At Chase
During the 1960s, Rockefeller used his family name and global contacts to increase foreign branches to 73 from 11. Chase was the first Western bank to open branches in Moscow and Beijing, and it made loans in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Rockefeller also hired management professor Peter Drucker as a consultant and created human resources, marketing and planning departments.
Critics said Rockefeller’s international focus led to the neglect of Chase’s everyday operations. By the early 1970s, the bank had suffered shaky real estate investments, bond losses that forced it to restate earnings, bad loans and technological problems.
Citibank, which would become Citigroup Inc., was closing in on Chase’s market share. Rockefeller was forced to focus simultaneously on the bank’s internal deficiencies and global expansion.
In “Memoirs,” he said he had to fight to keep his job in 1975, with director and family adviser J. Richardson Dilworth telling him during a helicopter flight up the Hudson River that he had limited time to turn the bank around. A week later, the board gave him another year, and after restructuring management and the way the bank made loans, he was able to continue until his retirement in 1981, just before he turned 66.
Foremost a financier, Rockefeller was often a conduit for high-level diplomacy on his Chase trips, flying more than 5 million miles and meeting 200 heads of state in 35 years. He developed a close relationship with then-Secretary of State Kissinger, a longtime adviser to his brother Nelson, and argued for President Richard Nixon’s overtures to Communist China in the early 1970s.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, protesters targeted him as a power behind U.S. foreign policy, including the Vietnam War. Some of his own children then in college opposed his politics, and he wrote about heated dinner table arguments with his daughter Abby, a draft-resistance counselor drawn to Marxism.
Rockefeller focused on managing family affairs after his Chase retirement. Since the 1940s the brothers held formal meetings, with David serving as secretary, that continued until the late 1970s.
“The five of us had had widely diverging and, in some ways, conflicting interests,” he wrote, “but largely because of these regular get-togethers we maintained a basic respect and affection for one another, something that has not always been the case with other wealthy families.”
In 1979, David, Laurance, and the widows of John and Nelson organized Rockefeller & Co., an outgrowth of the family office started by their grandfather when he moved to New York from Cleveland a century earlier. The firm has since branched out as a wealth manager for clients not affiliated with the family.
Rockefeller Center