Part 2 Memoirs David Rockefeller ...Travels ... Rockefeller Center ... Harvard

Memoirs 

David Rockefeller

4 

TRAVELS 

Father, busy as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute, as well as many other activities, was a somewhat remote figure to me and my siblings. Virtually the only opportunity we had to see his less formal side was on the many memorable trips we took with him during our childhood years. These early trips, as much as my formal education, helped develop the interests I would pursue and the man I would become.

The trips—four of which I will allude to here—were not typical family vacations. We traveled from the down-at-the-heels town of Williamsburg in Virginia to the towering Grand Tetons in Wyoming and from the resplendent palace of the Sun King at Versailles to the banks of the upper Nile in Nubia. They were extraordinary adventures, which gave me an insight into the values that motivated Father to make philanthropic gifts, not always as part of a grand design but spontaneously, because there were opportunities to do things that needed to be done. These trips also planted the seeds of my own later passion for travel and international affairs. 

LIFE SAVERS AND HERSHEY BARS 

Father understood that children become restless, especially on long automobile trips, and invariably brought along Life Savers, Hershey bars, and other goodies, which he doled out at appropriate moments along the way. He also used the trips as a means of teaching us how to travel. He showed us that by packing a bag neatly we could fit in more clothes than if we simply threw them in a jumble. He taught us to fold I suit jackets so that they would not be rumpled when we took them out of the bag. He assigned each of us jobs, such as seeing that the luggage was distributed to the proper rooms when we arrived at a hotel and tipping the baggage carriers, the doormen, and others who helped us along the way. The older children handled paying the hotel bills. 

RESTORING THE PAST: THE SPRING OF 1926 

In the spring of 1926, Mother and Father took Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and me on a trip to Philadelphia and then on to Virginia to visit Revolutionary War and Civil War sites. Father also had agreed to speak at Hampton Institute, the famous Black college in Hampton, Virginia, that had received a great deal of financial support from the family. We spent a day on the campus speaking to students and attending a church service. 

The next morning we climbed into the car for the trip to Richmond, where Father was to meet with Governor Harry F. Byrd to discuss conservation work in the Shenandoah Valley. Father had decided earlier that he wanted to stop in Williamsburg, home of the College of William and Mary, to see the work that was being done to renovate the national memorial hall of Phi Beta Kappa, the first chapter of which was located on the college campus. Father had been elected to this national honorary fraternity when he was an undergraduate at Brown and had agreed to lead the fund-raising campaign for the building. Our guide for this brief portion of the trip was to be the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church and a part-time development officer for the college. 

Dr. Goodwin met us on the road into town early in the morning of a glorious spring day, with the dogwood and azalea in full bloom. He showed us the memorial hall and then led us around the sleepy village that had been the capital of Virginia before the American Revolution. But after the Revolution, when the capital moved to Richmond, the town entered a long period of slow decline. Many of its splendid public buildings, including the Governor’s Palace and the House of Burgesses, had literally fallen into ruins. Dr. Goodwin was an eloquent tour director and a very good salesman. When we visited a handsome but dilapidated T brick building known as the George Wythe House, he extolled its fine architecture but pointed out with sadness its state of  disrepair. Father picked up on the observation and later agreed to provide the funds needed to restore the house. 

That was the modest beginning of Father’s most significant project in historic restoration, a project that gave him as much pleasure as anything he did in the field of philanthropy during his lifetime. Over a period of more than thirty years he spent some $60 million in acquiring and restoring the central portion of the town to its authentic colonial condition. Today Williamsburg is a pilgrimage site for millions of Americans and a place to which presidents of the United States have proudly taken visiting heads of state to catch a glimpse of an earlier America and its customs and traditions.* 

EXPLORING THE WILD WEST: 

THE SUMMER OF 1926 

The first extended trip I took with my parents was to the American West in the summer of 1926. We traveled in a private Pullman railway car, the Boston, which was usually reserved for the chairman of the New York Central Rail Road. We left the car on sidings at various points along the way and visited national parks and other sites of interest by automobile. In addition to Mother, Father, Laurance, Winthrop, and me, our group included a French tutor, who wrote long letters every day to his fiancée in France which he claimed were purely philosophical, and a young doctor from the Rockefeller Institute Hospital. We completed a ten-thousand-mile circuit of the country in a period of two months. 

Father was a committed conservationist and used his western trips (he traveled there almost every year) to learn about the national park system and meet park superintendents. Two men in particular impressed him: Horace Albright of Yellowstone and Jesse Nusbaum of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. We saw both of these men on the 1926 trip, and the meetings had important consequences. 

We stopped first in Cleveland, Ohio, where we visited Grandmother Rockefeller’s grave. Father stood there quietly for a few minutes as the rest of us watched him from a distance. Then we toured the old Rockefeller home on Euclid Avenue where Father was born and had spent his boyhood. He told us stories about his boyhood days and how different things were before electricity and the automobile. We also visited Forest Hill, where Grandfather had a summer home for many years. Father was then developing it into a middle-class suburb, really a planned community similar to the ones in Radburn, New Jersey, and Sunnyside, New York, in which Father also had an interest. The “Rockefeller Homes” were an innovative departure and had attracted a great deal of national attention, although the project never proved to be a financial success. 

Just as important to Father was a visit to the coal fields of southern Colorado, scene of the Ludlow Massacre. We spent a day in Pueblo touring Colorado Fuel & Iron’s large steel mills and meeting representatives of the company union. Father greeted a number of the men by name, and they seemed pleased to see him. I remember being a bit startled by the experience but impressed with my father’s forthright manner and the easy way that he dealt with the men and their families. It was an important lesson for a young boy to learn. 

We began our real vacation, at least from my point of view, when we reached Albuquerque. The Southwest was incredibly mysterious and interesting to me, and filled with all sorts of exotic characters: Indians, cowboys, ranchers, and artists. We visited a number of the famous pueblos along the Rio Grande, and at San Ildefonso we met the celebrated potter Maria Martinez and watched her make her black glazed pots, which would later become so famous and valuable. I celebrated my eleventh birthday in Taos, and that evening our group perched on a roof to watch the traditional fire dance ceremony at Taos Pueblo. 

Mother was impressed by the artistic merit of Indian artifacts, as she often was by the simple beauty of good handicrafts. She and Father purchased Navajo rugs and silver jewelry, Pueblo pottery, baskets, beaded saddlebags, and other objects wherever they could find them. Mother was also quite taken by the paintings of Indians and other western subjects done by American artists who had established an art colony a few years before in Taos. She and Father were particularly drawn to the very realistic work of Eanger Irving Couse and Joseph Henry Sharp and bought a number of their paintings.* 

Father became more aware of the need to preserve Indian art and to protect ancient archaeological sites as a result of this trip. We spent several days at Mesa Verde with Jesse Nusbaum, who took us through the Anasazi cliff dwellings there. Nusbaum also spoke to Father about the depredations of “pot hunters” and others who invaded old sites and totally ruined the historical record for the sake of unearthing a few pieces of pottery. Largely as a result of this trip Father supported the creation of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, an institution that continues to exist to this day as part of the School of American Research.

After Mesa Verde we visited the Hopi villages in the Painted Desert and the south rim of the Grand Canyon before moving on to California. After a few days in Los Angeles, where I got my first glimpse of the Pacific, we boarded the Boston for the ride through the Sierras to Yosemite National Park. We spent almost a week at Yosemite and saw El Capitan, Bridal Veil Falls, and Glacier Point. Father spoke here also, as was his custom, with the national park people, who brought to his attention the need for funds to improve public access within the park and to acquire additional acreage to protect the giant redwoods, Sequoia gigantea, from the woodman’s axe. 

After a short stopover in San Francisco we headed south for Santa Barbara, where I experienced my first earthquake, and then back north again for a few days on the Monterey peninsula. We then headed for the great groves of coastal redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, north of San Francisco. The year before, Father had made an anonymous pledge of $1 million to the Save-the-Redwoods League to enable this group to purchase one of the last remaining virgin stands of these trees in the area around Dyerville Flats. Even now, more than seventy years later, I can recall the incredible beauty of those redwoods standing like tall sentinels in the groves near Eureka. 

Our party finally reached Yellowstone on July 13. We had been on the road for more than a month and had grown a bit weary of constant traveling. Yellowstone quickly revived our spirits. 

Horace Albright presided over Yellowstone, the crown jewel of the National Park System. He took us to see Old Faithful and a number of other sites in the park, many of which could only be reached on horseback in those days. Albright urged Father to visit Jackson Hole, just south of Yellowstone, and we drove with Albright to see for the first time the Grand Teton Mountains, probably the most magnificent peaks in the Rocky Mountains, which only recently had been set aside as a national park. As Albright pointed out, however, the drive through Jackson Hole, from which one had the best view of the Tetons, was marred by ugly signs and tumbledown roadside stands. 

Both Father and Mother quickly saw Albright’s point, and Father would later acquire anonymously the sagebrush-covered floodplain of the Snake River at the foot of the mountains in order to extend the park and preserve its beauty. Over a period of several years he bought more than thirty thousand acres and then offered it to the federal government if they would include it and a number of other parcels controlled by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management within the park. It was nearly twenty years, however, before the Roosevelt administration would finally accept the gift. 

A collateral benefit from Father’s purchase of the Snake River land was his acquisition of the JY Ranch, a beautiful dude ranch on the eastern end of Phelps Lake, nestled at the foot of the Tetons. We had lunch there in 1926, and it became a favorite place for our family members to visit in subsequent years. 

We started the homeward trek in late July and made one final stop in Chicago to see Aunt Edith Rockefeller McCormick, one of my father’s sisters, at her palatial home on North Michigan Avenue. Aunt Edith was quite flamboyant and had recently divorced her husband of many years, Harold Fowler McCormick, the son of the founder of International Harvester, Cyrus McCormick. Aunt Edith was a devoted patron of the Chicago Opera and had also spent a great deal of time being analyzed by Carl Jung. She obviously relished her position as one of the grandes dames of Chicago society; she entertained us at a formal luncheon complete with liveried footmen in tights behind every chair. 

A FRANCE AND THE RESTORATIONS: 

THE SUMMER OF 1927 

Although my parents felt their children should first get to know their own country, they believed it was just as important for us to learn about European cultures and civilization. So in 1927 they took Winthrop and me to France. Four years earlier Father had offered to place a million dollars at the disposal of the French government to repair sections of the Reims Cathedral damaged by German artillery, and to restore the portions of Fontainebleau palace and the Palace of Versailles, where the leaking lead roof threatened the integrity of the limestone walls and made the famous Hall of Mirrors, where the treaty ending World War I had been signed, too dangerous to be used. 

France was still reeling from the enormous human loss and physical destruction of the Great War, and neither the French government nor wealthy citizens of France were in a position to assume responsibility to protect or restore these monuments of incomparable architectural beauty and historic significance. 

Once the French government had accepted Father’s offer, he retained his old friend and the Beaux Arts–trained architect Welles Bosworth to supervise the restorations. Over the course of the next decade he provided more than $2 million for these projects. 

We had a chance to inspect the work that had been completed to that point during our 1927 trip. We spent a week at Versailles in the lovely old-fashioned Trianon Palace Hotel so that Father could spend time with Bosworth and the French architects going over the details of the work under way. The conservator of Versailles gave Winthrop and me a special pass to ride our bicycles in the park and to climb over the vast lead roofs of the palace. 

Winthrop and I were particularly intrigued by the restoration of Marie Antoinette’s “Le Hameau,” an exact replica of an eighteenth-century farm village filled with miniature houses, barns, and a dairy. Marie Antoinette had been a devotee of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great romantic philosopher, and seems to have heeded his advice about returning to nature, at least on occasion. She constructed a bucolic fantasy where she could escape from the stress of court life and palace intrigue with a few of her friends. There she dressed as a shepherdess and tended a flock of sheep. Not wanting to be too removed from the F conveniences of court life, however, the Queen also built a small opera house, seating less than one hundred people, where she would go to be entertained by great musicians and singers. The story is also told that the Queen objected to the smell of the sheep and would send word of her arrival so that they could be perfumed. 

During the remainder of the trip we traveled in two huge Spanish-built Hispano Suissa limousines with uniformed chauffeurs through the château country of the Loire Valley and then on to Mont-Saint-Michel and the wonderful coasts of Brittany and Normandy, which Mother particularly loved because of its associations with the great masters of the Impressionist school.

I returned to France in 1936 with my parents to participate in the ceremony rededicating Rheims Cathedral. Jean Zay, the minister of culture in Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, gave a banquet in Father’s honor at the Palace of Versailles to express the French government’s appreciation for Father’s assistance, and named a street for him there as well. A few days later President Albert LeBrun decorated Father with the Grand Croix of the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration, in front of a large and distinguished gathering at the Elysée Palace. 

Sixty-four years later the French government generously awarded me the same decoration at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Paris. It was a particularly meaningful occasion because the only other living American to hold that rank is President Ronald Reagan. 

THREE MONTHS AMONG THE PYRAMIDS: 

THE WINTER OF 1929 

Father was enthralled by the discoveries of archaeologists who had uncovered so much about the emergence of the great civilizations of antiquity. As a young man he had taken a special interest in the work of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, headed by the distinguished Egyptologist Dr. James Henry Breasted. For a number of years Father supported Breasted’s work in Luxor and at the Temple of Medinet Habu across the Nile just below the Valley of the Kings. 

In late 1928, Dr. Breasted invited Mother and Father to visit his “dig” in Egypt and to review the work of the institute. Neither of my parents had ever been to that part of the world, and after some discussion they readily agreed to go. I was in the ninth grade at the time and quickly made it obvious to my parents that I wanted to go with them. I had read about the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb only a few years earlier, and a trip to Egypt seemed to me the most exciting of adventures. Father was concerned about my missing so much school because of the length of the trip, which would last for more than three months, but I finally persuaded him to let me go on the grounds that I would learn so much from the experience. He agreed on condition that a tutor went along to keep me up to date on school-work. This was the best deal I could get, so I eagerly agreed. 

We sailed from New York on the S.S. Augustus in early January 1929. At the last moment Mary Todhunter Clark, known as Tod, who was a close friend of Nelson’s from summers in Seal Harbor, came along as well. 

In Cairo we spent a week at the elegant old-world Semiramis Hotel, where a colorfully dressed dragoman served as our interpreter and guide. We visited the Sphinx, and I rode a camel out to Giza, where I climbed the Great Pyramid. We saw whirling dervishes dance in the Arab Quarter one evening and visited mosques and the ancient Arab university of el Azhar. Best of all for me were the bazaars, where I spent as many hours as I could, fascinated by the women dressed in black robes whose faces were always veiled, and by the exotic wares sold by hundreds of small shopkeepers from their tiny stalls facing onto narrow streets of the souk. The pungent smells of the spice market, the sounds of hammering on copper pots and bowls that were being fashioned, and the colorful displays of rugs and textiles caught my fancy, and I quickly learned to bargain for everything, offering but a fraction of the listed price for anything I was interested in. There were swarms of flies everywhere, clinging to freshly dressed meat hanging from hooks in the butchers’ stalls, and hordes of beggars, many of them children with trachoma who had fluid running from their milky white eyes. 

From Cairo we headed up the Nile on a large dahabiyah (a passenger boat) to see Dr. Breasted’s excavations at Luxor. I still remember the picturesque feluccas sailing on the Nile, the farmers patiently raising buckets of water from the river with shadoofs (a counterbalanced sweep) to irrigate their fields, which for centuries has fed millions of people in defiance of the desert. There were many other important ancient sites on the way, and each evening after we tied up along the riverbank, Dr. Breasted gave a slide lecture on the monuments we would see the following day. 

After Luxor and Karnak we continued on to the Second Cataract at Wadi Halfa, the first town in the Sudan. On the way we passed the beautiful Temple of Philae, now submerged under Lake Nasser following the construction of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s. We also saw the magnificent Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel with its four colossal statues of a pharaoh carved into the face of the cliff. Half a century later I visited Abu Simbel again after the entire temple, including the great statues, had been cut free and lifted hydraulically to the top of the cliffs, to protect it from the rising waters of the Nile behind the Aswan Dam. Reinstalled in this new setting in front of an artificial cliff, it looked as imposing as when I had first seen it in 1929. 

I continued to pursue my interest in beetle collecting and even managed to find a sacred scarab, a beetle that lays its eggs in a ball of dung and then buries it in the sand. The ancient Egyptians worshiped the sacred scarab, believing it to be an intermediary between the living and the underworld of the dead. Tod playfully teased me about my hobby, so I bought an inexpensive wedding ring and gave it to her in the presence of my parents and others, claiming that I represented Nelson in asking for her hand in marriage. Everyone except Tod thought this was quite amusing, since we all knew she had high hopes for just such an event. Indeed, soon after we returned from the trip, Nelson did propose, and they were married the following year. 

We also visited the Cairo Museum of Antiquities and found it in appalling condition with mud-encrusted sarcophagi and beautiful ornaments resting on bare shelves, poor lighting, and inadequate identification. In 1925, at Dr. Breasted’s urging, Father had offered $10 million to rebuild the museum in order to provide a better setting for the world’s greatest collection of antiquities. Inexplicably, the Egyptian government refused, and Father always suspected it was the result of pressure from the British government, which was not anxious to see an intrusion of American influence even in cultural affairs. 

We drove on to Palestine through the Nile delta and along the coast. We toured the holy places in Jerusalem and traveled down to Jericho, where I took a swim in the salty Dead Sea, a thousand feet below sea level. We then proceeded north to Beirut through the Jordan Valley and along the Sea of Galilee. The associations of this area with the Bible and the ministry of Jesus Christ made this a deeply meaningful part of the trip for Father and, I confess, for me as well. 

Although Father’s proposal to build a new museum in Cairo foundered on the rocks of international politics, he was much more successful with a similar idea in Jerusalem. Wandering the Via Dolorosa, visiting Bethlehem, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall on the site of the Second Temple convinced Father that something needed to be done to preserve the antiquities of the Holy Land after centuries of neglect by the Ottoman Turks. Again, with Dr. Breasted’s encouragement, Father offered to build a museum of archaeology to house these antiquities and provide the facilities for scholars to study them. This time the British government, which controlled the Palestinian Mandatory State, agreed with the proposal wholeheartedly. The Palestine Archaeological Museum, often referred to today as the Rockefeller Museum, still exists in east Jerusalem and houses, among many other marvelous things, the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

Looking back I realize the debt I owe to my parents for my education. While the Lincoln School did a creditable job in providing me with a formal education, my parents did more. They brought to our home some of the most interesting people of the time. On our many trips and excursions they opened our eyes to nature, to people, and to history in a way that expanded our interests and stimulated our curiosity. They made us feel the excitement of the opportunities open to us and recognize the role the family was playing in so many areas. These experiences gave us an education that transcended formal learning. 63S

*Dr. Goodwin and I hit it off immediately. Father wanted his involvement with the project to remain secret for as long as possible, and so Dr. Goodwin and he used the code name “David’s Father” in their correspondence to throw the press off the scent. 

*Mother and Father decorated a rest house near the Eyrie Garden in Seal Harbor with many of these works of art. The house and its contents remain to this day just as my parents arranged them. This is the only place left that shows Mother’s interest in furnishings coupled with Father’s passion for Southwest Indian artifacts

5

ROCKEFELLER CENTER 

During my childhood and teenage years Father was involved in a number of major projects in and around New York City. He seemed to have a hand in everything, from the creation of public parks and the preservation of the natural landscape and the building of museums and churches to the provision of adequate and affordable housing for the City’s burgeoning population. Many of Father’s initiatives—the Palisades Interstate Park, the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park, and Riverside Church —have become part of the City’s incredible physical landscape. Ironically, however, Father will be most remembered for a project he never intended to undertake and that inadvertently led him to become a major real estate developer. 

A NEW OPERA HOUSE 

Father’s most important project was, of course, Rockefeller Center. It was his most visible endeavor and has had a lasting impact on urban design in New York and around the world. The project began quite modestly, but it turned out to be an enormous venture that exposed him to serious financial risks without bringing him any financial return. Yet, paradoxically, Rockefeller Center is, with the possible exception of Standard Oil, the business venture with which my family is most closely linked. I will return to the story of Rockefeller Center again, but this is the place to introduce it—at the beginning. 

Mother commissioned Stefan Hirsch, a promising young artist, to paint the view from my fifth-floor bedroom window at 10 West 54th Street in 1930. Hirsch’s cityscape, Midtown Range, is dominated by the glowing white towers of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings rising majestically in the distance and punctuated by the graceful spires of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in the middle ground. The foreground, the neighborhood just to our south, much of it owned by Columbia University, is flat, featureless, and undistinguished.

The reality was even grittier. As commercial activity surged northward through Manhattan during the first decades of the twentieth century, older residential areas were overwhelmed and transformed. Columbia’s property, bounded by Fifth and Sixth Avenues between 48th and 51st Streets, was composed mostly of four-story residential brownstones, many of which were being converted to small retail businesses or subdivided into small apartments. With the advent of Prohibition in the mid-1920s, nightclubs and speakeasies selling bootleg liquor also appeared, and there were rumors that a number of brothels had opened as well. The neighborhood, once the exclusive preserve of the Vanderbilts and Astors, had become seedy and down-at-the-heels. Father owned substantial property just to the north and was concerned about the deterioration of property values. 

By the mid-1920s the neighborhood had become a prime candidate for redevelopment. Columbia University received little income from the properties, and with most of the leases expiring between 1928 and 1931, the trustees decided to look for a builder who could develop the entire parcel. An attractive potential tenant, the Metropolitan Opera Company, also appeared on the scene. 

At the time, the Metropolitan Opera House was located in the heart of the Garment District, at 39th Street and Broadway, a part of town not much different then from what it is today. Built in the early 1880s, the house also had become inadequate for the needs of the company— especially its crowded backstage areas and poor sight lines. For some time the Met directors had been searching for a site on which to build a new opera house. Thus, in early 1926, when Otto Kahn, the Met’s chairman, learned that Columbia wanted to improve its midtown property, he decided to explore its potential for the opera. 

At that point, in early 1928, Father came into the picture. He was impressed by Columbia University’s aspirations and the opera’s plans to build a new opera house as the centerpiece of a carefully planned commercial and residential development on the Columbia property. This would be just the thing, he felt, to upgrade the area and safeguard his own properties. 

After months of consultation with real estate experts, architects, and businessmen, followed by detailed negotiations with the university and the opera, Father signed a Definitive Agreement and Lease with Columbia on October 1, 1928, agreeing to rent the twelve acres of Columbia’s land for an initial period of twenty-four years at an average rent of $3.6 million a year. The agreement with Columbia gave Father the option to purchase the central block for $2.5 million, but only if the construction of an opera house was firmly committed. If the opera house plans failed to materialize, the land would revert to Columbia, which would then be free to incorporate this block in the broader lease. Although Father assigned the lease to a holding company, the Metropolitan Square Corporation, he remained “liable as a principal and not as a surety on all of the covenants and promises contained in the Agreement.” This was a fateful clause in that it made Father personally responsible for all financial obligations related to the development, whether or not it reached fruition. 

All participants agreed that the project would be called Metropolitan Square because of the opera’s role as the “anchor tenant.” The first site plan placed the opera house on the western portion of the central block between 49th and 50th Streets—where 30 Rockefeller Plaza now stands. Father proposed, and the leaders of the Met and Columbia agreed, that the eastern portion of this block, fronting on Fifth Avenue, would be developed as a small park with an open plaza to give the opera house the proper setting, after which the park would be donated to the City. This first plan envisioned apartment buildings, department stores, and hotels on the two blocks adjacent to the opera house, which would be subleased to developers who would be responsible for financing and constructing their own buildings. 

When Father signed the lease in 1928, everyone believed the plan would go forward as originally envisioned: The opera would sell its old house, and Father, having bought the land from Columbia, would transfer the title to the Met, which would reimburse him for the cost of the land and his expenses. The Met would then finance the construction of its new facility, and Father would be off the hook financially for the A central block of the site. 

In short, Father saw his role in the project as that of a facilitator. He considered it neither a real estate investment nor a charitable gift. He had no thought of making money from the deal, but he didn’t expect to lose anything, either. He knew there would be carrying costs between the time the lease went into effect in 1928 and when the area was fully developed, but depending on the subleases negotiated, he expected to come out even. Things did not work out that way. 

GOING IT ALONE 

A year after Father signed the lease with Columbia, the stock market crash changed the situation totally. The first domino to fall was the Metropolitan Opera. The Met board found it impossible to sell its old house and went to Father with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: Unless he donated the land to them outright and helped finance the construction of the new opera house as well, they would withdraw from the project. Father was outraged and promptly rejected their proposal. 

Losing the opera was bad enough, but with the deepening economic depression, the individuals and businesses that had earlier expressed interest in building on the other blocks also began to back out, even Standard Oil of New Jersey. For Father it was the worst of all worst-case scenarios. Columbia refused to renegotiate the lease or even to modify it significantly. Father was stuck with leasing the property on the original terms—with no tenant. For the university, of course, the deal was a bonanza that would turn out to be its principle source of income for the next fifty years. Columbia had Father over a barrel and was very content to keep him there. 

The situation Father faced in the first months of 1930 must have been frightening. If he did nothing to improve the property, he stood to lose about $5 million a year (counting rent, real estate taxes, and other expenses), which over the twenty-four years of the lease would amount to approximately $120 million. Developing the land without the firm promise of tenants, however, posed even greater risks. The construction cost for a project of this kind was enormous, and given the state of the economy, there was no assurance that tenants could be found once the buildings were completed. 

In later years Father would be praised for his courage in going forward with the project. He once said to a friend: “Often a man gets in a position where he wants to run, but there is no place to run to. So he goes ahead with the only course open to him, and people call that courage.” That may be so, but it still took a lot of courage for Father to face the risks and uncertainties that confronted him. All of a sudden he found himself thrust back into the world of business where he felt no special interest or aptitude, and once again was faced with the prospect that he might not be able to live up to the role he had been assigned, that he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his obligations. But as Father had demonstrated at Ludlow when he found himself with his back against a wall, he accepted the challenge and moved forward unflinchingly to do what had to be done. 

Father consulted with the several distinguished architects and builders who had worked with him in developing the original project, and an alternative proposal was quickly devised. The new  plan—the second iteration of what would now be called Rockefeller Center—in contrast to the original envisioned an entirely commercial development.* 

To finance the project Father negotiated a $65 million line of credit from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the largest such arrangement any insurance company had made up to that time. Father was furious at the 4.5 percent interest rate and told everyone that Fred Ecker, the chairman of Met Life, had forced him to pay an exorbitant premium. But it was the best deal he could get, and the high rate was in itself an indication of the riskiness of the project. Met Life also insisted that Father give his personal guarantee on the loan, making him the ultimate guarantor of both the lease and the loan. 

The Met Life loan took care of cash flow problems, but it did not relieve Father of his own financial obligations to the project. For more than five years in the 1930s during the main period of construction, Father spent between $10 and $13 million a year on the Center, which he financed from his personal income and through the sale of oil stock, sometimes at very depressed prices. Father’s expenditures on construction, taxes, lease payments, and other aspects of the project from 1929 to 1939 totaled $125 million, or the equivalent today of more than $1.5 billion. It might surprise people to learn that although he lived until 1960, Father received no income from this massive investment and recouped less than half of the capital he had invested. 

But Father’s cost in building Rockefeller Center cannot be measured only in dollars. As with everything he did, he applied himself single mindedly to the task, agonizing over minor details and meticulously supervising the work of the architects and builders. Constant worry took its toll. He was plagued by migraines and would often come home from the office in such a state of nervous exhaustion that he would have to lie down on his couch, not to be disturbed for an hour or more in the evening before dinner. He often used the service of a Swedish masseur who seemed to bring some relief. He suffered recurrent bouts of bronchitis and other ailments, which the stress he endured probably exacerbated. I recall that he was physically tired during much of this time, and he and Mother spent several weeks each winter either in Taormina, Sicily, or Tucson, Arizona, trying to get some rest and relaxation from the ordeal. 

Nevertheless, he persevered and in the process provided thousands of jobs for New Yorkers during the worst part of the Depression. Union leaders were vocal in their appreciation of Father, and years later my friends in the building trades—men such as Harry Van Arsdale and Peter Brennan—still spoke with deep gratitude of Father’s courage and generosity. 

RESCUING THE PROJECT 

For the project to be viable economically, Father needed tenants. The turning point, undoubtedly the salvation of the project, came in the summer of 1930 when David Sarnoff, chairman of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), and Owen D. Young, chairman of General Electric, which held a controlling interest in RCA and also owned Radio-Keith Orpheum (RKO), a major producer of motion pictures and a chain of movie theaters across the country, agreed to lease one million square feet of office and studio space in the project’s major building at $2.75 a square foot and to pay an annual rent of $1.5 million for four theaters that would be built on the property. With this major tenant in place, architectural planning could move ahead for most of the site. Just as important, by linking a real estate project with radio and motion pictures, two of that era’s most dramatic new technologies and growth industries, an excitement and cachet was created that would not have been possible with the Metropolitan Opera. When the deal was announced, David Sarnoff spoke enthusiastically of a “Radio City” rising on the site, a name that caught on almost immediately.* 

Securing NBC as the principal tenant of the main building was critical, but the other sites remained open. Congress agreed to special legislation that provided duty-free status for goods imported by firms taking space in the Center, and a number of foreign firms took long-term leases in some of the smaller buildings. This allowed construction to proceed on the British Empire Building and La Maison Française, the two low-rise buildings on Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. The press immediately christened the garden in between them the Channel Gardens, à la the English Channel. 

The Center had an enormous amount of space to fill, and this produced an intense competition for tenants with other landlords in the midtown area and even further afield. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, both completed in the early 1930s, were especially strong competitors because of their proximity, superb architecture, and modern conveniences. The Empire State Building even had mooring posts for blimps! 

As Rockefeller Center neared completion, Father persuaded Standard Oil of New Jersey, in which he was still the largest individual shareholder, to lease all of the final building that would be built on the original site. Other companies and institutions with which Father had a close identification also took leases. For example, Chase National Bank agreed to open a branch, on condition that it would have exclusive banking rights throughout the Center for a number of years. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Spelman Fund, and Industrial Relations Counselors—Father was chairman of each—also rented small amounts of space in the Center. 

Despite its difficult beginnings, Rockefeller Center became a universally acclaimed real estate property. The clean, bold thrust of its modernist lines and the Art Deco motif, plus its underground shopping malls, open W plazas, and rooftop gardens, gave it a simple beauty, elegance, and imaginative quality that silenced even its harshest critics. 

More than an architectural success, Rockefeller Center became a city planning paradigm known for maintaining the highest standards of security and cleanliness while promoting its creative design and aesthetic appeal. In many ways it is better known and more respected as a model of urban design today than it was in the decade after it was built. 

HELD HOSTAGE BY A LEASE 

While Rockefeller Center was a success aesthetically and architecturally, its financial viability remained uncertain for many years. The biggest problem, at least once the Depression eased and a measure of normality returned to the nation’s economic life, was the Columbia lease. Stated simply, while Father, and later my brothers and I, owned the buildings, the university owned the land. The lease provided Columbia with an unusual amount of control over a broad range of routine business activities—for example, the types of businesses that could locate in the Center and the amount of rent that could be charged. Most important, the lease prohibited Father from selling any or all of the buildings, offering outside investors a participation in the ownership, or assigning the lease itself to any other individual or corporation without Columbia’s prior agreement. Father tried to get the lease restrictions modified, but the university routinely refused his requests. Essentially, the lease held Father hostage and the next generation of the family as well. The original lease ran for twenty-four years, until 1952, with three option periods of twenty-one years each, potentially a full term of slightly less than one hundred years. However, the specific terms of the lease as well as its dollar amount were renegotiable each time it was up for renewal. 

The greatest financial burden to the family was the obligation to pay the rent regardless of tenant income. The greatest financial threat to the family was Father’s personal guarantee of the lease, an obligation that passed on to my brothers and me when we bought the equity shares of the Center after World War II. In addition there were several onerous covenants. One required Father to maintain an escrow fund equal to three years of lease payments that had to be invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds, which carried a very low interest rate. Another restricted the payment of dividends until all the original debt on the Center had been paid off, an event that did not occur until 1970. 

What all this meant was that during Rockefeller Center’s first five decades the family received virtually no return on the investment despite the fact that my father had poured his heart and soul—and a good portion of his fortune—into the project. 

A CONTROVERSIAL MURAL 

An interesting subplot to Rockefeller Center’s early history concerns the mural commissioned for the entrance lobby of the RCA Building. As part of the plan to make the Center aesthetically pleasing, a number of artists received commissions to decorate the buildings and the open spaces. Paul Manship’s golden Prometheus, which still gazes silently over the sunken plaza, was one of these works and has become a hallmark of the Center. Father was less fortunate with another selection. 

In the late 1920s my mother had come to admire the work of Diego Rivera, an extremely talented Mexican painter and muralist who had studied in Paris before and during World War I and became part of Matisse’s artistic circle. Like many artists of his generation, Rivera was left-wing in his political orientation and was even a member of the Mexican Communist Party for a time. 

Alfred Barr, the young director of the Museum of Modern Art, brought Rivera to Mother’s attention. Barr and Rivera had lived for a short time in the same rooming house in Moscow in 1928, and Barr was impressed by the Mexican’s talent and personality. When Barr proposed that MoMA give Rivera a one-man show in 1931, both Mother and Nelson were enthusiastic. Mother commissioned a painting from him and also bought a number of the watercolors he had done in Moscow in 1927. With this money Rivera was able to visit New York for the first time. 

Mother and Nelson came to know Rivera well, and he was a frequent visitor in my parents’ home, where I met him on several occasions. He was a very imposing and charismatic figure, quite tall and weighing three hundred pounds. He spoke very little English but perfect French in addition to Spanish. On one or two occasions he brought his wife, Frida Kahlo, with him. Frida was a fascinating and exotic young woman whose artistic talents were comparable to her husband’s. Today her works command prices in the New York auction market that are even higher than those paid for Diego’s. 

The MoMA show in December 1931 firmly established Rivera’s reputation in the United States. And when the time came to commission a mural for the front lobby of the RCA Building, which was just being completed, Mother and Nelson argued strongly in favor of giving it to Rivera. He submitted a sketch for consideration, and after much discussion among the architects and managing agents about Rivera’s reliability, it was approved. On the basis of this sketch a contract was drawn and signed by all parties, and Rivera agreed to a payment of $21,500 for a project that he estimated would take about three months to complete. 

Rivera arrived in New York in early 1933 to start work on the fresco after a very difficult experience at the Detroit Institute of Art, where his just-completed murals were attacked as anti-Christian and anti-American by many, including Father Charles Coughlin, the famous “radio priest.” 

It would appear that Rivera decided to use the Rockefeller Center mural to make a strong political statement. Mankind at the Crossroads, as Rivera titled the work, was filled with contrasting images drawn from the Marxist canon: class conflict, oppression, and war as the theme on the “capitalist” side of the fresco; peace, cooperation, and human solidarity on the “communist” side. The solution to these conflicts, at least in Rivera’s view, would come from the application of science and technology for the benefit of all. He filled the fresco with microscopes, telescopes, movie screens, and gigantic gears and levers to underline his point. When the mural was almost finished, he added a prominent and quite unmistakable portrait of Lenin joining hands with workers from around the world. This idyllic and somewhat fanciful grouping was balanced by a deftly done scene on the “capitalist” side of well-dressed men and women dancing, playing cards, and drinking martinis, all positioned under a microscope examining a slide filled with viruses of “social” diseases. The backdrop for this was a scene of policemen beating workers while Catholic priests and Protestant ministers looked on  approvingly. 

It was quite brilliantly executed but not appropriate for the lobby of the RCA Building. Nelson tried to persuade Rivera to eliminate, at the very least, the portrait of Lenin. But the artist refused to change anything, saying that rather than mutilate his great work he would have the whole mural destroyed! Nelson pointed out that he had not been commissioned to paint communist propaganda and that, based on the original, much less provocative sketch, there was no reason to accept the work as finally executed. In the end, when no compromise could be reached, Rivera was paid in full and dismissed. An attempt was made to remove and preserve the fresco, but it proved impossible, and this work of art had to be destroyed. 

In the late 1930s, Rivera reproduced the mural, with more than a few embellishments, including a portrait of Father drinking a martini with a group of “painted ladies.” This mural is prominently located on the central staircase of the Palacio de Belles Artes in Mexico City. In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Rivera’s mural, there were expressions of outrage from the arts community in New York, Mexico, and elsewhere. They accused the family of committing a sacrilege against art and of violating Rivera’s freedom of expression. In the view of artists and liberal thinkers more generally, the fact that the artist was guilty of deceit, meanness, and publicly insulting a family that had befriended him and helped promote his career seemed not to matter.* 

BICYCLING THROUGH BRITAIN 

While I was aware of Father’s worries about Rockefeller Center, as a teenager I had other interests and concerns. I graduated from the Lincoln School in June 1932, and as a graduation present I set off on a bicycle trip in the British Isles with a school friend, Winston Garth, and a French theological student and tutor, Oswald Gockler. The trip was inspired by tales Father had recounted to me of a similar trip he had taken in England when he was about the same age. 

We sailed tourist class on a Cunard liner to Southampton and then went by train to London. We had no sooner arrived at our hotel than the telephone rang and a very English voice announced that she was the Marchioness of Crewe, that she and her husband, the Marquis, had just returned from New York where they had taken part with my parents in the dedication of the British Empire Building in Rockefeller Center. My parents had told them of our proposed bicycle trip, and she was calling to say that on that very evening the Duke of York—who later became King George VI—was giving a dinner dance at Saint James’s Palace and that I was invited to attend with her. The event was in honor of his brother, the Prince of Wales—who would, of course, succeed to the throne within a few years as King Edward VIII and then abdicate—and other members of the Royal Family. Dinner would be at 8:30, white tie and tails. I should pick her up at 8:00. 

I was stunned and nervously replied that I had no evening clothes with me and could not possibly attend, to which the Marchioness replied with authority that this was a royal invitation I could not refuse. I mumbled something to the effect that I would see what I could do and hung up, looking petrified at my friend Win who had not been invited. 

Fortunately, my aunt Lucy was in town, so I called her in desperation. She said it was a great opportunity and that I should go. I should call the concierge about renting evening clothes and get the hotel to order a Daimler with a liveried chauffeur in which to fetch Lady Crewe. My day was ruined, but I followed instructions and arrived on time to pick up the Marchioness, only to find when I appeared at Crewe House, her grand mansion in Mayfair, that I was to ride with her in her Rolls-Royce. My Daimler could follow. 

Saint James’s Palace is a sixteenth-century stone structure at the end of St. James’s Street, facing out on Green Park and Pall Mall. For centuries it has served as the residence of senior members of the Royal Family. On our arrival we were greeted by Coldstream Guards standing rigidly erect with their red jackets and high beaver shakos, an imposing beginning for the evening. 

We entered the palace and proceeded down long corridors paneled in dark wood. Kings and queens from the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties peered down at us from the walls as we walked slowly toward the great drawing room to be presented together. 

I was received with great courtesy by the Duke and Duchess of York, who made a real effort to make me feel comfortable. But small talk with a seventeen-year-old American boy did not come easily for them, and the conversation was difficult for me. Lady Crewe introduced me to the other “royals” present that night and to a bewildering variety of dukes, earls, and countesses. The only other American present was Lady Nancy Astor, the wife of Lord Waldorf Astor and herself a viscountess. Lady Astor, the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons, was a formidable intellectual who presided over the somewhat notorious Cliveden Set, which would later be accused of pro-German sympathies. She, too, did her best to put me at ease, but after a few embarrassing pauses, Lady Crewe whisked me off to meet her brother, Lord Rosebery, whose father had been prime minister in the 1890s. 

Before I left—alone in my rented Daimler—Lord Rosebery invited my two friends and me to spend a night with him in his castle in the north of England. Our visit gave me my first exposure to the formalities of an English country estate with its hierarchy of servants headed by an all powerful Jeeves-like butler who unpacked our saddlebags filled with dirty clothes as if we were British royalty. 

The bicycle trip was a great adventure and quite unlike my brief and unexpected introduction to the Royal Family. We covered a considerable part of Britain, from Cornwall in the southwest to the Highlands of northern Scotland, stopping mostly in small inns along the way. We interspersed a few days of bicycle riding with train rides to the next area we wanted to visit. In those days this was easy to do since trains were run very informally. One bought a ticket for a seat and another for the bicycle. When the train pulled into the station, one simply put the bicycle in the baggage car and found a seat in a passenger car. There was no red tape, and no one ever thought of the possibility of the bicycle’s being stolen. 

We had no letters of introduction and relied on our guidebooks for modestly priced places to stay. In Scotland, however, we visited our Lincoln School classmate Donald Barrow, whose father managed Skibo Castle, Andrew Carnegie’s estate near the northern tip of Scotland. Our hostess was Mrs. Carnegie, a friend of my parents and the widow of the great industrialist and philanthropist who had been a friend of my grandfather’s. 

Altogether we bicycled some six hundred miles and covered a good deal more ground by train. It was a wonderful learning experience—far away from Rockefeller Center and Father’s troubles—and left me with a lasting affection for the United Kingdom and fit and ready for my freshman year at Harvard. 

*Among the architects was the young Wallace K. Harrison, and the principal builder, the man who really built Rockefeller Center, was John R. Todd, grandfather of Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey. 

*In a project filled with ironies, this was a rather intriguing one. Father disapproved of mass popular entertainment. A few years earlier there had been a bit of a family crisis over whether or not to buy a radio. Father was adamantly opposed but eventually agreed to buy one on the conditions that the instrument would be played quietly and would not be placed in the main sitting room of the 54th Street house. 

*Perhaps Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the last word on this controversy. He noted at a dinner in Washington soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union that it was a shame the mural had been destroyed because the almost complete eradication of monuments to Communist leaders throughout the Soviet Union and the old Eastern Bloc might have left it the only remaining image of Lenin anywhere in the world!

6 

HARVARD 

Mother strongly influenced my choice of colleges. Father had deliberately avoided stating a preference to any of his sons, believing the choice should be ours alone and refusing to influence our decisions in any way. The result was that, somewhat to his disappointment, none of us attended his alma mater, Brown. Mother, on the other hand, wanted one of us to go to Harvard. Her favorite brother, Winthrop Aldrich, was a Harvard man, and she hoped one of us would follow in his footsteps. My brothers had attended other colleges, so I was her last hope, and although she put no overt pressure on me, her quiet persuasion influenced me greatly. 

Although I entered college at seventeen, this was not due to academic brilliance. I entered first grade at Lincoln when I was five—a year earlier than most—because all my brothers were in school and I didn’t like being left alone at home. Lincoln’s strong focus on individual development allowed me to keep up with my class, and I graduated at the age of sixteen. What Lincoln had not taught me was disciplined work habits, and it had done a poor job of teaching me reading, spelling, and grammar, although my dyslexia certainly played a role in that also. This made my first year at Harvard a bit of a grind, but I did manage to attain a B average by diligently applying myself to my studies. Academically, the year was not a serious problem for me. 

SOCIALLY AWKWARD 

It was socially that I felt like a misfit. I was not only a year younger than most of my classmates, but I had grown up in a protected environment and was unsophisticated and ill at ease with my contemporaries. My brothers had largely ignored me, so most of my social interaction had been with adults. In fact, I was far more comfortable talking with public figures or famous artists than I was with people of my own age. 

I entered Harvard with eleven hundred other men, of whom only two had been classmates at Lincoln, and neither was a close friend. I lived in a single room on the fourth floor of Thayer Hall, the oldest freshman dormitory in Harvard Yard, and took my meals in the Union, located across Plimpton Street from the Widener Library. Wandering around the yard, in classes, and at meals in the Union, I came into contact with many boys from elite prep schools, such as Groton, Saint Mark’s, and Saint Paul’s. They all seemed to be my antithesis: good-looking, athletic, self-confident, and smartly dressed in Harris tweed jackets and gray flannel trousers. I admired them from afar. They represented the epitome of college fashion and sophistication, but I had little to say to them, and they showed no great interest in talking with me, either. Instead my closest relations were with other residents of Thayer Hall, including Walter Taylor, my class’s sole African American. Walter also seemed out of his element and a bit lost, so we had much in common. Sadly, for reasons I never learned, Walter did not return to Harvard after that first year.

I realize now that had I gone to boarding school, as so many sons of wealthy parents did, I would have been part of the very group I secretly envied but with which I felt so ill at ease, and my life at Harvard would have been more immediately pleasurable and certainly very different from what it was. Upon reflection almost seventy years later, however, I do not believe the rest of my life would have been as interesting or constructive as it has been. Having to deal with my early insecurities at Harvard and to struggle for academic achievement and social acceptance made me a more open-minded and tolerant person.

THE ALDRICH FAMILY 

While my freshman year had lonely moments, two circumstances laid the groundwork for my becoming more fully and happily engaged in college life. 

The first was that several of Mother’s family lived in the Boston area. Mother’s youngest sister, Elsie Aldrich Campbell, lived with her family in Brookline, only a few miles from Cambridge. She invited me to meals and encouraged me to bring my college friends. She always made us feel welcome. A good many years later Benji Franklin, one of my roommates and a frequent visitor to the Campbells’, married Aunt Elsie’s daughter, Helena. 

I also made numerous trips to Providence to visit Aunt Lucy Aldrich at her home, 110 Benevolent Street, where she, Mother, and their siblings were born and raised. Outspoken in her opinions and mercurial in her feelings, Aunt Lucy was full of life and great fun to be with. 

BENJY AND DICK 

The key moment in my freshman year was meeting George S. Franklin, Jr. (for obvious reasons known as Benjy) and Richard Watson Gilder. Benjy was the son of a prominent lawyer in New York City and two years older than I. He had a brilliant mind and was an excellent student. He was serious-minded and a strong competitor in anything he did—a good tennis player and excellent racing sailor. He won the summer championship in the Atlantic Class of sailboats at the Cold Spring Harbor Yacht Club on Long Island for nine years in a row. 

Dick Gilder was more lighthearted but no less brilliant. He was the grandson and namesake of the founder of The Century Magazine as well as a grandson of the great artist and founder of Tiffany & Company, Lewis Comfort Tiffany. Dick was a fine athlete and played on Harvard’s varsity squash team. He was also quite handsome, and girls found him almost irresistible. Dick loved to argue and to take strong positions, usually contrary to the conventional wisdom, on political or economic subjects. 

As prep school graduates, Benjy and Dick had many friends at Harvard. They included me in their circle, thereby dispelling my sense of isolation. We lived together in Eliot House for our three final years at Harvard in close proximity to several other friends. In fact, by our senior year our suite of rooms—consisting of four bedrooms and two living rooms—was called the “goldfish bowl.” I am not sure exactly what people meant by this, but it may have been because all of us were from prominent families and had a certain level of recognition around campus. 

Oliver Straus of the R. H. Macy family was also a suitemate until he left college his junior year. Walter Rosen, Jr., took his place. Walter was the son of the head of a prominent New York private bank, Ladenberg, Thalmann. His mother played the theremin, a black box containing an electrically charged field. It was played by passing one’s hand through it in mystifying, languorous motions; this changed the electrical field and produced ethereal sounds somewhat like the music in science-fiction movies. We all thought this very amusing, although for a time she had a serious coterie of musical admirers.

In senior year we connected a third suite occupied by two other friends: Ernst Teves, the son of a German industrialist, and Paul Geier, whose family had founded the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company. 

I went out for soccer as a freshman but disliked it immediately since I had no experience or talent for competitive sports. I switched to squash racquets in the winter and golf in the fall and spring. I had a short stint as assistant business manager for the Harvard Daily Crimson, but otherwise I remained unconnected with most organized school activities. My social life revolved around debutante parties in Boston and visiting the homes of my relations and classmates who lived in the area. Junior year I was asked to join the Signet Society, a lunch club that I greatly enjoyed because many interesting faculty members lunched with undergraduates on a regular basis; this included Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter, who soon after was appointed to the Supreme Court. 

CHALLENGING COURSEWORK 

My father expected me, as he did all his sons, to take courses that were challenging and meaningful and that would be helpful later in life. Father had an excellent academic record at Brown and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and although he never said so, I am sure he hoped each of his sons would do at least as well as he had done. As it turned out, Nelson did the best of all, despite a dyslexic condition far S worse than mine, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth. 

All freshmen were required to take at least two yearlong introductory courses. The most memorable of these courses was History 1, Modern European History, taught by the flamboyant Master of Eliot House, Professor Roger Merriman. It was an enormously popular and interesting course that covered the political and economic development of Europe from the Middle Ages to the outbreak of World War I. Merriman was a forceful lecturer who made history come alive. 

My long-term interest in beetles and other insect life enabled me to take a graduate-level course in entomology during the second semester of my freshman year. Professor William Marton Wheeler, the great authority on the social life of ants, taught the course, and I got an A-, my only A during four years of college! 

My interest in entomology led to another outside activity my first year at Harvard. Through the Philips Brooks House, an organization sponsored by Harvard to encourage volunteer student activities, I taught a class once a week in nature studies to a group of young teenagers at Lincoln House, a settlement house in south Boston. Every spring I took members of the class out to the country to hunt for insects and learn about trees and wildflowers. One of the boys, Fred Solana, the son of a Spanish stonemason, showed much more interest and aptitude than the others. As a result I asked him to help with my beetle collection, which I had brought to Harvard. For the next three years I employed Fred to catalogue and care for the specimens. I also helped modestly with his expenses at Boston College. After the war Fred joined the Chase National Bank where he had a fine career, but he never lost his interest in beetles. For twenty-five years he came to Hudson Pines every Saturday to work on the collection. My children loved to sit with him in the basement while he worked and became very attached to him. 

A SUMMER IN HITLER’S GERMANY 

Satisfying Harvard’s language requirement caused me some real difficulties. I had not studied classical languages at Lincoln—Dewey’s philosophy viewed Greek and Latin as irrelevant to the modern world— and so I was required under Harvard’s rules for graduation to demonstrate proficiency in two modern languages. My French was good enough so that I was able to handle an advanced course in French literature my sophomore year where the lectures were given in French by a well-known scholar, Professor André Maurice. 

German was a different matter. I found it difficult to keep up with the introductory course and dropped it at the end of the first term. My alternative was to pass a reading examination, and to prepare for it I decided to spend the summer of 1933 in Munich studying German. 

I lived in a pension run by Hans Defregger and his wife, and took German lessons every day with Frau Berman, a remarkably talented teacher. Her intensive “immersion” program worked well, and while I could not have translated Goethe by the end of the summer, I did pass the reading exam when I returned to Harvard that fall! 

The Defreggers were well known in the Bavarian art world. My host’s father, Franz von Defregger, was a respected nineteenth-century Romantic artist whose paintings were well represented in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. Frau Defregger took a great interest in her guests and took us on weekend trips by car to nearby parts of Bavaria and sometimes even farther afield. She was well versed in German art and history, and we visited many historic sites, including the wildly exuberant rococo churches in southern Bavaria, such as the Wallfahrtskirche auf dem Wies. During the course of our tours she introduced me to the magnificent paintings of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach and the exceptional wood carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider. Frau Defregger explained the architectural mysteries of the Nymphenburg Palace and the development of beautiful medieval towns such as Rothenburg and Nuremberg. I came to appreciate the relaxed fun-loving ways of the Bavarians and acquired a feel for German history and the incredible culture that had produced those marvelous works of art. In the evening we would often visit Munich’s renowned Hofbrauhaus, an immense beer hall, where we would drink giant steins of beer and sing along with the rest of the huge crowd. 

At the same time I saw the new Germany that Hitler was bringing into being, a glimpse that left me uneasy and uncomfortable. The Defreggers introduced me to one of Hitler’s close friends, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, who handled press relations during the Führer’s rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Putzi, a tall, bushy-haired man with an easygoing  artistic temperament, was part American and had graduated from Harvard. The deferential way in which he was treated suggested the apprehensions that people felt even then about anyone with a close connection to the iron-willed new leader of Germany. Later he broke with Hitler and fled to the United States. 

Already, only a few months after Hitler had taken power, people were speaking in hushed terms about the Gestapo, and there were reports of “concentration camps” where political opponents of the new regime had been sent. The first laws purging the German civil service of Jews and those of Jewish descent had already been implemented. I found it personally offensive that the worst kinds of anti-Semitic language were openly tolerated, not least because I was working closely with Frau Berman who was Jewish. I was indignant as well that quite a few people seemed to accept without serious question the Nazi claims that Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s economic problems and that they deserved to be punished. 

THREE MEMORABLE PROFESSORS 

That fall in Cambridge I had to select a more specialized area of study, and I chose English history and literature. I also opted to pursue a “degree with honors,” which entitled me to have a tutor, in effect a faculty advisor, whose role was to help with course selection and to recommend outside reading that would broaden my base of knowledge in a field of concentration. It was customary for an honors student to meet with his tutor two or three times a month to discuss academic progress and even issues of a more personal nature. 

My first tutor was F. O. Matthiessen, a highly intellectual professor of English literature. Unfortunately, he and I had little in common. I felt as uncomfortable with him as he did with me. I simply was not ready to take advantage of his subtle and sophisticated mind; therefore, for my last two years I switched to Professor John Potter, a historian and later Master of Eliot House, who was more accessible.

I was also fortunate to study under three men who opened my mind to creative thought and powerful new ideas. The titles of their courses now sound narrow and pedantic, but the way in which they taught them opened up a new world that I had previously only dimly perceived.

Professor Charles McIlwain taught British constitutional history from the time of the Magna Carta to the sixteenth century. A distinguished lawyer, McIlwain traced the political evolution of England from its feudal origins to the emergence of a centralized state in which the rule of law was an increasingly important element. McIlwain used legal and historical documents, beginning with the great charter itself, to illustrate his points, but he breathed life into those dusty documents and made us see them in their historical and human context. I began to understand the reasons that democracy and the rule of law are so important in any society, as well as why it has been so difficult to achieve them. 

The same year I took Professor John Livingston Lowes course on the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The most exciting part of the course was the analysis of Coleridge’s two greatest poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” We used Lowes book, The Road to Xanadu, which painstakingly identified the influences on Coleridge as he wrote those two masterpieces. Lowes had read not only everything Coleridge had ever written but everything he had ever read as well, and he identified all the personal and literary influences that inspired this great Romantic poet when he wrote his epic poems. I also learned that good writing—writing that conveys ideas lucidly and elegantly—is the result of a combination of factors that may begin with inspiration but also includes personal experience, formal learning, exhaustive research, and a great deal of hard work. 

Abbott Payson Usher’s economic history of England from 1750 to 1860 was a revelation of a different kind. Usher was a dull lecturer but a meticulous scholar who uncovered the hidden processes of economic change. He showed how successive inventions and innovations in plowing, fertilizing, and the use of improved seeds had revolutionized agricultural production in England. Over the same period, the introduction of the one-cylinder steam engine, coupled with the many inventions relating to the manufacture of iron, textiles, and other industrial products, had changed the lives of the ordinary man and woman in England. The facts were not new, but Usher explained their interrelationships in a manner that was a model of clarity. He made history come alive and seem real to me. Years later, as I wrestled with the difficult problems of economic development and social change in T Latin America and other parts of the world, I would often recall Professor Usher’s analysis of the complex process by which history unfolds. 

As I discovered a number of times in the course of my education, an inspiring teacher can stimulate thinking in a manner that has little to do with the subject matter in question. I will always be grateful to Professors McIlwain, Lowes, and Usher for teaching me how to reason.

SUMMER INTERLUDES AT HOME AND ABROAD

The summer following my sophomore year, Paul Geier and I took part in an entomological expedition in the Grand Canyon organized by the American Museum of Natural History. The expedition was led by Dr. Frank E. Lutz, curator of entomology at the museum, with whom as a boy I had spent two summers at the Station for the Study of Insects near Tuxedo Park, New York. The purpose of the 1934 expedition was to study the variation of insect species at different altitudes between the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of the nearby San Francisco peaks. It was an ecological study, a term little used at that time, which demonstrated that insect species at the bottom of the canyon were common to Mexico, whereas species at the summit of the peaks a few miles away, but ten thousand feet higher, were indigenous to Alaska. In short, altitude, with corresponding temperature changes, may be as important as latitude in determining the distribution of insect species. That summer I understood more clearly than ever before nature’s underlying order. 

At the end of the summer, to my pleasant surprise, Father joined me for a week. This had not been planned, and I have never fully understood why he decided to endure the two-day train trip to meet me; it was so uncharacteristic of him to do anything impulsively. We spent a week visiting the Hopi villages in the Painted Desert, Monument Valley in northern Arizona, and the great Anasazi ruins in Canyon de Chelly. 

Although I was nineteen years old, it was really the first time that Father and I had been alone for any length of time. We were both relaxed, and he talked openly about himself and his childhood. It was one of the best times we ever had together. 

In the spring of 1935, Dick Gilder and I decided to spend the summer touring Europe by car. We were motivated in part by two art courses we had taken and a desire to see firsthand some of the masterpieces of European art we had studied. In fact, we managed to visit some thirty museums in six countries. At the same time, however, we became absorbed by the ominous political situation in Germany, which left us deeply concerned about the future. 

We sailed tourist class on the S.S. Olympic and took with us in the hold the Model A Ford touring car that Father had given me for use while I was at college. We drove across the Low Countries and stopped in Paris for a few days before driving on to Germany, where we spent two weeks. 

The country had visibly become the Third Reich. As we made our way through Germany, we saw posters in public squares with slogans denouncing the Jews as Germany’s “ruination.” Half the population seemed to be in uniforms of one kind or another. One evening when Dick and I were in a tavern on the outskirts of the Black Forest, a group of soldiers came in, sat at a nearby table, and entered into conversation with us. They were curious about the United States and very talkative; by the end of the evening they had told us their life stories. They could not have been friendlier—until a couple who had been hiking in the Black Forest entered the tavern. A pall fell over the room. We only began to understand what was going on when the soldiers conspicuously turned their backs on the new arrivals and began talking in a loud voice about the Jews and the menace they represented to Germany. When the couple left, a soldier turned and with a raised right arm said, “Heil Hitler”—the obligatory salutation in Germany. The woman very politely said that she didn’t use the official salute but wished them a good night anyway. They then walked out the door. We felt very uncomfortable and left soon thereafter. 

Dick and I would often listen to the radio at night, and I would translate the broadcasts of Hitler’s impassioned diatribes as best I could. Even without being able to understand every word, we sensed Hitler’s powerful hold on the German people, which we also saw in the growing regimentation of daily life. Just hearing the cadence and drama of F Hitler’s oratory left Dick enraged and terrified, and by the end of a speech he would have tears of anger in his eyes. Dick later said that it was those bloodcurdling broadcasts that had convinced him we would eventually have to fight the Nazis. Anybody with that kind of hypnotic power to move and mold people was dangerous, he said. 

MEETING PADEREWSKI AND FREUD 

From the Black Forest we drove into Switzerland where we crossed the Rhine and continued on to Geneva. On the way we stopped in Morges to call on Ignacy Jan Paderewski, one of the world’s great musical figures who had also been prime minister of Poland for a brief period right after World War I. I had met him when he gave a concert at my parents’ home in New York the year before and had been charmed by his personality as well as his playing. He was an impressive man with a shock of long gray hair. He greeted us with great warmth and enthusiasm and took us on a tour of his property. From there we visited the library Father had built for the League of Nations a few years before. 

Soon afterward my sister-in-law Tod joined us for a portion of the trip. Tod and Nelson were living in England that summer while Nelson worked at the London branch of the Chase National Bank. Before leaving New York, Dick and I had invited her to join us for a week but had little hope she would be able to make it. We were pleasantly surprised when she actually agreed to come. She met us in Lucerne, and from there we drove through the Swiss and Austrian Alps. My Model A had no trunk, and there was barely room for Tod and our bags, but we managed well and had a congenial time. This happy adventure thoroughly scandalized Aunt Lucy, who thought it terribly inappropriate for a married woman to travel unchaperoned with two young men. In fact, it was all quite innocent. Tod and I had developed a good relationship on our Egyptian trip six years earlier, and she and Nelson had served on several occasions as chaperons at the house parties I gave at Abeyton Lodge during college vacations. Tod was like an older sister to me, and I think she was very pleased to get off on a spree with two college boys. 

After our tour of the Alps we drove through Austria to Vienna, where we visited Sigmund Freud. The visit was arranged by Dick’s aunt, who had been analyzed by Freud and had stayed on with the family as a companion and coauthor with Anna Freud of many books on child psychology. Freud by that time was quite old and was suffering from cancer of the jaw, but despite his evident discomfort, he was very friendly to us. He seemed less interested in discussing Freudian psychology—about which we knew next to nothing anyway—than in talking about his extraordinary collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, which crowded his study and living areas. He was intrigued that I had been to Egypt and questioned me closely about what I had seen and learned. I found out later that Freud had become almost obsessed with the idea of phylogeny, specifically the historical evolution of the ego, and thought about little else. We also spent some time with Anna Freud discussing the more familiar aspects of psychology. She must have been persuasive because I informed my parents that “certainly the Freudian doctrine has been much twisted by half-baked critics, as what we heard from her was most sane.” 

THE ROCKEFELLER INHERITANCE 

The fall of 1934 proved to be a crucial time for me and for the future of my family. In December 1934, Father decided to set up a series of irrevocable trusts for Mother and each of his six children with an initial value of approximately $60 million. The 1934 Trusts, as they are referred to within the family, allowed Father to pass on at least a portion of the family’s wealth without estate taxes through three generations. Today these trusts hold the majority of the family’s wealth. Without them, much of the Rockefeller fortune would have gone either to the government in taxes or to charity. 

As strange as it may seem, I never took for granted that I would inherit great wealth. Naturally, I knew Father was very wealthy, but I also knew the Depression was taking its toll on his fortune as well as everyone else’s. I well recall receiving a letter from Father during my freshman year in which he stated that the way things were going, I was very likely going to have to “work for a living.” While admittedly this is what most people expect to do, it was more surprising coming from one of the wealthiest men in the country. 

I knew Father was balancing many competing and even contradictory demands from among his extensive philanthropic commitments and financial obligations for Rockefeller Center and the necessity to make provisions for his family. Father understood that we needed a certain amount of economic independence, which he would have to provide. But he believed all of us were too young and too inexperienced to handle large amounts of money without expert supervision and guidance. His father, after all, hadn’t begun passing on any sizable sums to him until he was in his forties, and as I have noted earlier, it may not have been Grandfather’s initial intention to leave him a major part of his fortune at all. My guess is that Father would have preferred to wait some years before he decided how to distribute his fortune. 

Ironically, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tax policies targeted at the wealthy that persuaded Father to act when he did. Steep increases in both gift and estate tax rates in 1934 convinced Father that he had no alternative if he wanted to provide us with independent means. However, his real concerns about our maturity and inexperience led him to establish trusts with very strict limits on access to income and invasion of principal by any of the beneficiaries. 

Father’s original intention was to give each of his children a small but gradually increasing income until we reached the age of thirty. The trusts were set up to accomplish that objective. Until we reached thirty the income from the trusts in excess of what was paid out to us, rather than being reinvested, was distributed to a number of named charitable institutions, among them the Rockefeller Institute and the Riverside Church. 

In 1935, the first full year the trust was in operation, I received only $2,400, a tiny percentage of a much larger income. This income was to cover all my living and college expenses, apart from tuition, then $400 a year, which Father continued to pay during the remainder of my college years. On occasion I did find myself a bit short of cash and had to ask Father for an advance. He usually viewed my requests as an opportunity to impart wisdom and guidance. In one letter he wrote me in 1935, he noted disapprovingly that you have spent far more during the period than your anticipated income—which as you say is, of course, poor financing and is a mistake. . . . That I am somewhat disappointed at you again being in financial difficulties, you have of course imagined. When you were getting $1,500 a year you had no difficulty. As increases have been made, the difficulties have seemed to grow greater. The old saying that one is apt to lose one’s head with growing prosperity is a very true one. I hope from now on your financial plans will be such as to give no further occasion to believe this is true in your case. The $400 will be sent today to your bank account. 

At the time the 1934 Trusts were created, Father informed Laurance, Winthrop, and me that our trusts would contain assets of significantly less value than the ones he had established for Mother and our older siblings. Father wrote me a letter to explain his reasons. It gives a good sense of his feelings about the dangerous mixture of youth and money: “When I first talked with you about this matter, I had in mind to establish trusts for you three younger boys in the same amounts as for the older children. On further thought, I have come to the conclusion that to do so would be unfair to you … first, because it might result in your being put in a position where you would find yourself bewildered and unprepared because suddenly saddled with heavy and relatively new obligations … Secondly, it would … seriously curtail the opportunity for current guidance and advice during formative years which it is a father’s duty to provide.” 

However, when Congress increased the gift and estate tax rates in 1935, Father had to change his strategy. He reluctantly concluded that it was now or never if he was to increase the value of the trusts for his three youngest children, so he added additional assets to ours and thereby equalized the value of all the trusts at about $16 million. It was not until several years later that I was told the value of my trust. 

In mid-June 1935, Father wrote to me shortly before Dick and I left on our trip to Europe: 

I should have preferred not to take this step now but circumstances seem to have forced me to do so. The knowledge of how to manage and handle property wisely is best acquired through gradually  increasing experience. That thought has been uppermost in my mind in all the gifts I have made for your benefit. . . . I am putting great trust in you. I know, however, that you will never give me a cause to regret it. 

Affectionately, Father. 

CHOOSING A CAREER 

My senior year was occupied with writing my senior thesis on Fabian socialism, “Destitution Through Fabian Eyes.” The essay pointed to the fact that the traditional European approach to poverty was based on the Christian precept of atoning for one’s sins by giving alms to the poor. The focus was more on the benefits in the afterlife to the donor than on the notion that individuals had a social obligation to provide assistance to people in need. Fabian Socialists, under the leadership of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, took the opposite view. They saw the provision of a minimum standard of living for everyone as a basic right of all citizens and an inherent responsibility of government. 

The concepts advanced by the Webbs and other Fabians established the foundation for the work of Sir William Beveridge, then the director of the London School of Economics, where I would soon go to study. Sir William, later Lord Beveridge, became one of the principal architects of the welfare state, which began to gain acceptance in Britain in the mid1930s. 

With my undergraduate years coming to an end, I had no clear idea of what I wanted to make of my life or even what I wanted to do immediately after graduation. I was inclined toward pursuing something in the international field, and I leaned toward something independent of the Family Office since three of my brothers were already there. Postgraduate studies in business or economics had some appeal, but even that was not a clear objective. I felt the need to get advice from someone I respected and whose own life had been successful. 

Over the years I had come to admire William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had become a close friend of Father’s through their work together in the aftermath of the Ludlow strike. Mr. King later assumed leadership of the Liberal Party in Canada and became prime minister in 1935. He often stayed with my parents when he was in New York and sometimes visited Seal Harbor as well. He was always warm and friendly to me, and I felt comfortable talking with him. The Mackenzie King I knew did not correspond at all with the steely, remote, and offbeat reputation I later learned he had in Canada. 

After consulting Father, I wrote Mr. King asking if I could visit him in Ottawa to seek his advice. Mr. King quickly responded by inviting me to spend a weekend with him in the spring of 1936. During our long hours of conversation on my options and interests, it became clear that a career in either government or international banking made the most sense for me. In either case, Mr. King felt I would be well served by taking a Ph.D. in economics, a course that he himself had pursued many years earlier. Not only would this be good training in a field of knowledge useful to both government and banking, but it would also give me credibility with people who otherwise might feel that any job I had was principally because of my family’s influence. 

Mr. King’s arguments were convincing, and I decided to remain at Harvard for one year of graduate work in order to begin my study of economics under Joseph A. Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist. After that year my plan was to attend the London School of Economics and then finish my studies at the University of Chicago so that I could acquire as broad a background as possible. By spending time at three universities I would have a chance to work with many of the world’s greatest economists.

NEXT-93

LEARNING FROM THE GREAT ECONOMISTS

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