David Rockefeller - Political Life

Political Life

In a private capacity Rockefeller has interface with every United States president since Eisenhower and has even at times served as an unofficial emissary on high-level diplomatic missions. President Jimmy Carter offered him the positions of United States Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman but he declined both instead preferring a private role. He at an earlier point declined an offer from his brother Nelson to appoint him to Robert Kennedy's Senate seat after Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, a post Nelson also offered to their nephew Jay Rockefeller. On account of his personal, political, and professional connections and his family name, Rockefeller has been able to act as bridge to various interests around the world—even controversial leaders such as Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein.

In Henry Kissinger, Rockefeller found a political operative with an international and domestic perspective similar to his. They first met in 1954, when Kissinger was appointed a director of a seminal Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons, of which David was a member. The relationship developed to the point that Kissinger was invited to sit on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Rockefeller consulted with Kissinger on numerous occasions, as for example in the Chase Bank's interests in Chile and the threat of the election of Salvador Allende in 1970, and fully supported his "opening of China" initiative in 1971 as it afforded banking opportunities for the Chase Bank.

Though a lifelong Republican and party contributor, like his father in the dynastic line, he is a committed member of the moderate "Rockefeller Republicans" that arose out of the political ambitions and public policy stance of his brother Nelson. In 2006 he teamed up with former Goldman Sachs executives and others to form a fund-raising group based in Washington, Republicans Who Care, that supported moderate Republican candidates over more ideological contenders.

Rockefeller also reportedly has connections to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As well as knowing Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles — who was an in-law of the family since his college years, it was in Rockefeller Center that Allen Dulles had set up his WWII operational center after Pearl Harbor, liaising closely with MI6 which also had their principal U.S. operation in the Center. He also knew and associated with the former CIA director Richard Helms, as well as Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., a Chase Bank employee and former CIA agent, whose cousin was the CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., involved in the Iran coup of 1953. Also, in 1953, he had befriended William Bundy, a pivotal CIA analyst for nine years in the 1950s, who became the Agency liaison to the National Security Council, and a subsequent lifelong friend. Moreover, in Cary Reich's biography of his brother Nelson, a former CIA agent states that David was extensively briefed on covert intelligence operations by himself and other Agency division chiefs, under the direction of David's "friend and confidant", CIA Director Allen Dulles.

Additionally, he serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the Bilderberg Group.