*The technical term is heterozygous, which means the polled bull’s gene for hornlessness is dominant and overrides the genes of the horned cow.
EPILOGUE
September 11, 2001, was a day—to borrow a phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt—that “will live in infamy.”
I watched from the window of my office on the fifty-sixth floor of the General Electric Building in Rockefeller Center that morning as two plumes of smoke billowed blackly upward from the World Trade Center towers and then drifted out to sea across Brooklyn and through the Verazzano Narrows. Shortly before 10 A.M. the South Tower collapsed and a cloud of dust enveloped the southern portion of Manhattan. Beneath it lay the Wall Street area, where I had spent most of my career.
I knew immediately that the physical destruction would be immense and the loss of life catastrophic. Moreover, the hopes and dreams of thousands of victims and millions of survivors were buried in that rubble. For the first time since December 7, 1941, when I heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I experienced a physical sense of dread about the future.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, like all New Yorkers and Americans, I struggled with the incredible dimensions of the disaster and tried to comprehend its causes. It was only with time that I began to understand the connection between the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the failure over a period of almost fifty years to resolve the dilemma of the Middle East. President Nasser’s 1969 warning to me about the “growing instability and radicalism” throughout the region resonated strongly. Despite efforts by people of good faith on all sides, this dangerous cancer has never been excised, and it now threatens the stability and prosperity of the entire world.
In the months following those horrible attacks, the leadership of President Bush, Mayor Giuliani, and Governor Pataki heartened me, and the courage and compassion of New Yorkers, in particular, made me proud.
We New Yorkers are resolute people, and we Americans are optimists by nature. I have no doubt, therefore, that a new, even more vibrant lower Manhattan will rise from the ashes of devastation and personal loss. The process, in fact, is already well under way. And when lower Manhattan is ultimately “reborn” yet again, I have every hope and expectation that I will be right here to witness it.
AFTERWORD
My life today, at the age of eighty-eight, remains busy and fulfilling. I continue to travel extensively for business as well as enjoyment and have recently completed fascinating journeys to northern Thailand, Laos, Burma, Western China, and Tibet, as well as a wonderful sailing tour of the Hebrides Islands of Scotland and a boat trip up the Rio Negro in the Amazon. In recent years I have often traveled with members of my family, all of whom have sought ways since the death of Peggy to bring me comfort. Although only a few of them live in New York, they visit me often and make my Manhattan home their base of operations whenever they are in town.
As my children have grown older, each of them has discovered fields of special interest in which they have excelled and through which they have made contributions to the society in which we live. In many ways I think my proudest accomplishment—and one that I attribute in large part to my wife, Peggy—is these six vigorous, intelligent, and committed individuals. Although we have disagreed about many things in the past and continue to view the world in quite different ways, I now realize they have embraced their heritage as strongly as I did and have used their resources to improve the world or at least try to change it. I am immensely proud of each one of them.
In the aftermath of the conflicts of the 1970s, David, my eldest son, stepped forward to help heal the wounds of that difficult time and to begin to set the future course of the Rockefeller family. This generational transition would take many years to complete, but without David’s wisdom, hard work, and leadership during the 1980s and 1990s, I do not think the Rockefeller family would have survived as a cohesive entity. I do not want to suggest that David did this alone—he had plenty of help—but his leadership was critical to the process.
David, a number of his cousins, senior members of the Family Office staff, and consultants reviewed the work of all the family’s major organizations with the goal of adjusting them to the needs of the next generations of the family. The future of both the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Family Office loomed large in their deliberations. At the RBF, David chaired the planning committee and headed the search committee, which appointed Colin Campbell as the fund’s president. He then succeeded me as RBF chairman in 1987, the first member of his generation to hold this position. In addition to helping shepherd a new program into being, David also participated in the negotiations that produced the definitive agreement with the National Trust for Historic Preservation over the future of Kykuit, a process I have already described in some detail.
David became head of the Family Office in 1992, upon my retirement. For more than a decade before that, however, David had grappled with the need to free the family’s business operations from their almost total financial dependence on Laurance and me. He held various positions in Rockefeller Financial Services and Rockefeller & Company during the 1980s, including director of human resources and vice chair. David was the most qualified family member to succeed me and to continue the process of making Rock & Co., as it is known, into an independent, competitive financial services organization. David and his successor, my niece Abby O’Neill, have made a good deal of progress in that regard. Rock & Co., now under the capable management of James S. McDonald, has been able to attract and retain a large number of nonfamily clients even during one of the most trying economic periods I can remember. Somehow David found the time to handle these office responsibilities and to pursue a daunting slate of philanthropic commitments, especially at MoMA, and in the field of conservation, most notably as vice chairman of the National Park Foundation, a position that my brother Laurance once held, providing a nice bit of family continuity. I am grateful for and proud of the work David has done.
Abby has remained Abby, I am happy to say. She is still enormously curious about the world, deeply committed to social change and protecting the environment, and outraged by injustice wherever she finds it. She and I still differ in our political and economic philosophies, but I have grown to understand her perspective, and to admit, albeit grudgingly, that she may have been right about some matters. I hope she feels the same about me. Although she is involved in many projects and organizations, Abby continues to devote a good deal of time to the marketing of the Clivus composting toilet system. As the world grows increasingly aware of the unforeseen consequences of economic development, she has found greater understanding and acceptance of this rather intriguing and innovative low-impact technology. She likes to attack problems at their most fundamental level, and her advocacy of Clivus and other basic conservation measures reflects her powerful intellectual understanding of the problems we need to confront and resolve. I am more and more impressed by Abby’s passionate commitment to creating a better world for everyone.
Like her older sister, Neva is deeply committed to the defense of the natural world. In fact, all of my children are ardent environmentalists. Neva differs from them in that she approaches these complicated issues from the perspective of a trained economist. She has taught at Tufts University in Massachusetts for almost two decades. As a teacher, Neva is not only interested in the economic aspects of environmental degradation and the persistence of poverty, she is also committed to convincing her professional colleagues that economic growth is not the answer to all problems. For that reason, she brings a deeply humane understanding to the cold calculus of the “dismal science.” She has written extensively in the areas of ecological and developmental economics and her ideas have begun to have an impact on the way we think about these difficult problems—at least in the way I think about them. Neva has also served for many years as one of the more effective trustees at The Rockefeller University, and I have been pleased to see how strong her commitment
is to this venerable family institution.
Peggy has continued her efforts to bring together disparate groups—the public and private sectors; donor and donee organizations; former political adversaries—in common cause to solve enduring problems. She seems to be constantly on the move from her cattle ranch in Montana to meetings in New York to conferences in Bombay to field visits to projects in South Africa, Mozambique, or Ecuador. Peggy’s energy is prodigious and she has an expert’s understanding of the economic development process born of more than three decades’ work on these issues. She has developed a network of friends and allies around the world that is simply astonishing. Most of her projects are operated through the Synergos Institute, a not-for-profit organization she founded a number of years ago in New York City. While the goal of Synergos is to foster economic development around the world, I find that is a totally inadequate way to describe what Peggy and her colleagues really do. They are trying to give people the means to pull themselves out of poverty, and for that reason they are constantly seeking new points of leverage and new methods to achieve their goals. I consider her work fascinating and her efforts have my full support.
Peggy and I are also working closely on a project to preserve, renovate, and convert a complex of stone barns, built by my father on the Pocantico estate in the 1930s, into an educational center that will address issues of critical importance to this country’s future agricultural health, safety, and long-term prosperity. Part of our motivation in doing this is to create an institution that will perpetuate my late wife Peggy’s interest in helping to resolve the deepening crisis that faces family farming in the United States today. When the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture opens in the spring of 2004, it will include educational programs for children and adults and a four-seasons farm. This integrated project will also feature a restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, managed by Dan and Dave Barber, who themselves have a deep commitment to the farm-to-table ideal and community-based agriculture. Abby and Neva, as well as Paul Growald, Eileen’s husband, all serve as advisors to this project.
Richard, my youngest son, no longer actively practices medicine, but he is deeply involved in the effort to transform the fundamental framework of his profession. Richard is convinced that the contemporary revolution in communications and information technology can also revolutionize the doctor-patient relationship and dramatically improve the delivery of health care in the United States. His goal is to empower individuals to play stronger, more direct, and more informed roles in determining the nature and scope of their own medical care. He believes that computers and the Internet have set the stage for this transformation. Through the Health Commons Institute, a not-for-profit organization Richard founded in 1992, he has developed and distributed sophisticated computer-based questionnaires and protocols that allow the physician and patient to diagnose health problems jointly and agree upon the most appropriate course of treatment. He has seen some impressive and heartening results from this work. Convincing the medical establishment to adopt these innovations will not be an easy task, but Richard is persistent and resilient in the face of this challenge.
Somehow Richard also finds time to work with a number of not-for-profits, particularly in the field of conservation. He serves on the board of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and supports others that are working to preserve the forests of the northeastern United States. In addition, Richard works closely with Doctors without Borders, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in the late 1990s, and, to my great satisfaction, has been a trustee of The Rockefeller University for many years. Richard is an extraordinary man, and I admire and respect him greatly.
Eileen, my youngest child, has maintained and deepened her lifelong interest in human relationships. Her primary philanthropic interest is finding better ways to improve the quality and effectiveness of our social interactions with each other, an interest initially stimulated by her friendship with Norman Cousins and his pioneering work on the connection between mental health and disease. In the early 1990s, Eileen cofounded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in an effort to bring together scientists studying the biology of emotions with teachers involved in strengthening social and emotional skills. While teaching social and emotional skills might seem a bit intangible to some people, I am convinced that Eileen has found an idea that can have a powerful and enduring impact on contemporary society if widely accepted and implemented. Teaching skills that enable individuals to develop a stronger self-awareness has implications for every imaginable aspect of human life, particularly in the areas of conflict resolution, improved academic performance, and the strengthening of democratic values and community life.
In a very profound sense, Eileen has taken one of the Rockefeller family’s core values—a belief in the essentiality of philanthropy for the health of our society—and deepened its meaning and expanded its scope. She has taken the lessons she has learned from her own life and applied them to the transformation of Rockefeller institutional philanthropy. She now chairs the board of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, one of the country’s preeminent philanthropic services organizations, which works with both family members and an increasing number of outside clients to increase the resources available to deal with global problems. I am very proud of the unique contribution Eileen has made in this area, and equally proud of the energy she has devoted to her family.
I am immensely proud of all my children and their unrelenting engagement with the difficult issues of the world. They care deeply about our world. The fact that I played a role in helping to nurture and sustain them is my greatest accomplishment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing these memoirs has been a labor of love that took more than ten years to complete. Fortunately, I did not have to do it alone. I had many companions who made it an interesting and enjoyable experience. I gratefully acknowledge them for the assistance they all provided.
Randolph Bergstrom and David Robarge collected, organized, and analyzed much of the historical material upon which the manuscript was based. These fine young historians were followed by a number of other capable researchers who developed additional information on more specific topics when the need arose. Among this latter group, Rees Doughty, Amy Houston, Emily Landsman, Melissa Manning, and Simon Middleton stand out for the quality of the work they performed.
Dr. Darwin Stapleton, director of the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and his fine staff, including Dr. Kenneth Rose, the Center’s assistant director, the incomparable Thomas Rosenbaum, and Michele Hiltzik, the photo archivist, answered complicated questions on many institutions and events with courtesy and alacrity, and made their superb collection of photographs available for use. Jean Elliott, vice president and archivist at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., where my business papers are deposited, found the essential documents related to Chase’s international expansion and many other matters, and was always available for expert advice and consultation. Shelly Diamond and Nancy Palley, consulting archivists at Chase, located many of the photographs that are found in this book. Bjorg Lema and Michael Stern of the Rockefeller Family Office patiently and cheerfully filled my incessant requests for organizational files and personal letters. Jim Reed of the Rockefeller Center Archives was most helpful in locating photographs of Rockefeller Center.
Many of my friends and close associates made themselves available for lengthy interviews, and a number of them read portions of the manuscript (a few of them many times). All of them provided useful criticism, and often saved me from grievous error. I am particularly beholden to Richard Voell, Lori Marlantes, Jonathan Greene, Vince Silvestri, Richard A. Salomon, Ambassador Joseph Verner Reed, Bill Butcher, Frank Stankard, Charles Fiero, Richard Fenn, Richard J. Boyle, the late Tom Labrecque, Christopher Kennan, Warren T. Lindquist, the late J. Richardson Dilworth, Donal C. O’Brien, Jr., Peter Herman, Colin Campbell, Bill Dietel, Bayless Manning, Winston Lord, Betty Bao Lord, Bill Pounds, Jim Phelan, Wright Elliott, Mike Espo
sito, the late Ridgway Knight, the late Archie Roosevelt, Schuyler Chapin, Richard Debs, Steve Reifenberg, John Coatsworth, Fred Bergsten, George Landau, Ambassador Richard Helms, Robert Armao, Charles Heck, Zbig Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, the late William Jackson, Dick Oldenburg, Rona Roob, Linda Goelz, Frank J. Anton, and Glenn Lowry.
The members of my immediate staff were enormously helpful in the process of research, writing, and revision. At one time or another, everyone who has worked for me over the past decade was drawn into the process. I am therefore indebted to my associates Marnie Pillsbury, Patricia Smalley, and the late Jack Davies, as well as Dorothy Kenner, Clare Eastman, Laura Hepler Tappe, Kristine Olson Huit, Chrissy Bonanno, Linnea Bozynski, Anastasia Malacos, Alessandra Gregory, Katherine Jay-Carroll, Teri Recca, Dorothy Smith, Joan Ferris, Marion Mooney, Laura Opdenaker, and Betsy Gude. Richie Cataldo helpfully explained complex financial transactions and located important files dealing with my art holdings. James Ford and Bob Donnelly accompanied me on many of the trips described herein. Alice Gavitt deserves special mention for the many hours she spent typing and editing drafts of the manuscript. Bertha Saunders, my art curator, supplied critical information on art collecting. My associate Alice Victor and Barbara Harju, my personal secretary for many years, made my life much easier by deftly balancing my busy schedule with the demands of writing.
I am also grateful to Joe and David Nolan for the work they did at an early point in the evolution of this book, and to Josh Gilder for completing a partial first draft.
My friend and associate Peter J. Johnson has supervised this project from its inception, playing many roles and wearing many hats. Without his persistence, patience, and stamina, this book might never have been completed. Peter combined profound historical learning—including a compendious knowledge of the Rockefeller family and our many institutions—with a keen literary sense that was essential to the book’s creation. Among his most important contributions was his suggestion, at a critical point, that we add a third member to the “memoirs team.” Fraser P. Seitel was an inspired choice. I had worked with Fraser for many years at the Chase, and his understanding of the bank’s culture sharpened my understanding. More important, Fraser’s quick wit and sense of humor enlivened the process and improved the book’s quality.
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