TOP LEADERSHIP
The Council on Foreign Relations is a corporation, and is organized in a top-down corporate fashion with a chairperson as the final decision maker, aided by the president and board of directors. The board of directors approve all new members and selects all of the top leaders. There is a pro-forma process set up for the membership to “elect” the board, but even the membership does not take the process very seriously, as almost all board members are chosen as a listed slate that the members vote for, so up to two-thirds of the members typically do not vote.
Between 1970 and 2007 there were only two chairs—David Rockefeller and Peter G. Peterson—and from 2007 to 2014 two co-chairs, Robert E. Rubin and Carla A. Hills. At the same time there have been seven vice chairs who served longer than one year: Rubin, Hills, Cyrus R. Vance, Douglas Dillon, Warren Christopher, Maurice R. Greenberg, Richard E. Salomon, and David M. Rubenstein. Through a discussion of these ten individuals, a detailed collective biography of the organization’s top leadership can be developed. Vast personal and family wealth, finance capital careers, top corporate connections, and cabinet-level government service are their main characteristics, and they exemplify the Council’s deep capitalist-class connections.
David Rockefeller, Chairman 1970–1985
David Rockefeller was born in 1915 into what is likely the richest family in human history (the European Rothschilds being their main rival for this title). His grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, at one time held an estimated inflation-adjusted equivalent of a hundred billion dollars or more in today’s values, far outdistancing even the richest individuals of our era. David grew up in the largest private home in New York City, surrounded by an army of working-class employees: butlers, valets, drivers, gardeners, nurses, cooks, and chambermaids. He also spent significant time in coastal Maine and the Hudson River Valley, where his family had enormous houses and estates. He was educated at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. at the Rockefeller-founded and funded University of Chicago. He is now, in 2014, the last Rockefeller of his generation, the grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
As a man who has epitomized the Establishment, David Rockefeller is, fittingly, also one of the two most important leaders of the CFR during the 1976–2014 years. As this is written in 2014, David Rockefeller is revered as the still living legend linking the Council’s past with its present. It is difficult to exaggerate his importance in several areas, including as the CFR’s all-time leading financial contributor. Though exact amounts are not available, consider that during every single year since 1976, he was always ranked in the top group of contributors in the CFR’s Annual Report listings, and that he often gave special gifts, such as one for “$25 million and above” in 2007.43 This last contribution led to the renaming of the CFR’s study program as the “David Rockefeller Studies Program.”44 The 2007 Annual Report called Rockefeller “a guiding force in the Council for over half a century.” He first became a member in 1941, served as a board member from 1949 to 1985, and was Chairman from 1970 to 1985. Although he is now almost 100 years old, he remains, in 2014, the CFR’s Honorary Chairman.
At the beginning of the new century, David completed a full-length book on his life and times with a one-word title: Memoirs. Although he lists by name no less than ninety-five individuals—writers, researchers, archivists, and commentators—including twenty-five members of his “immediate staff,” who helped him research and write the book, it nevertheless appears to accurately reflect his thinking, his philosophy, and cultural preferences. As could be expected, a close reading of Memoirs reveals a person with a strong sense of class and personal entitlement, illustrated by Rockefeller’s recounting of his and his wife’s attempt to limit their household spending just after the Second World War, a time when they acquired “three rather large houses” in only one year. As he put it: “This presented a serious financial challenge since I had no capital of my own and was dependent on the income from the trust that Father had established for me in 1934, which in 1946 amounted to slightly more than $1 million before taxes.” “Making ends meet,” as this section of the book is titled, on that level of trust income was difficult, Rockefeller states, because taxes were quite high and they gave $153,000 to charity that year, leaving them with “less than $150,000 in discretionary income.” Since they wanted the furniture they purchased to be of “good quality,” they had a problem, solved by finding a dealer who “helped us buy many fine pieces of eighteenth-century English furniture at prices we could afford.” He was happy that his homes had “style and elegance” on an income level that was, in his opinion, “clearly modest.”45 Census data point out, however, that the average income of non-farm U.S. families was about $3,000 in 1946.
David points out he learned the neoliberal “free market” economic philosophy at an early date. The conservative Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek tutored him at the London School of Economics in the late 1930s. He later recounted: “I found myself largely in agreement with [von Hayek’s] basic economic philosophy.”46 This belief in the efficacy of the “invisible hand of the market” was later reinforced during his graduate work at the University of Chicago.47
Rockefeller often stresses his and the larger family tradition of “noblesse oblige,” or “philanthropy,” but this giving was tainted by the causes to which he donated to and the ruling-class aims of undercutting both the need for state intervention and people’s movements for fundamental change, promoting reformist “solutions” instead. Another purpose was to improve the “public image” of the Rockefellers and their institutions like the Chase Manhattan Bank: “The manner in which an institution gives expression to its relationship with the community has an important bearing on its public image. I was eager to have Chase perceived as a modern, progressive, and open institution. To forge a new ‘image’ … I wanted to transform our uncoordinated corporate charitable giving into a broad-based and carefully conceived program.”48
Memoirs also starkly reveals the culture of illegality, corruption, and extreme commodification that pervades the higher circles of U.S. society. There is a sense that money rules and can buy everything and everybody, and that the rich are above the law. For over a decade, 1969–80, David Rockefeller was the Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan, the Rockefeller family bank. David Brooks, a “moderate” Republican columnist of the New York Times, stated that Rockefeller, “the leading corporate statesman of his day … spent much of his career at Chase doing business with tyrants…. Rockefeller was soiled by his close embraces with these thugs.”49 One illuminating example of the practices of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the larger corporate ruling class comes from this period. When Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger were establishing U.S. ties to China in 1971–2, Rockefeller was very interested in gaining a top position for Chase Manhattan Bank there as a key part of expanding the bank’s presence in Asia. As Rockefeller recounted in Memoirs:
I asked Henry Kissinger for advice on the best way to get permission to enter China. He told me to contact Ambassador Huang Hua, the PRC’s permanent representative to the United Nations and the senior Chinese diplomat stationed in the United States…. It took more than a year to arrange an invitation. Henry’s support was certainly crucial, but astute marketing by one of the bank’s officers also contributed significantly to my success…. Leo Pierre … filled a suitcase with $50,000 in cash and spent all day in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel waiting for the Chinese delegation to arrive. When they finally turned up, he presented himself to the Ambassador, explained his purpose for being there, and handed over the suitcase, politely refusing even to accept a receipt for the instant loan. Huang was impressed by Leo’s gesture, and soon afterward the Chinese mission opened an account with Chase.50
Rockefeller then went on to point out how this initial contact led to his trips to China and eventually a correspondent bank relationship with the Bank of China. He clearly encouraged and approved of bribery of foreign officials to successfully gain favor, despite the law and the supposed “moral code” of the Rockefeller family. This illustrates a current fact about the United States, namely that the top economic and political leadership