hefty vision could be seen as a conspiracy, by the powerful and the well connected, to dominate and manipulate the weak and the fragmented people of the world.ĭavid Rockefeller, the last former member of the unofficial royal family of America, has admitted that if he is accused of such conspiracies to bring about a ‘one world order’, then he is proud and guilty as charged.
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