RIP: David Rockefeller

Here’s my piece in The Observer.

Here’s Where Rockefeller Was Different

We’ve lost something larger than a man.

David Rockefeller passed away Monday, aged 101. He was the last surviving grandchild of the great oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Born into great wealth and opulence—he grew up in the largest private residence in New York City—Rockefeller also inherited his famous family’s sense of noblesse oblige. The New York Times estimates that, over the course of his life, he donated $900 million to charity.

Rockefeller was part of a vanishing and perhaps extinct breed of men—the Establishment Men. Serious and sober-minded gentlemen, well-born and from the East Coast elite, who left the Ivy League to serve their fellow men. They started foundations, served on boards, built skyscrapers, collected art, preserved nature and promoted high culture.

Yet it was all done with an air of calm reserve. Rockefeller was a gentleman who embodied the great Yankee virtues of thrift and hard work. Well into his nineties, he would work from his office in, naturally, Rockefeller Center, the complex built by his father during the Depression.

David Rockefeller was also a visionary who refused to accept the staid conventions of banking. In the 1970s, as chairman of Chase Manhattan, Rockefeller led a bold strategy of international expansion. He traveled the world and became a de facto global ambassador for American-style capitalism. In 1973, he even managed to open a branch office in the Soviet Union.

Read the rest at The Observer…

Posted by on March 21st, 2017 at 5:36 pm


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