Peggy was devastated by the poverty she saw and enraged by the political and economic obstacles that prevented meaningful change from occurring. She believed the capitalist system that I represented was a significant part of the problem. After she graduated from Radcliffe in 1969, she enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and earned a master’s and then a doctorate. For most of that time she also worked as the co-director of the STEP Program for disadvantaged and at-risk youth at Arlington High School in Massachusetts.
Peggy was passionate in her efforts to reform the world and seemed unable to disassociate her family and me from what she felt was wrong. For several years she distanced herself, and her trips home to see us became more infrequent. Happily, with the passage of time, Peggy and I reestablished a good relationship. We have worked together on many projects in New York City and have traveled widely together around the world.
RICHARD
The war in Vietnam was still raging when our two youngest children, Richard and Eileen, entered college—Richard at Harvard and Eileen at Middlebury—and the tide of student protest was still running high. However, neither of them became involved with any of the radical movements that in varying degrees had attracted their older sisters.
Richard was troubled by Vietnam, but he remained relatively aloof from the issue during his undergraduate days. Because Dick was more dispassionate than either Abby or Peggy, the two of us could talk about it more calmly. By then, as a result of my experience with the other children and my more general exposure to college students, I was able to deal with him less emotionally.
But it was not easy to answer Dick’s probing questions or to justify my strong support for a war that might eventually claim him as a victim. In reality there was no simple solution to the dilemma our country faced, although there were many on both sides who insisted there was. Vietnam involved complex and contradictory geopolitical and moral issues that were a challenge to both the nation as a whole and to every family, including mine.
Dick and I discussed issues like Vietnam at great length. I was grateful he was willing to listen to my arguments even though he was clearly more sympathetic to the radical views of his siblings. I also learned a great deal from Dick about the deep feelings of betrayal and mistrust that many members of the younger generation had developed because of our government’s actions in relation to the Vietnam War.
Dick graduated from Harvard in 1971 and spent the next few years “deciding what to do with his life.” He worked for a missionary group that served the isolated indigenous populations of northern Quebec and Labrador. Through his work Dick fell in love with flying and qualified for his pilot’s license as soon as he could. He also took courses at Harvard’s School of Education before deciding on a career in medicine. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in the late 1970s and then built a successful family-oriented medical practice in Portland, Maine.
Dick set himself an orderly and purposeful course in life, centered around his family and his profession. Recently he has been active in helping to lead the effort to permanently protect important wildlands and forests in the northeastern United States. He also is using computer technology to build partnerships between patients and their doctors and to encourage people to become more active participants in their own medical care. Richard is a bright, compassionate, and dedicated man, and a steadying influence in our family.
EILEEN
Our youngest child, Eileen, seemed unaffected by most of the issues that had so deeply entangled her siblings. Instead, resolving the emotional struggle within our family became her preoccupation. She had always been close to her mother, and when her sisters were quite hostile in their attitudes toward Peggy and me, Eileen tried to act as a conciliator, passing information back and forth in an effort to keep the lines of communication open.
In the end Eileen did go through a rebellious phase, but it played itself out on a personal rather than a political or ideological level. She resented that Peggy and I did not appear to take her views on important issues seriously. Her feelings were easily hurt, and this, too, led to tensions. There was a period of estrangement following her lengthy trip to Africa in the mid-1970s when she decided to live apart from us after her return.
Eileen’s early efforts to mediate within the family became a central focus of her life after she met Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, at a Dartmouth Conference meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1979. Norman had just published Anatomy of an Illness, which detailed his successful battle to overcome cancer through the healing ability of the human mind. Eileen was impressed with Norman’s philosophy, and for a time he became her mentor. Subsequently, she set up a foundation, the Institute for the Advancement of Health, to encourage scientific study of mind-body relationships in health and disease. This led her to found the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning to promote social and emotional intelligence throughout the country.
THE TRAGEDY OF VIETNAM
For more than forty years after the end of World War II I believed that “containing” the threat posed by the Soviet Union and counteracting its consistent and unrelenting support of “wars of national liberation” around the world was the most important task the United States faced as a superpower. The defense of South Vietnam fit into the broader global strategy of containment. If Ho Chi Minh’s Communists, with the backing of China and the Soviet Union, conquered all of Vietnam, then it would be only a matter of time before the other “dominos”—including Indonesia, India, and the Philippines—would fall one after the other. It was an article of faith for me and for most of the people I knew and respected that only the United States had the power to prevent this from happening.
A trip to South Vietnam in September 1966 only confirmed my belief that we had to do everything we could to prevent the triumph of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. I had gone to Saigon to open a Chase branch that would serve the growing number of American troops stationed there. General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American forces, briefed us on the progress of the war and his strategy to defeat the enemy. Westmoreland believed the United States had the capability to win the war if we were prepared to commit enough combat troops and “to stay the course.”
Westmoreland’s greatest concern was that growing antiwar sentiment at home would prevent us from fighting the war to the finish. He was particularly upset by the editorial stance of The New York Times, which he felt undermined what we were doing and how we were going about it. I had also been concerned by these editorials, written by John Oakes, head of the Times editorial board, whom I had known when we were stationed at Camp Ritchie during World War II. I contacted John when I returned to New York and suggested that he go to Vietnam and meet with Westmoreland. John did go to Saigon, but he was so convinced we should negotiate a settlement with Ho Chi Minh as quickly as we could and get out that nothing Westmoreland said could disabuse him of his strongly held views.
I had a very different perspective. I was disturbed by the numbers of young Americans, including my own children, who had lost their sense of patriotism and pride in their country, and I was saddened by the cynicism and mistrust that so many felt about our government and its actions.
After the Tet offensive in early 1968, however, it became clear that Westmoreland’s strategy of massive military intervention had not worked and that disenchantment with the war had reached a fever pitch at home. I realized then that we had no choice but to negotiate our withdrawal on the most acceptable terms possible. There had already been too much damage done to our national fabric and cohesiveness for the conflict to be sustained any longer. I look back on Vietnam, as others do, as a terrible tragedy for our country.
Nonetheless, our intervention in Vietnam did secure time for the rest of the region to stabilize and begin the transition toward democratic market-oriented economies. A conversation in late 1998 with Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, confirmed this view. He told me, “Americ
a lost the Vietnam War in the United States, not in Vietnam.” Lee was convinced that had we not intervened in South Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would have fallen under Chinese Communist domination. I doubt whether many Americans would look upon this result as much of a consolation for the damage done to our country.
CONFRONTATION AT HARVARD
I also encountered the rebelliousness of the sixties in many places outside my home, especially on college campuses, where my appearances frequently generated protests. On one occasion I canceled a speech at Columbia University’s Business School when the central administration refused to provide more than token security, even though there were indications that my appearance might be physically resisted.
The protestors I encountered accused me of responsibility for all the world’s ills—from the Vietnam War to institutional racism to fluoride in the water supply. I regret to say that some of the experiences that I found most offensive occurred at Harvard, my alma mater. Surprisingly, one had to do with a gift my family and I made to the Harvard Divinity School.
In 1962 I had been elected to a second six-year term on the board of overseers at Harvard, and in 1966 I was asked to be president of the board for my last two years of service. Throughout those years I worked closely with Harvard’s president, my good friend Nathan M. Pusey.
The Divinity School affair began quite innocently in the spring of 1967 when a fellow overseer and chair of the Divinity School Visiting Committee asked me for a contribution to the school. Harvard was in the midst of a $200 million capital campaign, of which the Divinity School was trying to raise $7 million to construct a new dormitory and dining facility, and to endow scholarships and fellowships. I was asked if my family and I would provide $2.5 million for a new building, which would be named in honor of my father.
Since Father had been an active supporter of Nate Pusey’s efforts to restore the Divinity School to its former position as a major center for Protestant ministerial training, I agreed to try to encourage the family to join me in providing the necessary funds. My stepmother, Martha, and I each gave $750,000, and the remainder was put up by my brothers and two family foundations.
Nate Pusey and the dean of the Divinity School were overjoyed by our gift. Edward Larrabee Barnes was selected as the architect, and we all looked forward to a ground breaking in the fall of 1969 and a completed building in the latter part of 1970.
In April 1969, President Pusey was forced to call in the Cambridge police to clear University Hall of militant student protesters. His action led to a student strike that effectively closed down the campus. Although classes resumed soon thereafter, campus disruption continued. Plans for Rockefeller Hall became hostage to more general student demands that the university cease its expansion into surrounding neighborhoods, restructure the governance of the university, renounce all defense contracts, eliminate ROTC from campus, and purge its investment portfolio of stock in corporations that continued to operate in South Africa.
A small group of students at the Divinity School demanded that the money contributed by the Rockefeller family either be rejected or used for other purposes, such as buildings for low-income housing in the Cambridge area. They sneered that Rockefeller money was “tainted” and that the family was trying to buy respectability with the gift. While their demands were rejected by a majority of the Divinity School faculty and students, the radicals enjoyed enough power to insist that a delegation be appointed to visit me in New York to explain their position on Rockefeller Hall.
With considerable reluctance I agreed to meet with them at Chase on the morning of June 10, 1969, the day before commencement weekend at Harvard. Some of the group were honestly concerned about the future direction of the Divinity School and wondered if the funds designated for the building might be spent in a more socially responsible way. Two of them took the position, however, that accepting money from the Rockefellers for any purpose would compromise Harvard morally. One of them, a graduate student in religion, reeking with self-righteousness, asserted that Father was a hypocrite, “no real Christian at all,” who had given money away only to purge his conscience.
It made me so mad, I could hardly speak. I can’t think of a moment in Father’s life when his actions were not motivated and shaped by his deep religious beliefs and concern for his fellowman. This was unfair to him and my family, and a most disagreeable encounter for me.
I left that night for Cambridge to attend our daughter Peggy’s graduation ceremonies at Radcliffe and to receive an honorary degree at the Harvard commencement—along with New York’s mayor John Lindsay, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and labor leaders Marianne and Walter Reuther.
I learned that Students for a Democratic Society had threatened to disrupt the graduation exercises unless they were allowed to speak. Nate felt it necessary to accede to their demands. Thus, when I was called to receive my degree, a young SDS representative stood on his chair with a loudspeaker and harangued the audience: “David Rockefeller needs ROTC to protect his empire, including racist South Africa, which his money maintains. . . . Harvard is used by the very rich to attack the very poor. . . . Every minute of this commencement Harvard continues to attack people, including us as students. In the context of Harvard’s training of officers, of Harvard’s racism, of Harvard’s expansion, this commencement is an atrocity. . . . Our interests as students do not lie in this tea party with these criminals, these Puseys and Bennetts and Rockefellers.”
Of course there was no chance to respond to his invective. I stood there grimly as a small scattering of those attending cheered and applauded. Although the incident was personally unpleasant for me, I felt the real victim was Harvard. A strident ideological minority who cared little for civility, free speech, or democratic principles had tarnished a solemn event at a great university.
Eventually the protests dissipated, and Rockefeller Hall now stands proudly on Harvard’s campus. Nevertheless, the 1960s were years embittered by angry protests and saddened by periods of family estrangement and conflict.
HAPPY ENDINGS
As memories of the war in Vietnam began to fade, so did much of the rebellious mood it had generated. As our children matured and started to have families of their own, frictions and misunderstandings between them and their parents rapidly diminished.
An important breakthrough came in 1980, the year that Peggy and I celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary. To our surprise and delight, several weeks before the date of our anniversary, the children came to us as a group and invited us to spend a week with all of them, including spouses and children, anyplace in the world we would select, at their expense.
We chose the JY Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Peggy and I spent our honeymoon. It was a total success; neither a harsh nor an unkind word was spoken. We enjoyed the beauties of the Grand Tetons and being together as a family. After our week together the dark clouds lifted. In the years since, we have strengthened our bonds as a family. We still disagree on many important issues, but we have learned to count on one another for love and support in both good times and bad.
*One of the minor ironies of contemporary politics is that Collier and Horowitz, having made their names and a good deal of money writing as left-wing Marxist critics of American capitalism and the American establishment in books on the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Fords, have now become the darlings of the right wing of the Republican Party. Horowitz is the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, which receives significant funding from Richard Mellon Scaife and other conservative activists. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.
CHAPTER 23
BROTHERLY CONFLICTS
By the mid-1970s the circle of family conflict had broadened considerably beyond my own children.
Winthrop died of cancer in February 1973, and Babs succumbed to the same disease in May 1976. With their passing, my three brothers and I found ourselves at loggerheads over the future of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Fami
ly Office, and the Pocantico estate. Our debates and disagreements over these family institutions were affected by the attitudes and actions of the “cousins” during this time—so much so that a divisive inter-generational struggle briefly threatened the cohesion and continuity of the family itself.
Each of the brothers had experienced some degree of friction within his own immediate family during the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, but the sharp conflict between Nelson, who, ironically, had been the great advocate and architect of family unity, and John, our generation’s foremost philanthropist, now became the focus of family tensions.
AN EMBITTERED LEADER
In late January 1977, Nelson returned to the Family Office from Washington, crowned with the laurels of an exemplary public career spanning four decades, a career that had brought him within a heartbeat of achieving his lifelong quest for the presidency of the United States. But despite his significant achievements, Nelson became deeply embittered by the events of the two preceding years.
In the wake of Watergate and Richard Nixon’s ignominious resignation, President Gerald Ford selected Nelson as his vice president. Nelson properly viewed his selection as a great honor that would allow him to serve his country in high office at a time of crisis. He handled the arduous and intrusive congressional confirmation process with characteristic equanimity, and the Senate approved his nomination in December 1974.
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