David Rockefeller (born June 12, 1915) is a prominent American banker, philanthropist, world statesman, and the son and grandson, respectively, of the billionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller.

He was born in New York City, graduated from Harvard in 1936, studied for a year at the London School of Economics, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1940. In 1946 he joined the staff of the Chase National Bank, which subsequently became the Chase Manhattan Bank, now JP Morgan Chase & Co. He was chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan from 1969 to 1980 and chairman till 1981. A notable achievement was the setting up of the first branch of an American bank in the then Soviet Union, in 1973. He continued in the role of Chairman of the bank's International Advisory Committee until 1999.

In 2003, he served as "honorary member" of the Jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. This was appropriate, as he had created and chaired the original Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association that had initiated the Center, along with major backing from his brother, Nelson Rockefeller, who was the New York governor at the time.

He is also the founder and Honorary Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, Chairman Emeritus of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Honorary Chairman of Rockefeller University, Honorary Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Honorary Chairman of the Council of the Americas, as well as serving as a non-executive board member at the Institute for International Economics. He is a regular attendee since its inception in 1954 of the Bilderberg Group and has attended the Bohemian Grove.

He has worked with every US president since Eisenhower, at times serving as an unofficial emissary on high-level missions; in his extensive world travels he has met a vast range of world leaders, including, notably, Saddam Hussein. He is a prodigious networker, having a Rolodex containing up to one hundred thousand entries of the most powerful people in the world. He has acted as spokesman for the U.S. business and financial community and the New York City business community on notable occasions.

His net wealth is 2.5 billion dollars, making him the 215th wealthiest person in the world.

His Memoirs were published in 2002. Interestingly, they were over ten years in the writing, with many personal staff involved, including Fraser P. Seitel, one of the premier public relations professionals in America. Seitel is the author of the acclaimed textbook The Practice of Public Relations, and a senior counselor for Burson-Marsteller, the world's largest public relations firm.

The "Memoirs" contained the following notable quote; "For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with other around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

Further Reading

• Memoirs, David Rockefeller, New York: Random House, 2002.
• David: Report on a Rockefeller, William Hoffman, New York: Lyle Stuart, 1971. (The only existing biography)

• Those Rockefeller Brothers: An Informal Biography of Five Extraordinary Young Men, Joe Alex Morris, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
• The American Establishment, Leonard Silk and Mark Silk, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980.
• The Shah's Last Ride, William Shawcross, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
• Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City's World Trade Center, Eric Darton, New York: Perseus Books, 2001.
• The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976.

Children

1. David Rockefeller, Jr. (born 1941)
2. Abby Rockefeller (born 1943)
3. Neva Rockefeller Goodwin (born 1944)
4. Margaret (Peggy) Rockefeller (born 1947)
5. Richard Rockefeller (born 1949)
6. Eileen Rockefeller Growald (born 1952)

See Also

• Council on Foreign Relations
• Trilateral Commission
• Bilderberg Group
• World Economic Forum
• United Nations
• Chase Manhattan Bank
• International Banking
• Rockefeller Foundation
• Rockefeller University
• Rockefeller Center
• World Trade Center
• Museum of Modern Art
• The Asia Society
• New York City Partnership
• Rockefeller family
• Pocantico Hills (The Rockefeller family estate, Kykuit)
• Nelson Rockefeller
• Henry Kissinger
• Philanthropy

External links

• The Rockefeller Archive Center: Selected Biography Contains an overview of his life, achievements and membership in organisations.
• Short biography at the Trilateral Commission web-site.
• 'Born to be Mild', a review of Memoirs at the New York Times
• 'The "Proud Internationalist": The Globalist Vision of David Rockefeller' by Will Banyan

American philanthropists | Rockefeller family | University of Chicago alumni | Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients | Forbes 400 | Members of the Trilateral Commission | Alumni of the London School of Economics | 1915 births | Living people

David Rockefeller | David Rockefeller