David Rockefeller ran a bank like a private foreign ministry
The youngest grandson of Standard Oil's founder could have had a Senate seat or the Treasury; he turned both down. David Rockefeller preferred banking, and as head of Chase Manhattan he opened the first American bank branch in Moscow and made his firm the first American correspondent of China's national bank, both in 1973.
He grew up in an eight-storey house on West 54th Street, at the time the tallest private home ever built in New York, the youngest of six children of John D. Rockefeller Jr. After graduating from Harvard in 1936 he studied economics at the London School of Economics under Friedrich von Hayek and earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1940. His first job was a dollar-a-year post as secretary to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, supposedly one intern among 60, though he worked from the empty deputy mayor's office.
In the Second World War he enlisted, rose to captain and, being fluent in French, set up political and economic intelligence units in North Africa and France. In 1946 he joined Chase National Bank, then chaired by his uncle, starting in the foreign department financing trade in coffee, sugar and metals through a web of more than 1,000 partner banks worldwide.
He became president in 1960 and served as chairman and chief executive from 1969 to 1980. His tenure was bumpy. Critics said he spent too long abroad, the bank carried more bad loans than its rivals, and in 1975 the Federal Reserve labelled it a problem bank after understated bond-trading losses came to light. Earnings fell 36 percent over two years, then more than doubled between 1976 and 1980, and by 1981 the bank was healthy again.
Throughout, he met world leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev and sometimes acted as an informal envoy. A former Chase chairman predicted he would be remembered less as a great banker than as a distinctive personality and loyal citizen. He died in 2017, the family's oldest living member since 2004, leaving a fortune estimated at $3.3 billion.
Source: David Rockefeller
