Part 1 : Memoirs David Rockefeller ... Grandfather ... Mother & Father ... Childhood ...

Memoirs

David Rockefeller

CHAPTER 1 

GRANDFATHER 

There is a picture of all the men in the family waiting at the Tarrytown station for the train carrying Grandfather’s casket from his winter home in Ormond Beach, Florida. He died quietly in his bed on May 23, 1937, at the age of ninety-seven. While the official cause of death was sclerotic myocarditis, it would be simpler to say he died of old age. I had known him as “Grandfather,” not the “robber baron” or great philanthropist of the history books. He had been a constant presence in my childhood: benign, indulgent, revered by my father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and by the family as a whole. 

Looking at that picture today, I find it remarkable how well it captured our relationships with one another, where we were in life, and, perhaps, where we would all be going. 

John, characteristically, stands on the periphery. Thirty-one years old, he is the oldest son, inheritor of the dynastic name. After he graduated from Princeton, Father put him on the boards of many family institutions, among them the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and Colonial Williamsburg, grooming him to be the family leader, but he is shy and uncertain of his abilities. 

Nelson, also characteristically, has managed to situate himself at the exact center of the picture and stares authoritatively at the camera. At twenty-nine he will soon become president of Rockefeller Center. 

Laurance, twenty-seven, the philosopher and businessman, gazes into the middle distance. He was emerging as a leading investor in the aviation industry and, with Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace, would soon buy a large stake in Eastern Airlines. 

Winthrop is the handsomest. Somehow Mother’s Aldrich features— which one might describe as having a lot of “character”—combined with the Rockefeller genes to produce almost movie-star good looks. Win is the most troubled of us and never quite fitted in. Now twenty-five, he is working as a “roughneck” in the Texas oil fields. 

I am the youngest, twenty-one years old, and look very wet behind the ears. I have just completed my first year of graduate work in economics at Harvard and will leave that summer to continue my studies at the London School of Economics. 

Father, beginning to show his sixty-three years, presides over us all, completely forthright, a friendly, kind face. Perhaps a little distant. 

🔗🔗🔗

We brought Grandfather back to the mansion that he and Father had built twenty-five years earlier on the family estate at Pocantico Hills. Called Kykuit, the Dutch word for “lookout,” its hilltop site commands a magnificent view of the Hudson River. The next day, with only immediate family and a few close friends present, we held a service for him. I remember it was a beautiful spring day, the French doors open to the terrace, and the Hudson River a glistening blue below us. His favorite organist, Dr. Archer Gibson, played the large pipe organ in the main hall, on which we used to pretend to perform when we were children. Harry Emerson Fosdick, senior minister of Riverside Church, which was built by Father, gave the eulogy. 

After the service, as everyone milled about, Mr. Yordi, Grandfather’s valet, gestured to me. Yordi, a dapper Swiss fellow, had been Grandfather’s valet and constant companion for thirty years. I knew him well, but he had always been reserved in my presence. I went over to him, and he pulled me aside, into a deserted hallway. “You know, Mr. David,” he began (from as early as I can remember, the staff always addressed us in that way, “Mr. Rockefeller” being too confusing with so many of us having that name, and first names would have been too familiar), “of all you brothers, your grandfather always thought you were the most like him.” I must have looked very surprised. It was the last thing I expected him to say. “Yes,” he said, “you were very much his favorite.” I thanked him somewhat awkwardly, but he just waved his hand and said, “No, no, I just thought you should know.” I didn’t really know what to make of it. I thought it would have been Nelson, but I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t pleased. G 

“THE STANDARD” 

Grandfather had started at $5 a week as a clerk in a dry goods store in Cleveland, Ohio, and went on to found and run the Standard Oil Company, which for all practical purposes was the oil industry in the United States until the Supreme Court ordered the trust dissolved in 1911 after a long period of acrimonious litigation. Many of the companies that emerged from the breakup still exist: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Amoco, and about thirty others as well. 

Standard Oil made Grandfather rich, possibly “the richest man in America.” He was also, for much of his life, one of the most hated. The tabloid press attacked the  Standard business practices and accused it of crimes—including murder—in its relentless efforts to eliminate all competition and perfect its monopoly of the oil industry. Grandfather was the target of Progressives, Populists, Socialists, and others discontented with the new American capitalist order. Robert La Follette, the powerful governor of Wisconsin, called him the “greatest criminal of his age.” Teddy Roosevelt used him as a whipping boy in his effort to bring the industrial monopolies to heel. Ida Tarbell, who through her writings probably did more than anyone to establish the image of Grandfather as a greedy and rapacious “robber baron,” wrote: “There is little doubt that Mr. Rockefeller’s chief reason for playing golf is that he may live longer to make more money.” 

Today most historians would agree that the picture painted of Standard in those contemporary accounts was highly partisan and often inaccurate. Grandfather and his partners were tough competitors, but they were guilty of no more than the common business practices of their day. It was a different world then. Few of the laws that regulate business competition today were in place. Standard was operating on the frontiers of the economy; it was new, unexplored territory, in some cases literally like the Wild West. Muckrakers idealized the first years of the petroleum industry as some kind of entrepreneurial Eden. It was, in fact, exceedingly cutthroat. Prices gyrated wildly, with huge swings in production and alternating gluts and droughts of oil. Refiners and producers were bankrupted and driven out of business overnight. Grandfather was no romantic; he thought the situation was speculative, shortsighted, and wasteful, and he set about to correct it in a tough- minded fashion. 

The accusations that Standard cheated widows of their inheritance, bombed rival refineries, and drove competitors into ruin by any means available—all gleefully repeated by Tarbell and others—were absolute fiction. The real story is that Standard was considerably more honorable in its dealings than many of its competitors. During the process of consolidation, Standard offered not only an honest, but often a generous price for competing refineries—so generous, in fact, that competitors often reentered the business simply for the opportunity to be bought out again. Grandfather’s partners complained bitterly about this persistent pattern of “blackmail,” but he continued to buy in order to complete his plan. 

Standard was a monopoly. At its height it controlled 90 percent of the domestic oil industry and was trying hard to buy up the last 10 percent. Grandfather, however, never saw anything wrong with dominating the market, not only for the owners and workers in the industry, but for consumers and the country as a whole. This runs so contrary to textbook assumptions that many people find it hard to credit his sincerity on the matter. But as Standard’s market share increased, the cost of petroleum products to the consumer—principally kerosene during Standard’s first decades—dropped dramatically. Kerosene became universally available, and Standard’s product was cheaper and better. The company invested in new technologies to improve the range and quality of its products and to develop new uses for by-products that earlier had simply been poured onto the ground or dumped into the nearest river. Gasoline is the most obvious example of a waste product that eventually found a prime use in the internal combustion engine and became the most valued petroleum product. 

It was Grandfather’s policy to lower prices, believing that the less expensive the product, the more of it people would buy; and the larger the market, the more economies of scale Standard would be able to employ. Without having studied economics, he understood the meaning of “elastic demand.” He always believed that it was good practice to “do a larger volume of business at a smaller profit per unit.” Many economists talk of business as “responding to market demand”; but that isn’t how Grandfather operated. He also created demand by setting up new channels of distribution at home and abroad. For instance, as a M marketing device, Standard often gave away lanterns to ensure that consumers would buy kerosene to burn—much as Gillette gives away razors so that the customer will continue to purchase razor blades. Grandfather drove his associates to buy refineries, to develop new oil fields, and to increase production long before demand existed. Standard acted most aggressively during economic downturns when others retreated, because Grandfather had a long-term vision of the industry and how it should be operated. 

A number of factors distinguished Standard from its rivals: a willingness to invest in new technologies, a constant concern for the cost of production, and great attention to the marketing of its products. Grandfather successfully integrated within one cohesive organization the diverse elements of the industry from production at the wellhead to the final delivery to the customer. Standard was the first modern, fully integrated economic enterprise. That was Grandfather’s greatest achievement: building the petroleum industry and, in the process, creating the modern corporation. It was an organizational triumph that transformed the business world. 

The American public welcomed the Supreme Court’s dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust in 1911 with great acclaim. However, it should be remembered that the ultimate result of Grandfather’s consolidation of the oil business was a cheaper, better, and more reliable supply of petroleum that helped the United States make the transition from a decentralized, agrarian nation to a highly centralized industrial democracy. 

EQUANIMITY IN THE FACE OF THE STORM 

My father, who later had his own troubles with the press, used to describe with a kind of envy Grandfather’s equanimity in the face of the storms raging against him. When Grandfather read the Tarbell book, he remarked to everyone’s consternation that he “rather enjoyed it.” In my view it was Grandfather’s deep religious faith that gave him his placid self-assurance in the face of personal attacks, and supreme confidence that enabled him to consolidate the American oil industry. He was a devout Christian who lived by the strict tenets of his Baptist faith. His faith “explained” the world around him, guided him on his way through it, and provided him with a liberating structure. The most important of these principles was that faith without good works was meaningless. That central belief led Grandfather to first accept the “doctrine of stewardship” for his great fortune and then to broaden it by creating the great philanthropies later in life. 

Grandfather was raised in modest circumstances in central New York State. William Rockefeller, his father, was something of an absentee parent and had a shady past, but his mother, Eliza Davison Rockefeller, who actually raised Grandfather and his siblings, was an extraordinarily devout and principled woman. 

In our secular age it is difficult for us to understand a life that was so governed by religious faith. For many, too, a life lived according to the strictures of the Baptist faith—no drinking, smoking, or dancing—seems a painfully dour existence. But Grandfather wore the commandments of his religion, all the things that would seem to us such burdens, with ease and even joy. He was the least dour man I have ever known; he was constantly smiling, joking, and telling shaggy dog stories. Often at dinner he would start to sing softly one of his favorite hymns. He wasn’t singing to anyone; it was as if a feeling of peace and contentment were welling out of him. 

As a boy I would occasionally walk up the hill to Kykuit from my parents’ home, Abeyton Lodge, a distance of about a quarter mile, for breakfast or lunch with Grandfather. For breakfast Grandfather invariably ate oatmeal, but with butter and salt rather than cream and sugar. He ate very slowly, chewing every bite very thoroughly, because he thought this an important aid to digestion. He said one should even chew milk, which he did! 

Grandfather rarely took his meals alone. Friends and associates, many from the old days in Cleveland, often stayed with him, frequently for extended periods. Meals were long and leisurely, and the conversation informal and congenial. Business was never discussed; instead, Grandfather would joke with his cousin and longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Evans, a rather stout and kindly woman who would return his good natured jibes in kind. On a few occasions I dined with him at Kykuit as well. After the meal we all moved to a sitting room where, as his guests talked, Grandfather would doze quietly in his easy chair. He always retired for the night at a very early hour. 

At other times Grandfather enjoyed playing a card game called Numerica. The cards were square with only one number on each, and the game was designed to test and improve mathematical reasoning. Grandfather always served as the dealer—and the winner of each round always received a dime and the losers a nickel. 

On one occasion when I was a bit older and Grandfather was in his nineties, he accepted my invitation to a chicken dinner at the Playhouse, which I prepared. Both he and Mrs. Evans came and pronounced the meal “quite delicious!” 

I also visited Grandfather at his homes in Florida and Lakewood, New Jersey. Grandfather loved golf and built private courses at Pocantico and Lakewood. When I was a teenager and just learning the game, we would play a few holes together. By then Grandfather played for the exercise and rarely completed a full round. 

In June 1936, as Grandfather’s health began to fail, I paid him a short visit in Ormond Beach. He was pleased, as always, to see me, but he was noticeably feeble and tired. He spent most of his time sleeping or sitting quietly in his room. We spoke briefly about matters of little consequence, but he seemed content just to have me in the room with him. He allowed me to take several photographs of him sitting in his chair. It was the last time I saw him alive.

Grandfather was a deeply religious man, but he never judged or condemned others who did not share his beliefs. As a teetotaler his entire life, Grandfather was a rarity at Standard, where most of his closest associates were anything but pious men. John Archbold, a onetime rival who became a close friend, was a very heavy drinker, and Grandfather made it a lifetime project to reform him. Grandfather formed intense friendships with his business partners, including Archbold, Henry Flagler, and his brother, William, who were with him from the earliest days at Standard. On the rare occasions when I heard him mention his business career, he spoke of the fun they had, despite the hard work and long hours, as confederates in a grand new enterprise. 

Grandfather was modest by nature, and while he lived a life possible only for those of great wealth, he was comparatively frugal. At a time when the Carnegies, Fricks, Harrimans, and Vanderbilts were building grand mansions along Fifth Avenue, Grandfather bought a home on a side street whose previous tenant, Arabella Worsham, was the mistress of Collis P. Huntington. It was a very large brownstone, and Grandfather bought several lots beside it into which the family would later expand, but it says something about him that he never bothered to redecorate it. Miss Worsham’s red plush wallpaper and heavy, ornate Victorian furniture remained there as long as Grandfather lived. 

His one indulgence seems to have been trotting horses. He kept a number of matched pairs, and he enjoyed driving them at Pocantico and in Central Park, where he would occasionally become involved in races with his brother and close friends. 

Grandfather was totally lacking in vanity. He gave little thought to surface appearances. As a young man he had been good-looking, but in the 1890s he contracted a painful viral infection, generalized alopecia, which affected his nervous system. As a result of the disease he lost all his hair. In one photograph from this time he is wearing a black skullcap, which made him look a bit like the Merchant of Venice. Later he wore wigs. 

Some people, notably Ida Tarbell, thought his physical appearance repugnant; others disagreed. Initially, John Singer Sargent was reluctant to paint Grandfather’s portrait. However, after lengthy conversations during the sittings, they became friends. In the end, Sargent told Father he wanted to paint a second portrait because he had become intrigued with his subject and said that Grandfather reminded him of a medieval saint. 

“THE ART OF GIVING” 

The truth is that Grandfather found managing his fortune, which had reached almost a billion dollars by 1910, to be a problem. His annual income from Standard Oil and other investments was enormous, and given Grandfather’s meticulous nature, it had to be spent or invested properly. Since he was uninterested in acquiring French châteaus or Scottish castles and was appalled at the idea of buying art, yachts, or suits of medieval armor—all activities engaged in by his more extravagant contemporaries—Grandfather worked out a characteristic solution: He invested a good portion of his income in coal mines, railroads, insurance companies, banks, and manufacturing enterprises of various kinds, most famously the iron ore business, and eventually controlled much of the rich Mesabi Range in Minnesota. 

But increasingly, after Grandfather retired from Standard in 1897, he occupied himself with a different form of investing: philanthropy, which he referred to as the “art of giving.” In doing this he would have as profound an effect as he had with Standard Oil. 

From the time he was a young man just starting in business, Grandfather recorded every item of income and expense, including charitable donations of as little as a penny, in a series of ledgers, beginning with the famous “Ledger A,” which are preserved in the Rockefeller Archive Center in Pocantico Hills. Keeping records became a family tradition. Father followed Grandfather’s example and tried to have my generation do the same with varying degrees of success. And I tried it with my own children with even less success than Father. 

In doing this Grandfather was following the religious injunction to tithe, or give a tenth part of his income to the Church and other good causes. As his earnings grew, his charitable donations kept pace, usually reaching the tithe to which he had committed himself. By the mid1880s, Grandfather found it difficult to handle charitable contributions by himself. It was, in fact, one of the chief causes of stress for him in those years. He felt obliged not only to give but to give wisely, which is a lot more difficult. “It is easy to do harm in giving money,” he wrote. By then his annual income exceeded a million dollars, and disposing of just 10 percent of it was a full-time occupation. His eventual solution was to employ the Reverend Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist minister, to develop a more thoughtful and systematic way to assess the individuals and organizations who requested funds. Fortunately, Gates was a man with a broad education and considerable wisdom. Over the next several decades they planned the distribution of more than half of the fortune; most of the rest ultimately went to Father, who dedicated his life to carrying on and expanding their work. 

Some have said that Grandfather and Father, along with Andrew Carnegie, invented modern philanthropy. That may be true, but it may also claim too much. What the two of them did was emphasize the need to move charitable activities away from treating the symptoms of social problems toward understanding and then eliminating the underlying causes. This led them both to embrace a scientific approach and to support the work of experts in many fields. 

Grandfather’s first major philanthropic project was the creation of the University of Chicago in the 1890s. It was only after the turn of the century, however, that Grandfather put his business cares behind him and devoted himself primarily to philanthropy. One of the first initiatives he undertook was the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, founded in 1901. 

Grandfather’s vision, developed in close collaboration with Gates, my father, and the first director of the institute, Dr. Simon Flexner, was to establish a research facility modeled on the Pasteur and Koch institutes in Europe. In creating the institute Grandfather followed the same principles he had first tested at Standard Oil: He hired good men and gave them scope. While he had been intimately involved in the inception and planning, once the institute was up and running, he made it a point not to interfere with its management. He felt it appropriate to hand over the reins to the educators and scientists who were specialists in their field. Father became president of the board of trustees to ensure that the policy of independent scientific research was strictly maintained. 

The General Education Board, Grandfather’s next major initiative, grew out of his desire to create a public education system in the South that would benefit blacks as well as whites. Grandfather provided the GEB with almost $130 million in endowment and operating funds over its thirty-year existence. The GEB worked closely with local and state governments to achieve its goals. It is one of the first and most successful examples of public-private cooperation that our family has always promoted. 

The Rockefeller Foundation, founded in 1913, was the first philanthropic organization with a specifically global vision and the culmination of Grandfather’s efforts to create a structure capable of wisely managing his assets for benevolent purposes. Grandfather provided more endowment for the foundation—approximately $182 million, more than $2 billion in present dollars, over a period of ten years—than for any other institution. The foundation fought against hookworm, yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. In later years it became a leader in developing hybrid varieties of corn, wheat, and rice that served as the basis for the Green Revolution, which has done so much to transform societies around the world. 

“PUBLIC RELATIONS” 

The charge has often been made that Grandfather’s charitable giving was no more than a public relations ploy to burnish his image after a lifetime of rapacious profit-making. If that had really been his motivation, would he have needed to spend half a billion dollars to achieve that end? 

Public relations pioneer Ivy Lee is often credited with developing the plan that included everything from the creation of the great foundations to having Grandfather give away shiny dimes, which would replace his image as a ruthless robber baron with that of a genial, kindly, and benevolent old man. Most of this is quite preposterous. Grandfather handed out dimes as a means of establishing an easy rapport with people whom he met casually on the golf course, at church, or walking down the street. It helped break the ice with them, and put them at ease, and it usually worked. 

In fact, Grandfather had so little interest in the public relations benefits of his philanthropy that he wouldn’t allow his name to be used for the University of Chicago or the General Education Board, and it was only with great reluctance that he agreed to use his name for the Rockefeller Institute. It is hard to imagine that Grandfather, who refused to allow Standard Oil to refute the libels being spread by the muckrakers, would instead devote the larger part of his fortune to manipulating the public’s view of him. One would have to believe, which I do not, that he experienced a crisis of conscience that compelled him to throw off his “ill-gotten gains.” 

Grandfather never breathed a sigh of remorse to my Father, his grandchildren, or anyone else about his business career. He believed Standard Oil benefited society, and he felt comfortable with his role in creating it. 

What, then, explains Grandfather’s philanthropy? In my view it flowed from his religious training and the experiences of his own life. Ida Tarbell and her intellectual descendants have chosen to picture Grandfather as the essence of greed and the epitome of selfish individualism. Grandfather was a strong individualist, but he defined the term differently. He rejected the idea of individualism as selfishness and self-aggrandizement. Instead, he defined individualism as the freedom to achieve and the obligation to return something of value to the community that had nurtured and sustained him. I believe this was both the source and object of his philanthropy. 

As for Father, far from being ashamed of Grandfather, he was immensely proud of him and his many achievements. If Father had conflicted feelings—and he did—they were that he didn’t measure up. For much of his life my father, one of the greatest philanthropists in history, thought of himself as simply following in the footsteps of a greater man.

CHAPTER 2 

MOTHER AND FATHER 

When my parents married on October 9, 1901, the press headlined it as the union of the two most powerful families in America: the son and heir of John D. Rockefeller and the daughter of Nelson Aldrich, Republican majority leader in the U.S. Senate and, according to some, “the General Manager of the Nation.” 

Father had been taken with my mother from their first meeting, but he agonized over whether to propose to her for an almost fatal length of time. It is indicative of Father’s earnestness that when he finally asked the Senator for his daughter’s hand, he launched into a lengthy explanation of his financial prospects, apparently anxious to demonstrate that he was a sound match. The Senator, somewhat amused, stopped him in mid-sentence and said, “Mr. Rockefeller, I am only interested in what will make my daughter happy.” 

That Father did make Mother happy, and she him, I have no doubt. They were exceedingly close—perhaps too close, as I will explain in a moment—and I believe they loved each other very much. Mother brought to Father and to the marriage a sense of joy and fun that he desperately needed. 

Mother grew up in a large family of eight siblings, five boys and three girls, in Providence, Rhode Island. Mother was third in age, the second oldest daughter, and was particularly close to her father. Her father played a key role in setting high tariffs and creating a more flexible currency and a more stable banking system through the formation of the Federal Reserve System. Mother recalled him and his Senate colleagues debating legislation while playing poker and enjoying a few drinks at his Washington home. Grandmother Aldrich had been an invalid for many years, so for a decade or so prior to her marriage, Mother often served as T hostess for her father. She was thrust into the center of the Washington scene and was not only comfortable but supremely adept at handling the demands of “society.” 

Grandfather Aldrich loved travel and greatly appreciated art. Mother and her siblings often accompanied him to Paris, Rome, and London, where he attended official conferences. At an early age she came to know Paris and its art world, and became comfortable with the new forms and ideas emerging at that time. 

INFLUENTIAL STANDARDS, EMOTIONAL FRAGILITY 

The family Mother married into couldn’t have been more different from hers. Her siblings, especially her older sister, Lucy, kidded her about the “straitlaced” Rockefellers, and in the beginning worried if she would be able to adapt. 

For most of Father’s childhood his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, was the dominant figure in his life. She had the principal responsibility for his upbringing and education, and was a strict disciplinarian. Her parents were deeply religious and had been active in both the antislavery and temperance movements. Her portraits and photographs reveal a formidable individual not easily given to mirth. 

Grandmother Rockefeller provided Father with most of his religious training, his strong sense of moral rectitude, and the first intimations that he would bear a heavy responsibility for the stewardship of the family’s immense fortune. Grandmother Rockefeller joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union soon after its founding, firmly convinced that “demon rum” lay at the heart of all the social problems of the time: poverty, vice, and crime. As a young boy Father attended temperance meetings regularly and, when he was ten, signed a pledge to abstain from “tobacco, profanity, and the drinking of any intoxicating beverages.” Until he entered college, Father’s life was centered on his family and the Baptist Church. Father’s college years at Brown University provided him with the first opportunity to break free from his mother’s influence, but it was a difficult task and he never quite succeeded. He did, however, explore new ideas that gradually broadened his understanding of the world around him and formed a number of D friendships that lasted his entire life. Most important, at least from my perspective, he met my mother and began the courtship that would end in their marriage more than eight years later. 

Even with the leavening of a college education, a secure family life, and a large circle of friends, Father approached life with a considerable amount of insecurity. His marriage, despite his initial doubts and hesitation, was a godsend. Mother’s high spirits, gregariousness, and sociability helped him deal with his shyness and introspection, and helped compensate for what he felt keenly were his deficiencies. In Mother he found someone who could understand, care for, and protect his emotional fragility. He wanted her to be with him always—if not immediately by his side, then immediately available. He wanted to retreat with her into their own private circle of two. From one point of view it was romantic, and I believe their relations with each other were extremely intense and loving. From another point of view the bond they shared was exclusive of all else, including the children. And therein lay the source of much tension for Mother. 

We grew up realizing that if we were to have any of Mother’s attention, we would have to compete with Father for it. We knew how much she cared for us and enjoyed spending time with us, and it was apparent to us that the conflict between his needs and ours caused her much anguish. It was a never-ending struggle for her and the cause of great stress; and it was something she was never able to resolve. Father expected Mother to be there for him when he needed her, and his needs in this regard were practically insatiable. 

A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN 

Despite that tension—which strongly underlies my memories of childhood—whenever I think of Mother even today, it is with a sense of great love and happiness. I suppose by contemporary standards she would not be considered a beautiful woman. Nelson and I inherited her Aldrich features, most prominently the Aldrich nose. However, I thought of my mother as beautiful, as did many of her friends and acquaintances, because those features were animated by such liveliness and infused with such warmth. It was a beauty that was hard to capture in a photograph or a painting, and, in fact, few visual images do her justice. Strangely, the best likeness of her is a drawing done after her death by Fred W. Wright, who took it from a very good photograph of her holding Nelson’s eldest son, Rodman, when he was a small boy. Somehow it captures her expression better than any formal portraits. 

Along with the Aldrich physiognomy I inherited from Mother a good deal of the Aldrich temperament. Her calm disposition was in distinct contrast to the more tense, driven quality of Father and some of my siblings. I always felt a special rapport with her. Mother loved small children, and no doubt being the youngest gave me an advantage. My brothers often accused me of receiving special treatment, though both of our parents made a conscious effort never to show any favoritism. But Mother and I had an easy relationship. We enjoyed many of the same things. One of my strongest memories is her love of art and how she subtly and patiently conveyed it to me. Beautiful objects came alive in her hands, as if her appreciation provided them with a special aura of beauty. The longer she looked at a painting, the more she would find in it, as if by some magic she had opened new depths, new dimensions not accessible to ordinary people. 

There was little of the “collector” in Mother; having a complete set of something was of much less interest to her than enjoying the quality of each object. By her side I absorbed some of her taste and intuition, which in her was unfailing. I learned more from her about art than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about the technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years. 

While “officially” Mother and Father agreed on all vital questions of our upbringing and spoke to the children with one voice, they were poles apart in temperament. It wasn’t lost on us children that Mother didn’t attend our morning prayer meetings, preferring to stay comfortably in bed, reading the paper or answering correspondence. Or, that she brought into the house daring new art forms—often along with the artists who produced them—that upset Father. Or, that her face lit up whenever she had a chance to be with us or play with us alone. She loved adventures and the unexpected. Being spontaneous came naturally to her, and she derived the greatest pleasure from doing things on the spur of the moment.  

DUTY, MORALITY, PROPRIETY 

Father was the opposite. He wanted life to follow an orderly pattern. He liked to know what he was going to do and in what order, with whom and how. Whether in the city or on vacation, the day would be planned out in advance, and deviations from the plan were not greeted with pleasure. I remember his saying, when someone proposed a new activity, “But we planned something else.” For him that was reason enough not to do it. 

When we moved to Maine for the summer, Father’s trunks would be brought out three days before we left; some were the old-fashioned steamer trunks which had a lid that opened from the top. Others were known as “innovation trunks”; they opened out and had room on one side to hang suits, and drawers on the other for linen. He would fill half a dozen or more trunks and bags for the two or three months he would be away. To begin with, he and his valet, William Johnson, would start selecting and laying out what to take—overcoats, sweaters, suits, riding clothes, and so forth. Then William would do the actual packing. 

Dress was decidedly more formal in those days; in the winter Father wore a black tie to dinner every night, and Mother a long dress, even when the family dined alone. Still, the quantity of clothes they carried everywhere was astounding. Father never ventured out even in the summer without a coat in case the weather turned cold, and he always wore a hat outdoors. A photograph of Father and me taken one summer during my college years on a motor trip through the Southwest shows us seated on a wool lap robe under a lone pine tree in the middle of the Arizona desert. Father is wearing a suit and tie, felt hat on his head, and the ever-present coat lying nearby. 

I have no doubt Father loved his children, all of us, very much, but his own rigid upbringing undoubtedly contributed to his inflexibility as a parent. He was formal, not cold, but rarely demonstrably affectionate. Nevertheless, he was physically more present during my childhood than many fathers, and perhaps more than I was with my children. He worked hard, but mostly in his office at home where he did not wish to be disturbed. He was with us in Pocantico on weekends and spent summer vacations with us in Maine, but on the emotional level he was distant. 

There were exceptions. When we took walks, rode horseback, or traveled together, he would sometimes talk candidly about his own boyhood and listen to my concerns with real interest and tenderness. Those were important moments in my life. 

However, the procedure Father preferred whenever we had something important to deal with, especially an issue with significant emotional content, was an exchange of letters. This happened more frequently when we went off to college and when my parents were on extended trips, but it was the preferred mode of communication even when we were all living under the same roof. Father dictated his letters to his secretary, who typed and mailed them—with one copy for the files! 

Although Father’s love for us was heartfelt and sincere, his sense of parental duty prodded him into frequent soliloquies on duty, morality, and proper behavior. My brother Laurance to this day remembers with some distress the letter he received from Father after he was voted “most likely to succeed” by his class at Princeton. Father reminded him that he would have to spend the rest of his life truly earning the good opinion his classmates had of him. Such a response was fairly typical of Father. 

But underneath Father’s formal, correct exterior was a tender, warm side that came out if one of us was in trouble. This revealed an aspect of his personality that was very precious to me. It helps explain Mother and Father’s close relationship over nearly five decades. I knew I could count on his love and support when I really needed him even if he might disapprove of something I had done. 

Father was a complicated person. Grandfather was a self-made man who created a great fortune starting with nothing, an accomplishment Father would have no opportunity to emulate. Even after he had built a solid record of achievement, he was plagued with feelings of inadequacy. He once described his brief involvement in the business world as one of many vice presidents at Standard Oil as “a race with my own conscience,” and in a sense Father was racing all his life to be worthy of his name and inheritance. 

In his early thirties Father suffered a “nervous collapse”—we would now call it depression. It was then that he began to withdraw from active involvement with Standard Oil. In order to recover his health, Father took Mother and my sister, Abby, then only a year old, on a month’s vacation to the south of France. Their stay there lengthened into six months, and even when they came back, Father retreated to his home and rarely went out. It was almost a year before he felt able to return to the office, and then only part-time. 

Perhaps it is understandable that he never told me directly of this episode, although once or twice he hinted that as a young man he had some emotional problems. The first time I became aware that he had gone through some difficult times was a few years after I graduated from college when a close friend of mine was experiencing a similar bout of depression. Father spent hours with him, and my friend said that when Father spoke about his own experience, tears rolled down his face. It was only then that I understood how serious his depression had been. 

Once Father overcame his depression, he resigned from Standard and devoted himself exclusively to philanthropy and the management of Grandfather’s personal affairs. As a result, during the decade of the teens, Grandfather began to transfer some stocks and other properties to him, but it was still in relatively small quantities. In 1915, the year I was born, when Father was forty-one years old, he owned outright only about $250,000 of Standard Oil stock. 

What was Grandfather waiting for? I am not sure he ever intended to leave a great fortune to his children. His original plans for Father’s inheritance were probably the same as for his daughters: He would leave Father enough to be comfortable, to be “rich” by most measures, but by several orders of magnitude less than it turned out to be. Grandfather truly believed it when he said, in the context of philanthropy, that “there is no easier way to do harm than by giving money,” and he felt it applied most particularly to his own children. Frederick Gates wrote Grandfather a memo about how Grandfather’s fortune was “piling up” into “an avalanche” that would “bury him and his children.” Grandfather was probably a bit stunned at the size of his fortune as it continued to appreciate long after he had retired from Standard Oil. He saw his son, who was struggling to deal with his own emotional problems and to find his place in the world, already weighed down with more responsibility than he could bear, and he probably concluded that dumping an immense fortune on him wasn’t going to help matters. Thus, until 1915, Grandfather probably planned to give the bulk of his fortune to philanthropy either before his death or through his will. What changed his mind was Ludlow. 

LUDLOW 

The “Ludlow Massacre,” as it has come to be referred to in history books, was one of the most famous or infamous events in American labor history. It was also one of the seminal events in my family’s history as well. 

Ludlow, a coal mining town in southern Colorado, was where Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I), a company in which Grandfather owned nearly 40 percent of the shares, operated a number of mines and other facilities. Grandfather, already well into retirement, still maintained large holdings in many companies, but he looked upon them as a passive investment in securities and did not pay close attention to their management on a daily basis. Father sat on the board of CF&I, but corporate meetings were held in New York, and he never visited the company’s operations in Colorado. 

In September 1913 more than nine thousand miners represented by the United Mine Workers struck all the coal operators in the southern Colorado fields, including CF&I, over a number of grievances, including wages, hours, safety conditions, and, most important, union recognition. Months of sporadic violence between the strikers and guards employed by the companies forced the governor of Colorado to call out the National Guard. The situation worsened through the winter, and on April 20, 1914, open warfare erupted. During the course of a pitched battle between the strikers and the guardsmen, eleven women and children suffocated to death in a small crawl space under their burning tent; scores of others on both sides were killed and wounded in the days following this event, eventually forcing President Woodrow Wilson to dispatch federal troops to enforce an uneasy truce. 

It was a terrible tragedy, and because the name Rockefeller evoked such powerful emotions, Grandfather and Father were dragged into the middle of the conflict. There were even demonstrations outside our West 54th Street home denouncing the Rockefellers for the “crimes” of Ludlow. 

Father appeared before several congressional committees investigating conditions in Colorado, both before and after the Ludlow tragedy. At first he took a hard-line position against the strikers, undoubtedly influenced by Gates, who considered the strikers little better than anarchists. After Ludlow, Father began to question the soundness of Gates’s position. He removed the despised head of CF&I and hired Ivy Lee, who suggested that Father retain a labor expert to help him resolve the issues. Lee was much more than an image maker. He convinced Father that he would have to address the underlying causes of the miners’ discontent. 

Father then hired William Lyon Mackenzie King, who would later become prime minister of Canada. Mr. King became Father’s closest friend, and at his recommendation, Father implemented an “industrial representation plan” at CF&I that became a milestone in labor relations. Father traveled to Colorado with King and spent several days meeting with the miners and even dancing with their wives at a square dance. 

Father’s objective was to improve labor relations in the United States by addressing the grievances of labor and persuading businessmen to recognize their broader responsibilities to their workers. For that reason his involvement with labor issues did not end with Ludlow but remained a central interest for the rest of his life. In the early 1920s he established a company, Industrial Relations Counselors, to advise corporations on labor relations. It was well received, and a number of large American corporations, including several in the Standard Oil group, used its services. 

Ludlow was a rite of passage for Father. Although not a businessman by talent or inclination, he had demonstrated his skill and courage. What must have impressed Grandfather most was Father’s determination and strength of character under very trying circumstances. Moreover, he had displayed these qualities during a time of intense personal tragedy; in March 1915 his beloved mother, Laura, died after a long illness, and his father-in-law, Senator Aldrich, died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage a month later. These events took place only a short time before my birth on June 12, 1915. It was a period of trauma for both my parents. 

Ludlow and its aftermath seem to have convinced Grandfather that his son was fully qualified to bear the burden of managing his great fortune. Beginning in 1917, Grandfather began to transfer his remaining assets to Father—about one-half billion dollars at the time, which was equivalent to about $10 billion today. Father promptly set about restructuring his life to deal with the responsibilities that great wealth had brought him. Essentially, his goals would be the same as those expressed by the motto of the Rockefeller Foundation: improving the “well-being of mankind throughout the world.” This meant continuing his active involvement with the institutions started by Grandfather: the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, and the Rockefeller Foundation, where he already had significant leadership responsibilities. But it also gave him the opportunity to initiate projects of his own— projects that would range over practically every field of human activity from religion to science, the environment, politics, and culture.

CHAPTER 3 

CHILDHOOD 

I was born in my parents’ home at 10 West 54th Street on June 12, 1915. Their home wasn’t a château with turrets, crenelated walls, and expansive ballrooms of the sort built by the Vanderbilts and others along Fifth Avenue, but it wasn’t exactly simple, either. At the time it was the largest private residence in New York City and had nine floors and an enclosed play area on the roof. Below it there was a squash court, a gymnasium, and a private infirmary, where I was born and where family members would go if sick with a contagious disease such as the measles or mumps. On the second floor was a music room with a pipe organ and a large piano; it was here that my parents hosted recitals by such noted artists as Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Lucretia Bori. 

SURROUNDED BY ART 

The house was filled with art from many parts of the world, the style and period of which reflected my parents’ very different tastes and personalities. Mother’s taste was eclectic and ranged from the art of the ancient world to contemporary work from Europe and the United States. Her interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s. Under the guidance of Edith Halpert, owner of the Downtown Gallery, Mother acquired works by Sheeler, Hopper, Demuth, Burchfield, and Arthur Davies. It was during this time that Mother came to know Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who shared her excitement about modern art. The three of them were concerned that talented artists had little prospect of being shown by a museum until they were dead—if then. They decided to establish a museum of modern art where the works of contemporary artists would be shown. It was through their initiative that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) came into being in late 1929. 

Although Father provided Mother with ample funds for her personal needs, she did not have independent resources to buy expensive works of art; oil paintings by Monet, Manet, Degas, Matisse, and others were beyond her means. Instead, she acquired prints and drawings by several of these artists, eventually forming a remarkable collection, much of which she later donated to MoMA. 

Father disliked modern art. He considered it “unlifelike,” ugly, and disturbing, and discouraged Mother from hanging contemporary art in those areas of the house that he frequented. Though respectful of his views, she remained undaunted in her growing interest. In 1930, Mother retained Donald Deskey, the designer who later supervised the decoration of Radio City Music Hall, to transform what had been the children’s playroom on the seventh floor of Number 10 into an art gallery. 

Father’s more traditional tastes prevailed in other parts of the house, although Mother’s influence and good taste was very much in evidence there as well. Indeed, Mother fully shared Father’s appreciation of ancient and classical art, as well as the art of the Renaissance and post Renaissance periods. Mother loved beauty wherever she found it, but Father’s taste was restricted to the more conventional and realistic art forms. 

Shortly after building Number 10, my parents ran out of space for some of the large and important pieces they had acquired, so they bought the house next door. Connecting doors were cut through the walls from Number 10 on three floors. It was here that Father displayed some of his favorite works, including ten eighteenth-century Gobelin tapestries, The Months of Lucas, woven originally for Louis XIV, and the early-fifteenth-century set of French Gothic tapestries, the famous Hunt of the Unicorn. 

I was fond of the Unicorn Tapestries and often took visitors through the room where they were hung, explaining to them, panel by panel, the story of the hunted unicorn. One of the visitors was Governor Al Smith of New York, who, as a guest at my sister’s wedding, listened patiently to my monologue and later sent me a photograph of himself signed “To my pal, Dave, from Al Smith,” as a thanks. In the late 1930s, Father gave both sets of tapestries to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Unicorn Tapestries continue to be the central feature in the Metropolitan’s Cloisters Museum in Fort Tryon Park near the northern tip of Manhattan Island. 

Father’s pride and joy was his comprehensive collection of Chinese porcelains from the Ming and K’ang-hsi dynasties. He had acquired a significant portion of J. P. Morgan’s enormous collection in 1913 and maintained his intense interest in these beautiful objects for the rest of his life. Many of the K’ang-hsi pieces were huge beakers, taller than I was as a boy. They stood on specially made stands and were conspicuously displayed in several rooms on the second floor at Number 10. They looked very imposing—and overwhelming. He also bought many smaller pieces, including figures of mythical animals and human figures that were delicately painted and beautifully wrought. To this day I have a picture of him in my mind, examining the porcelains he was thinking of buying with a magnifying glass to ensure they had not been broken and restored. 

Mother also loved Asian art, but she preferred the ceramics and sculpture of the earlier Chinese and Korean dynasties, as well as Buddhist art from other parts of Asia. She had what we called “the Buddha room” in Number 12, filled with many statues of the Buddha and the goddess Kuan-Yin, where the lights were kept dim and the air heavily scented with burning incense. 

Mother had another partner in her collecting, her oldest sister, Lucy. Aunt Lucy had been almost completely deaf since childhood, and one had to stand very close to her and shout into her ear to be understood. Despite this handicap she was an intrepid traveler, and during the 1920s and 1930s she wandered the world visiting many out-of-the-way places at a time when travel was much more precarious, particularly for unmarried women. In 1923, while traveling on the Shanghai Express between Peking and Shanghai, Aunt Lucy’s train was attacked by bandits. Several people on the train were killed, and she was kidnapped. She was taken on the back of a donkey into the mountains, where the plan was to hold her for ransom. When the bandits learned that government troops were in hot pursuit, they abruptly abandoned her. Aunt Lucy made her way in the middle of the night to a walled village. D She was refused entry and spent the night in a doghouse outside the gate before being admitted in the morning. She was rescued later that day. 

Aunt Lucy bought art everywhere she went—often in remote spots and at modest prices. Not infrequently she bought things for Mother and would ship them back in large crates to our home in New York. Fortunately, Aunt Lucy had excellent taste. She developed a keen interest in Japanese bird and flower prints and Noh dance costumes, highly prized in Japan and quite rare, from the Edo Period (1600–1868), acquiring a rather large number of both over a period of forty years. In addition, she accumulated a superb collection of antique European and English porcelains, including a complete set of the eighteenth-century Meissen Monkey Band, modeled by Johann Kändler. Before her death in 1955 she left most of these collections to the Rhode Island School of Design, to which my mother also gave her important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints by the great artists Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamara. 

SCHOOL DAYS 

During the week our daily routine never varied. We were roused early for a quick breakfast, preceded by morning prayers in Father’s study. Father required us to learn selected verses from the Bible, which he called upon us to recite. Each of us then took turns reading a psalm or another passage from the Bible. We ended with a prayer. Father, strict but gentle, would explain to us the meaning of what we were reading. Making jokes or cutting up was sternly discouraged. Prayers lasted ten or fifteen minutes; neither Mother nor my sister, Babs, attended. 

Except for John, we all attended the Lincoln School at 123rd Street and Morningside Drive near Harlem. Father considered it important for boys to get exercise, so every morning we strapped on our roller skates in the front hallway and headed uptown on Fifth Avenue along the border of Central Park. When we were younger, Winthrop and I got only as far as 72nd Street, whereas Nelson and Laurance often went to 96th Street. Following along behind us in a Nash sedan to pick us up when our energies flagged was one of the three Irish Concannon brothers, who had originally worked as coachmen and who all learned, with varying degrees of success, to drive a car. They had difficulty adjusting to sitting behind a wheel and were happiest driving one of our electric cars, which were popular before the advent of Henry Ford’s Model T, because, like a hansom cab, the driver perched on top like a coachman. 

Lincoln was not a typical private school like Browning or St. Bernard’s for boys or Chapin or Brearley for girls, where the children of most wealthy families studied. Tuition was quite low to make it accessible on a competitive basis to children from all backgrounds. Lincoln was coeducational, and the student body was representative of the City’s diverse population. In my class there were a few children from the families of wealthy businessmen and bankers, but most of my classmates were from middle-class academic or artistic families. One of them, Tessim Zorach, was the son of the well-known sculptor William Zorach, whose wife, Marguerite, painted and wove tapestries. A few were the children of very recent émigrés to this country; one was even a White Russian émigré. My classmates were quite intelligent and, like me, were more interested in activities other than sports. 

It was Lincoln’s experimental curriculum and method of instruction that distinguished it from all other New York schools of the time. Father was an ardent and generous supporter of John Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. Father and the other founders of Lincoln believed that modern schools had to be more than places where facts and formulas were memorized and recited verbatim; schools had to become the place where individuals learned how to think and solve problems on their own. Teacher’s College of Columbia University operated Lincoln, with considerable financial assistance in the early years from the General Education Board, as an experimental school designed to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice. 

Lincoln stressed freedom for children to learn and to play an active role in their own education. In most subjects we did not have detailed reading assignments from a textbook but were instructed to go to the library and find information for ourselves. Essentially, we were taught how to learn rather than being forced to simply repeat facts that had been drilled into our heads. But there were some drawbacks. In my case, I had trouble with reading and spelling, which my teachers, drawing upon “progressive” educational theory, did not consider significant. They believed I was simply a slow reader and that I would develop at my own D pace. In reality I have dyslexia, which was never diagnosed, and I never received remedial attention. As a result my reading ability, as well as my proficiency in spelling, improved only marginally as I grew older. All my siblings, except Babs and John, had dyslexia to a degree. 

On the other hand I had some very good teachers at Lincoln. I attribute my lifelong interest in history to Elmina Lucke, my sixth grade teacher, who made the past come vividly alive. While Lincoln may have left me in some ways unprepared, I was able to enter Harvard at age seventeen and complete my academic requirements there with moderate success. 

POCANTICO 

During the winter the family spent the weekend at the estate in Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, just north of where the Tappan Zee Bridge now crosses the Hudson River. We drove up in a Crane Simplex sedan with a roof high enough for a person of average height to stand upright inside. It had folding side seats and could comfortably accommodate seven people including the chauffeur. For children it seemed like an endless journey—there were no modern highways, and the trip from Manhattan took about one and one-half hours—and I remember distinctly the smell of the plush fabric on the seats that always made me feel a little carsick. 

Grandfather started buying property in Pocantico in the early 1890s close to his brother William’s estate on the Hudson River. Southwestern Westchester County was still very rural then and had large areas of woodlands, lakes, fields, and streams—all teeming with wildlife. Eventually the family accumulated about 3,400 acres that surrounded and included almost all of the little village of Pocantico Hills, where most of the residents worked for the family and lived in houses owned by Grandfather. 

The wooden house my grandparents occupied burned down in 1901. Rather than rebuild, they simply moved down the hill to a smaller place, known as the Kent House, where they were perfectly content. After a great deal of prodding by Father they finally built a larger and more substantial house on the top of the hill near where the original structure had stood. Grandfather occupied Kykuit from 1912 until his death in 1937, and then Mother and Father moved into it. 

My parents’ first home in “the Park,” Abeyton Lodge, was a large, rambling wooden structure down the hill from Kykuit. Abeytons cheerful interior was filled with oak paneling and floors, which gave it a warm and comfortable feeling. A wide golden oak staircase ascended from the entrance hall to the second floor, and a huge oak table almost filled the front hall. It was on that table that I recall seeing the front page of the New York Herald-Tribune the day the stock market crashed in 1929. There were fireplaces in many rooms, including several of the bedrooms. The one in the living room was always lit in cool weather and contributed to its friendly and inviting atmosphere. Bookcases with glass doors lined an entire wall and held sets of books by well-known authors, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson among them, as well as bound copies of Country Life and St. Nicholas magazines, both relics of Victorian America. The only painting in the house of any distinction was a large George Inness landscape. 

There was a long hallway between the living room and dining room where the heads of big-game animals lined the walls. I have no idea where they came from, because Father certainly never went on an African safari, but this wasn’t too long after Teddy Roosevelt’s time, and mounted animal trophies were much in vogue. There was also a stuffed Emperor penguin standing in the front hallway. Admiral Richard Byrd had presented it to Father in gratitude for the financial support Father provided for his expeditions to the polar regions. Admiral Byrd visited us frequently in those days, and on his first expedition to Antarctica he telegraphed me from Little America saying he was naming a relay camp after me. That was an exciting thing for a thirteen-year-old boy. Byrd discovered mountain ranges near the Ross Sea, and he named one of them the Rockefeller Range, a name it still bears to this day. Another famous visitor was Charles Lindbergh, who spent a weekend with us soon after his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. 

A spur of the New York Central, the Putnam Division, ran right through Grandfather’s property, and there was a small station just outside the entrance gate. I recall hearing the whistle and the chugging of the steam engine as I lay in bed at night. Outside my bedroom window stood a big maple tree that turned bright red in the autumn. When the leaves fell, I could see up the sloping lawn past the sheep grazing on the golf course—a Scottish shepherd herded a flock of sheep around the property to keep the grass down—and all the way up the hill to Kykuit. 

I had developed an avid interest in nature study, particularly collecting beetles, as a result of a class in natural history I attended, along with Henry Ford II, one summer in Maine. On warm spring nights I would hang up a linen sheet against the stucco wall on the porch off my bedroom and put a light in front of it. Beetles and other insects would swarm toward the light in large numbers, and in a short period of time the sheet would be covered with crawling life. On a single evening I could easily collect thirty or more species of beetles. It is a sad fact that the same result could not be produced today, clearly due to the extensive use of insecticides. As a child the strident sounds of the katydids, cicadas, and other members of the insect orchestra would keep me awake at night. Now, late in the summer, we sometimes hear a few katydids sawing away, but very few. Sadly, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring was all too accurate about the impact that pesticides would have throughout the world. 

There were two electricians who lived on the estate, named, appropriately, Mr. Bell and Mr. Buzzwell. Mr. Buzzwell’s daughter, Louise, was exactly my age, and this fact convinced me when I was five that the two of us were destined to be married. When the snows fell, the endless sloping lawns around Kykuit were ideal for sledding, and Louise and I often raced down the hills together. Except for Louise and a few other children of estate employees, there wasn’t much companionship. I would sometimes bring friends out for the weekend, but more often I spent my days alone. 

The estate was nevertheless a child’s paradise. When I was in my early teens, Father built a huge playhouse just up the hill from Abeyton Lodge with a gymnasium, indoor pool, bowling alley, squash court, and the kitchen where I had prepared Grandfather’s chicken dinner. A decade later Father added an indoor tennis court lit by a vast glass dome, with a sitting area for observers and fireplaces to keep them warm in the winter. There were an infinite number of places to play, but I remember usually having to play alone or with a tutor who came out for the weekend.  

SUMMERS IN SEAL HARBOR 

Summers were always spent in Maine at the Eyrie in Seal Harbor on the southeast shore of Mount Desert Island, not far from Bar Harbor. We would celebrate Grandfather’s birthday on July 8 in Pocantico and head north the next day. The movement of the household was a complicated logistical task and required weeks of preparation. Large trunks and suitcases were dragged out of storage and packed with everything we might need during the nearly three-month stay. On the day of our departure, workers loaded them on trucks along with ice chests containing pasteurized Walker-Gordon milk for the children on the train. Everything was delivered to Pennsylvania Station and loaded on the train. Abeyton Lodge was filled with a wonderful bustle and sense of anticipation as we hurried about collecting all of those things that we had to have with us: books, games, and athletic equipment. 

In the mid-afternoon of what was invariably a hot and humid summer day, we would leave Pocantico for the drive to New York City. The family and household staff filled an entire Pullman sleeping car. In addition to Mother, Father, and the six children, there were nurses, tutors, personal secretaries, Father’s valet, waitresses, kitchen maids, parlor maids, and chambermaids—each a distinct vocation—to take care of some one hundred rooms in the Eyrie, which had been enlarged considerably by my parents after they bought it in 1908. In addition to the Pullman sleeping car, Father had a horse car hooked onto the train to accommodate the horses and carriages he always brought for the summer. A groom would sleep there so that no accidents occurred during the sixteen-hour train ride. 

The Bar Harbor Express originated in Washington and stopped in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York to add sleeping cars. We boarded at about five in the afternoon for the overnight trip through New England. The following morning, as if by magic, we would be passing by the sparkling blue waters along the rugged coast of Maine. 

We would climb down excitedly from the car when it arrived at the Mount Desert Ferry at the head of Frenchman’s Bay, breathing in the balsam-scented Maine air and pointing to Cadillac Mountain looming in the distance. Father supervised the unloading of trunks, luggage, horses, and people. Each of us boys helped carry parcels down the dock to the Norumbega, a side-wheeler, which would carry us to the island. 

With everything safely stowed aboard, the Norumbega would pull slowly away from the pier for the four-hour voyage to Seal Harbor. The ferry stopped first in Bar Harbor, where many of our fellow passengers would disembark, along with their many steamer trunks and other possessions. Then the Norumbega would steam round the headland, toward Seal Harbor, and finally, in mid-afternoon, we would dock. After a journey of almost twenty-four hours we had finally arrived, with the whole summer stretching deliciously before us. 

In contrast it now takes barely two hours to reach Ringing Point, my Seal Harbor home, by plane from Westchester. While it is a good deal faster, I am nostalgic for the sights and sounds of the train and ferry, and the sweet anticipation of an endless summer in Maine. 

One of my earliest memories is from Seal Harbor. There was a report that a dead whale had washed ashore on a nearby island. Father arranged for a boat to take family members over to view the carcass. Barely three, I was considered too young to accompany them. I remember standing on the dock weeping bitterly as the others left and complaining to my governess that “in my whole life I had never seen a whale” and would probably never see one ever again. 

By 1900, Bar Harbor had become one of New England’s most fashionable summer resorts, on a par with Newport, Rhode Island. The rugged coastline along Frenchman’s Bay flanking Bar Harbor was covered with immense gabled mansions of the rich, and the harbor was filled with large pretentious yachts. Seal Harbor, although only nine miles away, remained much quieter and more conservative. My parents thought Bar Harbor too flashy and ostentatious, and spent little time there. Families such as the Atwater Kents of radio fame, the Dorrances of Campbell Soup, and the Potter Palmer's from Chicago gave elaborate parties, with bands playing on yachts anchored just off their property and dancing all through the night. Speedboats carried guests back and forth, and champagne flowed for all ages. 

My parents disapproved of such opulent displays, especially because of the liquor that was in abundant supply even during Prohibition. Many rumors circulated about the high society of Bar Harbor; it was even whispered that Mr. Kent kept a mistress! Of course, I was too young for most of this and heard about it primarily from my brothers. 

Father spent much of his time during the summers riding horses and driving carriages along the fifty-five miles of carriage roads he had built on land he owned as well as within Acadia National Park. They were marvels of engineering and meticulous planning, and provided spectacular views of the ocean, mountains, lakes, and forests. 

Father didn’t like sailing and rarely ventured out on the water. He preferred outdoor activities on the ground: horseback riding, carriage driving, and long walks through the woods. This was a great disappointment to Mother who had been raised on Narragansett Bay among a family of sailors. Eventually Father bought a beautiful thirty six-foot racing sloop, an “R” boat named the Jack Tar, undoubtedly as a concession to my older brothers. Being the youngest, I didn’t get much sailing time on it, although when I was seventeen, a friend and I sailed one hundred miles east to Saint Andrews in New Brunswick across the treacherous waters of Passamaquoddy Bay. Jack Tar had no engine, so Captain Oscar Bulger, who worked for the family for many years, followed along in his lobster boat in case two very inexperienced sailors got into real trouble. 

I have always loved Maine, but I now realize that I felt a certain sense of isolation during my summers there. There was a large household of servants, tutors, and governesses, but because everything was available at the Eyrie, I never took tennis lessons at the club or went to a sailing class at the Northeast Harbor Yacht Club with other children. I never became part of a group as most children did whose parents summered at Seal Harbor. At the time I am not sure I realized what I was missing. I liked the series of French tutors whom Father had selected to be our companions, and they did their best to keep me entertained, but they were hardly substitutes for the companionship of children my own age.

I do fondly remember my nurses—governesses, really—who took me under their protective wings. My first was Atta Albertson—for some reason I called her “Babe”—who was with me until I was ten years old. She had served as a nurse with the U.S. Army in the Philippines during World War I, and I remember hearing about the delectable qualities of M mangoes for the first time from her. Many years later on my first trip to Asia I tried them, and they have become my favorite fruit. After Babe came Florence Scales, whom I called “Puss”; one of the kindest, sweetest ladies imaginable, she would read to me as I worked on my beetle collection. 

My sister’s companion, Regina DePartment, a Russian aristocrat whose family had fled the Revolution, was beautiful with dark hair and eyes; she spoke exquisite French but could barely get by in English. She was very kind and would often play a board game with me called Peggaty, at which I was very good, or thought I was, because she would usually let me win. 

SIX DIFFERENT PERSONALITIES 

My siblings viewed me as being far too young to be worth playing with. The eldest, my sister Abby, whom we called Babs, was twelve years older than me. When I was a young child, she was already a debutante, out every night until early morning; once or twice I remember her getting home as I was strapping on my roller skates and heading off for school. John, two and a half years younger than Babs, was next in line and already in long pants—literally; we all wore knickerbockers and long socks until well into our teens—so I also considered him almost part of the adult world. Nelson and Laurance were also quite a bit older, seven and five years, respectively, and Win, the closest to me in age, was my senior by three years.

It’s interesting how very different siblings can be despite the similarities of their upbringing and genetic inheritance. The two oldest, Babs and John, bore the brunt of Father’s own severe upbringing and personal rigidity. 

From my earliest memory Babs had already entered her rebellious phase, which in one way or another lasted most of her life. Father clearly wanted his first child to be a devout Christian woman and to do things he felt a well-brought-up lady should do. He truly adored Babs, but in his eagerness to have her become a paragon of modesty and charity, he badgered her constantly with lectures on good behavior and the obligations of wealth. Babs would have none of it. If Father wanted her to do something, she would refuse or do the opposite. For instance, Father strongly disapproved of alcohol and tobacco, and offered each of us $2,500 if we didn’t smoke before the age of twenty-one, and another $2,500 if we made it all the way to twenty-five. This was not an insignificant sum, either, considering the size of the allowances we received. I don’t think Babs even tried. She smoked as ostentatiously as possible in front of our parents. 

Babs was most adamant in her refusal to give money to charity. Grandfather and Father expected all of us to follow their example and encouraged us to contribute 10 percent of our allowances to church and other charitable causes. In the beginning these were very small amounts —only a few dollars a month—but Father saw this practice as an essential part of our moral and civic education. Babs refused to give a cent, as a way of showing her independence. She suffered for it financially because Father was less generous to her than he was to his five sons. 

The rebellion was not a happy one on either side. Father was distressed by her behavior and hurt by her animosity toward him. For Babs, life just became more and more difficult. One episode when she was in her early twenties had a lasting impact on her life. She was ticketed for speeding in her Stutz convertible and was terrified at what Father might say when he found out about it. Her fiancé, Dave Milton, was an attorney and tried to get the ticket “fixed” through a judge he knew. The press picked this up, and the story appeared on the front page of the tabloids for several days. My parents were upset, but my sister even more so. In the end, seeing her real distress, Father was understanding of her plight and did not react as she had feared. But from that day forward she was terrified of public notoriety. She retreated into herself and ceased being the gay, fun-loving party-goer she had been. 

Babs was intelligent, capable, and beautiful, but after that event life never seemed to work for her. She loved to travel, but the most trivial inconveniences or delays overwhelmed her; she was upset if the bathwater wasn’t the right temperature or if meals weren’t served precisely on time or if she had not brought just the right clothes for the weather or a dinner party. As a result she could think of nothing else and viewed all her trips as failures. It was as if her rebellion had been turned inward, where the struggle would continue, forever unresolved. 

When I was ten and Babs twenty-two, she married Dave Milton. His family had been friends of our family both in Seal Harbor and in Pocantico. At first she saw marriage as a way to escape from Father, and while she attended major family events and kept in touch with Mother, she lived a very separate life. 

John, of course, had the name. He was John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the eldest son and the heir apparent. Of all the children, John was the most like Father in personality; he was hardworking and conscientious, and had a strong sense of duty. But Father’s standards were so high and exacting that John could never hope to win any final or complete approval from him. Every achievement or success was taken for granted —that’s how a Rockefeller should behave, after all—and, furthermore, one should be careful not to get a swelled head about it and think you’re superior. Since perfection was the norm, all John could do was fail. Though probably not articulated in words, Father’s response always made him feel he should be able to do better. 

It’s not surprising that John had a “nervous disposition.” He was extremely shy and awkward in social situations, so self-conscious that he would agonize for days over things he had said or thoughts he was thinking. He was, like Father, something of a hypochondriac, always concerned about his health and plagued throughout his childhood by a series of allergies and illnesses, though none of them was serious. Perhaps because he was so much like Father, John was destined to have, apart from Babs, the greatest conflict with him, but that would not come out in the open for a number of years. 

John and Abby took opposite approaches in dealing with Father. Abby rebelled and tried to be in every way as different as possible; John, especially in his youth, tried to please Father, to be everything he could ask for, to be as good, dutiful, and giving as Father wanted him to be. In some ways it was just as futile. While at Princeton, John asked Father if he could bring a car down for use during prom week. Father acceded to his wish but expressed deep disapproval. Characteristically, Father elevated what was a simple and almost classic request from a son to his father—to use the family car—into an opportunity to teach a moral lesson. He said that in his own college days he had not had a horse because he did not want to be different from the other boys, and he stressed the valuable “democratic” role John would play by “getting along without a car when others were having them.” John wrote back that he felt there was a limit to the sacrifice Rockefellers ought to feel it their duty to make to promote the democratic spirit. It was as close to sarcasm as John ever allowed himself to get, and in fact he ended the letter with an apology.

It can’t have been easy for John, either, to have Nelson always nipping at his heels. Nelson was the first in my generation to test successfully the limits of Father’s precepts on the proper way to raise children. 

The contrast between John and Nelson was dramatic. Where John was painfully shy and self-conscious, Nelson was sociable and outgoing and loved to be the center of attention. The duties and obligations that weighed John down seemed to roll off Nelson easily. It was as if Nelson had looked at Babs and John and decided he wasn’t going to make either of their mistakes in his relations with Father—there would be no futile rebellion and no slavish subordination to the Rockefeller image. If he broke the rules, as Babs did, it wouldn’t be done ostentatiously to anger Father but to have fun, get away with it, or secure some important result. If, like John, he was setting out to please Father, it was to achieve a clear and calculated objective—to get what he wanted—and he often succeeded. 

Nelson was named for Mother’s father, Senator Nelson Aldrich. But even though Nelson admired both grandfathers, he thought it significant that he had been born on Grandfather Rockefeller’s birthday. He let one infer from this coincidence that he was the true Rockefeller standard bearer. Yet his own career more closely paralleled that of Grandfather Aldrich, the career politician. In any case, Nelson was politically astute, even wily, within the family. He was a natural leader and radiated self confidence. The burdens of duty, as defined by Father, did not weigh him down, and he seemed to relish being a member of a prominent family. He was also the mischievous one in the family; he surreptitiously shot rubber bands at the rest of us during our morning prayers and was not the slightest bit concerned when Father reprimanded him. 

I idolized Nelson. In a household full of duties and constraints, Nelson knew how to have fun and acted as if the constraints were only minor obstacles that could be easily avoided. Most of the time he miraculously escaped serious discipline, and even the punishments that were meted out to him never really seemed to stick, because Mother enjoyed his liveliness and independence and, perhaps, in the secret and subtle ways that mothers can, encouraged his jaunty misbehavior. On the rare occasions when he took notice of my existence and asked me to join one of his adventures, my life was immediately transformed into something larger, better, and more exciting. 

Laurance—the unusual spelling is because he was named after our grandmother Laura—was the philosopher and the creative one. Quiet like John and a bit detached, he was less shy and more venturesome. When he was at Princeton and roomed with a rather fast crowd, he told me that he believed in trying anything once. He was quick and witty, but not an especially good student. His natural charm and whimsical manner made him very attractive to girls, to whom he warmly responded. As a young man, however, he searched endlessly for the right road to follow in life. Later on he became a highly successful venture capitalist as well as a conservationist. His interest in unconventional ideas never diminished. 

Nelson and Laurance formed an inseparable team, and they remained uniquely close within the family throughout their adult lives. Nelson, as the more aggressive and outgoing of the two, was invariably the ringleader in their exploits, but Laurance, in his more quiet and engaging way, would keep his end up. Zane Grey’s western novels were their favorites, and they emulated characters from these stories in their behavior. As a result Nelson took to calling Laurance “Bill,” because that sounded more Wild West than Laurance, and he continued calling him that until the day he died. 

Even as a young boy Laurance showed evidence of his later financial acumen. He and Nelson bought several pairs of rabbits from the Rockefeller Institute, bred them at Pocantico, and then sold back the offspring for a handsome profit. A few years later the two of them, with some help from John, built a log cabin as their secret hiding place in the woods near Mother’s garden in Maine. It was built with logs from trees they chopped down and dragged to the site with a pony. It was quite skillfully done, though I only saw the cabin as an adult because they had strictly forbidden Win and me from going anywhere near it, and I was sufficiently intimidated by their warning that I never attempted to find it until years later. 

Winthrop faced an unusually difficult situation within the family. Nelson and Laurance were a club to which he wasn’t invited. I, three years his junior, was a club he didn’t want to join. He was teased unmercifully by them and gave me full measure of the grief they inflicted on him. Win did not have a particularly happy childhood. He was, as was I, somewhat overweight and awkward, and received a great deal of ridicule from Nelson and Laurance, who gave him the nickname Pudgy. Once Nelson coaxed Win onto a seesaw, and when he was high in the air, jumped off, sending poor Win crashing to the ground. Win picked up a pitchfork and chased Nelson, fully intending, I’m sure, to skewer him if Father hadn’t intervened. 

Later in life, after Win had been governor of Arkansas for two terms and was suffering from chronic alcoholism, Nelson made some gestures of support, but Win saw them as halfhearted and very belated. Win was deeply embittered about the condescending treatment he felt he had always received from Nelson. 

As the youngest I received the special attention of my Mother, but there were fewer compensations for Win. Win had exceptional natural qualities of leadership, which he demonstrated during his distinguished military service in the war and later during his political career in Arkansas. But he was never comfortable with his social and intellectual peers. He spent much of his time with fair-weather friends, who looked up to him because of his money and position. He hated school and was actually somewhat relieved when he was expelled from Yale during his junior year. Win was restless, iconoclastic, and full of energy. I think he desperately craved Father’s approval, but his academic failures and undisciplined comportment with friends of whom my parents did not approve meant that Father rarely granted him the acceptance and approval he sought. 

As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional family, but the effect was different on each of us. For some it was a burden, for others an opportunity. Mother and Father cared for each of us deeply, wanted the best for us, and tried to show us, each in his or her own way, the kind of life they thought would be most fulfilling. Mother was a remarkable woman whose elegant style and gracious behavior affected everyone, especially her children, in a positive way. Father was a more austere and certainly a more awesome figure. However, much of what I learned about myself and my family’s traditions came as a result of his efforts to expose me to the special travails associated with the Rockefeller name and the realities of the world I would inevitably inherit. His accomplishments were an inspiration to me.

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