Memoirs

by David Rockefeller

  Although I admired Dick for his strong beliefs and his decisiveness in acting on them, I was ambivalent about enlisting immediately myself. Peggy was not having an easy time adjusting to being a Rockefeller and had just given birth to our first child, David, Jr. I also felt more than a few misgivings about how I would handle military service. I persuaded myself that my war-related job would exempt me from active military service. Certainly Anna Rosenberg could pull a few strings if I asked. I was classified III-A because of my dependents, which meant I would not be drafted for some time, so I felt there was no need for an immediate decision.

  AN UNSETTLING CONVERSATION

  Until, that is, I had an unsettling conversation with Mother in her sitting room at 740 Park Avenue. My parents lived near us, and I stopped by a few times a week to say hello. One evening she brought up the war. Mother had long been a pacifist and, before Pearl Harbor, firmly believed the United States should remain neutral. Starting in the late 1930s, however, Mother became convinced that Hitler and his allies posed a profound threat to the United States and, indeed, to the deepest values of Western civilization. Her doctor told me later that with each domino that fell before the Nazi war machine—Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France—Mother experienced severe psychosomatic reactions, becoming extremely anxious and physically ill.

  No doubt one of the things Mother had long dreaded was the conversation she was having with me. She was gentle but firm in expressing her view that the United States had to fight to safeguard our way of life and that men who were eligible ought to do their part by enlisting. They should not wait to be drafted. It was their “duty.” I remember her saying the word softly but emphatically. I was taken aback, not because it appeared she had changed her mind about the war but because she was telling me it was time to go off to fight and possibly die in the process. It was upsetting for me, and obviously it wasn’t easy for Mother, either. I knew Mother was right and that I had been indulging in wishful thinking. I discussed it with Peggy, who agreed. In mid-March 1942 I enlisted in the Army as a private even though Father could have used his influence to get me a commission.

  BASIC TRAINING

  I began basic training at Fort Jay on Governor’s Island on May 1, 1942. Governor’s Island lies off the southern tip of Manhattan. I slept in the barracks, which also housed the grooms for the officers’ horses. Each room in the barracks accommodated several score of enlisted men who slept in double-decker cots. I slept above one of the grooms. As the weather got hotter, the “aroma” of my bunkmate’s clothes, reeking of horse perspiration mingled with his own, grew stronger. He was an amiable fellow with very little education, but we got on well—save for the scent—and I valued his knowledge of horses and his many small kindnesses to me.

  Basic training consisted of endless hours of close-order drill, calisthenics, learning how to care for and fieldstrip our weapons, and, of course, the inevitable KP duty. At first the Army was something of a shock. It was at once threatening because it was all so new and, at the same time, boring and arduous. I had entered the Army with serious misgivings about my ability to cope with its rigors physically or to adapt socially. I had never been a good athlete, and I was not good at most competitive sports. Thus, having occasional bits of time to play baseball was more nerve-racking to me than close-order drill. At the outset I wondered how I would fare mixing with people from very different backgrounds, tastes, and skills.

  As it turned out, basic training went surprisingly well. Submitting to military discipline and getting on with my fellow trainees was much less of a problem than I had anticipated. I had a strong sense of duty, of doing what I was told (perhaps not so surprising, given my upbringing), and following orders was the primary attribute demanded of an enlisted man.

  I recall at one point that a few of us were assigned to paint the kitchen in the officers’ mess hall. I followed instructions faithfully, painting quite a bit more steadily than some of the others who had a more lackadaisical attitude toward Army orders and work. It certainly wasn’t my intention, but this impressed the officer in charge of the detail and also the other enlisted men. They were amazed that a Rockefeller was willing to do manual labor. I soon realized that I wasn’t as inept as I had feared; that I could get along and even become friends with people with whom I had few things in common.

  Of all the brothers, only Win and I enlisted. Win joined the infantry, went through officer candidate school at Fort Benning, and saw combat in the Pacific. He was seriously wounded when his troopship took a direct hit by a kamikaze off Okinawa in 1945. My eldest brother, John, first took a job with the Red Cross in Washington and then was commissioned in the Navy as a lieutenant in 1943. He worked for a special interagency group in Washington, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, that planned for postwar governments in Japan and Europe. Nelson, as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, was, of course, exempt from military service. Laurance, however, had not yet decided what he would do, and that was the occasion of a somewhat cruel but nevertheless funny practical joke that Peggy and I played on him.

  After the first few weeks of basic training I was able to spend weekends at home with my family. Laurance and his wife, Mary, lived in an apartment in the same building at 115 East 67th Street. One Saturday they invited us for dinner. Peggy took some of Father’s office stationery and wrote Laurance a letter, signing it “Father.” The letter mentioned an admiral who had pulled a few strings and arranged for Laurance to be inducted immediately into the submarine service. It was all set; Laurance would sign up and enter training the following week. The letter closed with heartfelt expressions of pride and warm good wishes to his brave son in what Father knew would be a “challenging service for his country.”

  Peggy had the letter delivered that morning, so Laurance would be sure to see it before dinner. When we arrived, Laurance looked quite ashen. He showed us “Father’s letter,” and we played along for a short while but didn’t have the heart to keep it up. Laurance was so relieved when we told him the truth that he forgot to be angry with us.

  Later, Laurance, who had learned a great deal about the aviation industry through his early business investments, was commissioned a lieutenant in the Navy and worked on the design and production of aircraft.

  PAINFUL LOSSES

  I got my corporal’s stripes shortly after finishing basic training and was assigned to the Counter-Intelligence Corps on Governor’s Island. In August I was sent to Washington to join a counterintelligence task force training for assignment in the Middle East. We met in the basement of an obscure government building for two weeks and heard rumors that we would be sent to Cairo in the near future. While I was awaiting orders, however, Colonel Townsend Heard of the American Intelligence Command asked for my transfer to his unit, which was about to be moved to Miami. I confess this came as a welcome surprise. Somehow I could not see myself as an “undercover agent” in the bars of Cairo. The transfer was arranged, and early that fall I reported for duty in Miami Beach, where Peggy and young David joined me. We rented a small house on La Gorce Island, and I bicycled to work each day. My duties were not very impressive or important—serving as a messenger and standing guard duty.

  During this time Dick Gilder was stationed at an air base in northern Florida. When he learned that his wing was soon going overseas, Dick wrangled a twenty-four-hour pass that allowed him to visit us before his departure. I was on guard duty when he arrived—making sure the colonel’s horses, stabled on the Firestone estate, were not hit by falling coconuts!

  Dick came out to be with me for part of the night. We talked of nothing special, but everything seemed important at the time, and I cared very much that he had made the effort to see me. He reminded me of the promise I had made to him in New York, and I told him that he could depend on us. When I was relieved, we went back to the house to spend a few hours with Peggy. Early the next morning we took Dick to the station. As the train pulled out, Peggy and I turned to each other, both knowing somehow t
hat we would never see him again.

  We spoke to Dick one last time when he called from his home in Tyringham, Massachusetts, just before he left for England. His wing refueled in Gander, Newfoundland, and then took off for the North Atlantic crossing. Dick’s plane and two others in his flight were lost without a trace. Ann learned later that the planes had been held in Gander because of indications that the engines had been tampered with. One would have to suspect sabotage as the cause of their disappearance. The war had barely begun, and already I had lost my best friend and Ann was a widow with two small children.

  Before the war ended, two other close friends would die. Walter Rosen, whose mother played the theremin, tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps but was rejected because of his eyesight. He then joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was killed during the Battle of Britain. Bill Waters, my roommate from the LSE who only a few years earlier had stood with me watching Hitler march through the streets of Munich, died when his plane crashed outside of Kano, Nigeria. He and his crew were part of the vast armada that flew across the South Atlantic and Africa, and finally over the “hump” of the Himalayas to Chungking, to supply the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek.

  OFFICER CANDIDATE SCHOOL

  After a few months in Florida I asked Colonel Heard’s permission to apply for officer candidate school. He told me the competition was quite strong and that the best chance for getting a prompt acceptance was to apply to the Engineer OCS School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, which had a reputation as the system’s toughest. My application was accepted, and I began the demanding three-month course in January 1943.

  OCS was much more rigorous than basic training, both intellectually and physically. At the end of the course we had to complete a twenty-mile march carrying an M-1 rifle and a field pack weighing eighty pounds. That night we pitched, and then immediately dismantled, pup tents in the deep snow and straggled back to camp at 5 A.M., only to be awakened two hours later for calisthenics. I was pleased to discover that I could handle the tough and disciplined side of the military as well as excel in the classroom.

  I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Engineer Corps in March 1943 and received orders to report to the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, after a two-week leave. Peggy was already well along in her second pregnancy, so I was grateful for a short break that enabled me to be with her in New York. As the fates would have it, Peggy went to the hospital to give birth to Abby only a few hours after I left for Camp Ritchie. I got the news on my arrival and was granted a three-day pass to return to New York to see her and my newly arrived daughter.

  The two-month course at Ritchie trained officers for intelligence work with combat infantry units. The focus of our training was the battlefield; we studied the order of battle and combat tactics of both Allied and enemy forces, learned map-reading skills and reconnaissance procedures, and mastered techniques for the interrogation of prisoners of war. Each of us chosen for the course had been selected because we had special talents, such as language skills and familiarity with foreign cultures, that would be useful in the European Theater of Operations, our group’s ultimate destination.

  I met a number of interesting men at Camp Ritchie who would intersect with my life later on: Philip Johnson, then a junior architect who had already been involved with the Museum of Modern Art; John Kluge, who was born in Germany and later would found Metromedia; John Oakes, who later edited the New York Times editorial page; and Fred Henderson, part Apache Indian and a regular Army officer who made a career with the CIA after the war. His son, Brian, joined Chase in the 1960s before going on to a senior position at Merrill Lynch.

  After completing the course I was appointed an instructor in the French section of the school and remained for an additional three months to teach French army organization, giving the lectures in French. This assignment provided me with a good background for the task that I would face for the final years of the war in North Africa and France.

  DUTY IN ALGIERS

  In late August 1943 my pleasant interlude in the Appalachians ended. On a lovely summer morning I opened sealed orders that assigned me to the Joint Intelligence Collection Agency (JICA) of the War Department and directed me to report immediately to Washington.

  I spent the next month at the Pentagon, where I learned that I would be assigned to JICA’s detachment at General Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers. My fluency in French, knowledge of the prewar European political situation, and time as an instructor at Camp Ritchie seemed to qualify me as a French “expert”—or so the War Department believed.

  I left Washington on September 23, 1943, with about one hundred other servicemen crammed onboard a noisy, drafty DC-4. We crossed the North Atlantic to Prestwick, Scotland, seated side by side along the fuselage in “bucket” seats, a hard metal bench with shallow indentations on which you planted your buttocks. The thirteen-hour flight was an exhausting experience.

  I had spent two days in Prestwick waiting for transport to North Africa before I ran into William Franklin Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, whom I had met when I was a student in Chicago. He offered to take me on his plane—which had much more comfortable seats—as far as Rabat, Morocco, where I was able to pick up a ride on a military plane to Algiers.

  Because I was entering a combat zone, the Army issued me a .45-caliber pistol, two magazine clips, twenty rounds of ammunition, a first-aid kit, a compass, and a pair of suspenders (which I promptly lost). I was also given little information booklets with helpful advice on how to behave in North Africa: “Never smoke or spit in front of a mosque.” “Don’t kill snakes or birds. Some Arabs believe the souls of departed chieftains reside in them.” “When you see grown men walking hand in hand, ignore it. They are not ‘queer.’ ” One book admonished the reader that staring at Muslim women or touching their veils could start a riot!

  None of this prepared me for the beauty of wartime Algiers. The city stretched for miles in a crescent along the aquamarine Bay of Algiers. The modern French city, built close to the harbor, had wide boulevards, handsome government buildings, and private villas interspersed among parks filled with date palms and flowering plants. Nearby was the older Arab city with its winding streets, whitewashed buildings, and slender minarets, crowned by the Casbah, the ancient Moorish citadel. The Sahel Hills framed the city, and in the distance loomed the coastal mountains. Allied shipping crowded the harbor, and the streets were filled with military men from around the world: Americans, British, Australians, Indians, South Africans, as well as Arabs and Berbers and, of course, the French.

  By the time I arrived in Algiers, the real war had moved on. Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been driven from its last bastion in Tunisia, and Eisenhower had captured Sicily in a lightning campaign. In early September, Allied forces crossed the Straits of Messina and started the long and bloody campaign up the Italian peninsula. The beauty of Algiers masked the intrigue that simmered just below the surface. The intense battle within the French Committee on National Liberation (CNL) for control of the Vichy French civil and military authority in North Africa absorbed everyone’s interest. And central to that struggle was the question of whether General Henri Giraud or General Charles de Gaulle would control the CNL.

  Giraud was one of the leaders of France’s brief and ineffectual struggle against the Germans in 1940. Captured and interned, Giraud escaped from the fortress of Koenigstein in Austria and made his way to unoccupied France. Untainted by collaboration with the Germans and deeply respected by the French officer corps, Giraud seemed the ideal candidate to replace Admiral Jean-François Darlan as chief of state in North Africa. Following Darlan’s assassination in December 1942, Giraud, with the full backing of President Roosevelt and his senior advisors, became the commander of French military forces. It appeared to be only a matter of time before he took control of the political structure as well.

  Charles de Gaulle, who would become one of the great figures of the po
stwar period, was still an obscure military man with a small following and few financial resources in 1943. After the French defeat in 1940, de Gaulle organized the Free French from the remnants of the army that had made it across the Channel after Dunkirk, and proclaimed the French Government in Exile. Although most of the French officer corps detested de Gaulle, Churchill respected his fighting spirit and pressed Roosevelt at the January 1943 Casablanca Conference to include de Gaulle’s Free French in whatever political structure was established in North Africa. The outcome was that the two rivals were forced together in a “shotgun wedding” and told to work out their differences.

  INITIATING AN INTELLIGENCE NETWORK

  By the time I arrived in Algiers, the Giraud–de Gaulle marriage was on the rocks. The two had spent ten months maneuvering deviously and incessantly against each other. While de Gaulle had clearly gained the upper hand in the political struggle, it was by no means certain that he would prevail. Their continuing conflict demanded solid intelligence both because of its implications for the war effort and the impact it would have on postwar France.

  The Joint Intelligence Collection Agency North Africa (JICANA) was composed of about ten officers and thirty enlisted men drawn from all of the U.S. intelligence services. We operated from an office on le boulevard du Telemly, and the officers shared quarters in a private villa across the street. Our primary job was to “collect” intelligence produced by the military intelligence services operating in North Africa and to pass this material along to Washington and London. JICANA functioned as a clearinghouse and a postal service. This was not a particularly arduous task and left the officers with a great deal of leisure time, which was devoted to sampling the quite palatable local vintages and scrounging black market restaurants for rationed delicacies not available to the general public.