Nelson Rockefeller

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (July 8, 1908 - January 26, 1979), named after his maternal grandfather and US Senator Nelson Aldrich, was the dominant figure in US-Latin American relations from World War II through the mid-1970s. As coordinator of inter-American affairs (1940-1944), assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs (1944-1945), and later as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's special assistant for national security, he built the institutional architecture that governed American policy toward Latin America and shaped the intelligence community's covert operations in the Western Hemisphere. His private vehicles, the IBEC (International Basic Economy Corporation) and the AIA (American International Association), extended Rockefeller family commercial interests into the Brazilian Amazon and beyond.

Early Formation

Born at Bar Harbor, Maine, Nelson was the second son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. (The family's Pocantico Hills estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and their summer compound at Seal Harbor, Maine, were the settings for his upbringing.) His grandfather John D. Rockefeller Sr. had built the Standard Oil empire that underpinned the family fortune. From childhood, Nelson absorbed the family's dual tradition of Baptist philanthropy and calculated commercial expansion, a combination in which missionary and corporate work served mutually reinforcing ends.¹

A childhood trip to the American Southwest in 1924 exposed him to Taos Pueblo Indians and Navajo reservation lands, trips organized partly by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), a Rockefeller-owned mining firm. The experience introduced him to how Standard Oil subsidiaries and Christian missionaries together operated on lands being stripped of Indian tenure.²

Nelson suffered from dyslexia, which his father treated punitively, and compensated by developing exceptional interpersonal skills and a domineering confidence his siblings lacked. He attended the Lincoln School of Teachers College at Columbia University, graduating in 1926, then enrolled at Dartmouth College, where he graduated cum laude in 1930 as a Phi Beta Kappa member with an A.B. in economics. His senior economics thesis defended Standard Oil, flattering his father while revealing his political instincts. He made two failed runs for class president and settled for vice president, a pattern he would repeat on the national stage.³

The Road to Washington

After Dartmouth, Nelson worked briefly at Chase National Bank under his uncle Winthrop Aldrich, then moved into the management of Rockefeller Center, where he served as president beginning in 1938. There he oversaw the building's politics and learned, through the Diego Rivera mural controversy, the limits of his instincts. From 1935 onward he served as a director of Creole Petroleum Company, a Standard Oil of New Jersey subsidiary operating in Venezuela, which grounded his understanding of Latin American extractive economics. His tour of Latin America in the mid-1930s, combined with the family's existing oil investments through Standard Oil of New Jersey in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, convinced him that the hemisphere required a coordinated American strategy.⁴

In 1936-1940, Nelson assembled a coterie of trusted advisers he called "the Junta," including Frank Jamieson (journalist and future campaign manager), John Lockwood (lawyer), Wallace Harrison (architect and planner), and Berent Friele (a Brazilian coffee importer). These men became the core of his wartime and postwar operations.⁵

The CIAA (1940-1944)

On August 16, 1940, the US Council of National Defense established the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics (OCCCRBAR) and named Rockefeller, then 32, as its first coordinator. President Franklin D. Roosevelt formalized and expanded the office through Executive Order 8840, signed July 30, 1941, which reconstituted it as the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) within the Executive Office of the President and named Rockefeller as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Executive Order 8840 designated the Coordinator as "the center for the coordination of the cultural and commercial relations of the Nation affecting hemisphere defense" and granted authority to develop programs across "the arts and sciences, education and travel, the radio, the press, and the cinema." The appointment reflected Roosevelt's need to remove German and British commercial and cultural influence from Latin America and replace it with American hegemony before the United States entered the war.⁶

Under Rockefeller's direction, the CIAA became the first official US government propaganda operation, producing radio programs broadcast throughout Latin America, subsidizing 1,200 newspaper publishers dependent on CIAA-controlled newsprint shipments, producing newsreels and political cartoons, and publishing the magazine En Guardia with a circulation of 80,000 by summer 1941. The CIAA battled and defeated William J. Donovan's rival Coordinator of Information for control of Latin American psychological warfare. Roosevelt ruled in Rockefeller's favor, restricting Donovan's future OSS to Europe and Asia.⁷

The CIAA's "coordinating committees" in Brazil and elsewhere were staffed with American businessmen and served primarily to draw Latin American raw materials (rubber, tin, quinine, and oil) into the US war supply chain. Critics within the State Department noted the committees were composed of "the biggest businessmen" with "the most reactionary" policy views. The CIAA spent $140 million by 1944, far beyond its initial $3.5 million authorization.⁸

Rockefeller used the CIAA to advance US aviation dominance in Latin America through the Inter-American Escadrille, displacing German airlines from Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil, and integrating Latin American air forces into a US-led hemispheric defense system. His brother Laurance Rockefeller supported this effort through his position as director of Eastern Airlines.⁹

The CIAA's rubber program in the Amazon drove 100,000 people off their land (including a Haitian displacement project), a pattern that would repeat throughout Rockefeller's career in Latin American development.¹⁰

The Act of Chapultepec and Cold War Architecture (1945)

Appointed assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs on December 20, 1944 (his entry on duty date), Rockefeller convened the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, which ran from February 21 to March 8, 1945. There he pushed through the Act of Chapultepec (formally adopted March 6, 1945), which authorized a regional military pact making an attack on any American state an attack on all, a Latin American precursor to NATO that both the State Department and the Soviet Union recognized as a violation of the Yalta accords.¹¹

At Chapultepec, Rockefeller assembled his "Latin American Junta": Galo Plaza of Ecuador, Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia, and Mexico's Ezequiel Padilla. These men would become presidents, OAS secretaries-general, and trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller also arranged for Adolf Berle to replace Jefferson Caffery as US ambassador to Brazil.¹²

The Act of Chapultepec killed 180 Latin American resolutions promoting industrialization and protective tariffs, replacing them with an open-door policy for American corporate investment and commitments to road-building that served extractive industries. Rockefeller supported Argentina's Juan Perón's admission to the founding United Nations conference over strong objections, adding the Latin American bloc's 19 votes to the Western tally against the Soviets. Adolf Berle warned him privately this would be a political error; Rockefeller ignored the advice and paid with his job when the move was exposed as a violation of Yalta.¹³

Nelson's appointment as assistant secretary terminated on August 17, 1945. President Harry S. Truman reversed his policies and shut down the OCIAA shortly thereafter; whether his departure was a dismissal or a resignation has been characterized differently by different sources, with the State Department's official record listing a termination date of August 17, 1945.¹⁴

Private Instruments: IBEC, AIA, and the "First Cold War Coup"

Back in New York, Rockefeller reconvened his Junta and created two private vehicles for Latin American penetration: the IBEC (International Basic Economy Corporation, of which he served as president from 1947 to 1953 and again from 1956 to 1958) and the AIA (American International Association for Economic and Social Development, of which he served as president from 1946 to 1953 and again from 1957 to 1958). These nominally separate entities combined Rockefeller commercial interests with US government development goals.¹⁵

Through his former CIAA aide Adolf Berle and his CIA Western Hemisphere operations director J.C. King (a former Johnson & Johnson Latin American manager), Rockefeller was connected to the 1945 coup that overthrew Brazilian president Getulio Vargas. The coup ended Vargas's plan for state-directed Amazon development and opened Brazil to the American corporate penetration Rockefeller had prepared during the CIAA years.¹⁶

Eisenhower's Cold War General (1953-1955)

In 1953, Rockefeller accepted appointment as chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Government Organization, which ran from 1952 to 1953, before becoming Under Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953-1954). On December 15, 1954, President Eisenhower sent Rockefeller a letter appointing him Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs (also described as Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy). The appointment letter tasked him with providing "advice and assistance in the development of increased understanding and cooperation among all peoples" and attending meetings of the Cabinet, the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Economic Policy, and the Operations Coordinating Board.¹⁷

On March 3, 1955, Bureau of the Budget Director Rowland Hughes recommended that Eisenhower designate Rockefeller as a member and vice chairman of the OCB and as chairman of a new Planning Coordination Group. Eisenhower approved these recommendations on March 10, 1955. The Planning Coordination Group (PCG), operating within the framework of NSC 5412 governing covert operations, comprised Rockefeller as chairman, the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Its function was to "advise and assist the responsible operating agencies in the coordinated development of plans and programs" and to serve as the "normal channel for giving policy approval" for CIA covert operations. CIA director Allen Dulles and State Department officials refused to cooperate, and their obstruction stymied the PCG's initiatives. Rockefeller recommended the group's abolishment in September 1955 and resigned as Special Assistant to the President in December 1955.¹⁸

In this role, he commissioned and partly directed the Quantico I and II strategy panels. Quantico I convened June 5-10, 1955, at the Marine Corps School in Quantico, Virginia, where eleven experts in Soviet-American relations (including W.W. Rostow of MIT as panel chairman, C.D. Jackson of Time-Life, and Hans Speier of the RAND Corporation) assessed the US position in the psychological dimensions of the Cold War and developed the "Open Skies" proposal that Eisenhower then brought to the Geneva Summit. Quantico II met in late August 1955 in Washington and Quantico to examine the psychological aspects of US national security policy. He brought Henry Kissinger, then a young Harvard academic, in to chair the Panel on National Security Studies for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which produced six "Special Studies Reports" between 1958 and 1961. These reports shaped the Kennedy administration's counterinsurgency strategy, and Kissinger himself became Nelson's most enduring foreign policy tool.¹⁹

Brazil and the 1964 Coup

By 1964, Rockefeller's instruments were in place for a more decisive intervention. His former CIAA colleague Adolf Berle maintained connections to Brazilian military officers through the State Department and private channels. The CIA's J.C. King coordinated with US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon and Military Attaché Vernon Walters. Rockefeller's IBEC had major agricultural and commercial holdings in Brazil, and his brother David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank was deeply invested in the Brazilian economy.²⁰

The April 1964 coup deposing President Joao Goulart was welcomed within the Rockefeller network. Planning for the contingency had been underway since at least December 1962: a November 22, 1963 contingency plan showed "heavy emphasis on U.S. armed intervention," and Ambassador Gordon's March 28, 1964 telegram from Rio de Janeiro described Goulart as "now definitely engaged on campaign to seize dictatorial power, accepting the active collaboration of the Brazilian Communist Party." On March 31, 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff assigned the code name "Brother Sam" to a naval task force authorized to supply arms and potentially deploy combat troops in support of the coup if needed. Operation Brother Sam was the military expression of a strategy Rockefeller had been building since Chapultepec. These deliberations are documented in FRUS 1964-1968, Vol. XXXI, which covers South and Central America and includes the Lincoln Gordon cables and the JCS Brother Sam authorization.²¹

The Nixon Mission and Latin American Backlash (1969)

In 1969, President Richard Nixon asked Rockefeller, on Nixon's first full day in office, to assess the effectiveness of the Alliance for Progress program and prepare a policy report on Latin America. Rockefeller undertook a 20-nation tour in summer 1969. The tour was met with riots, demonstrations, and stone-throwing in nearly every country he visited, a response that shocked official Washington but not those who had watched his career from the other side. The tour's report, delivered to Nixon and titled "Quality of Life in the Americas," recommended reversing recent trends to reduce security assistance to Latin American military governments. The report stated, "At the moment there is only one Castro among the 26 nations of the hemisphere; there can well be more in the future." Its military aid recommendations further deepened US backing for Latin American military dictatorships.²²

The Rockefeller Commission (1975)

In 1975, amid the congressional Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses, President Gerald Ford appointed Rockefeller to chair the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the "Rockefeller Commission"). The triggering event was a December 1974 New York Times report that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities during the 1960s.

Rockefeller "attempted to head off inclusion of the subject" of CIA assassination plots, restricting consideration of assassinations to the question of Cuba's possible role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When the Commission voted on whether to include assassination investigations, it overrode its own chairman, with Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California, serving as a commissioner) siding with executive director David Belin against Rockefeller. In a March 10, 1975 memorandum to Commission members, Belin argued that selective investigation of assassination plots would confuse the public and that "the threat of assassination" warranted comprehensive inquiry. The Commission took testimony from CIA General Counsel John Warner on April 14, 1975.

Despite the Commission's vote to include the assassination material, the Ford White House suppressed it. An entire 86-page section, "Summary of Facts: Investigation of CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders" (dated June 5, 1975), covering plots against Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo, and references to Patrice Lumumba and Sukarno, was removed from the final report before public release. Then-Deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney made handwritten edits throughout the draft on or around June 1, 1975, altering language describing CIA activities from "unlawful" to merely "improper" in most instances, while drug experiments on US citizens retained the characterization "illegal." White House Counsel Philip Buchen coordinated the suppression. Commission public affairs director Peter Clapper warned that deleting the section would "cast doubt on the rest of the report" and be perceived as a cover-up; his objection was overridden. Senator Frank Church personally visited Rockefeller in early May 1975, alleging that CIA documents were being withheld from the Church Committee by the Rockefeller Commission. President Ford wrote to Church on October 31, 1975, urging suppression of assassination findings; Church rejected the request, stating that "the national interest is better served by letting the American people know the true and complete story." These internal documents are collected in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 543, published February 29, 2016, edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi.²³

Rockefeller's chairmanship of the commission investigating the agency he had supervised under Eisenhower was widely considered a conflict of interest. Key findings were withheld or classified. The Commission also added Recommendations 29 (civilian oversight committee) and 20 (periodic declassification reviews) to the report without a Commission vote, under White House direction.²⁴

New York Politics and the Vice Presidency

Rockefeller served as governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, during which time he built the South Mall (later renamed the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza) and pursued the presidency unsuccessfully in 1960, 1964, and 1968, repeatedly blocked by the Republican right wing. On August 20, 1974, President Ford nominated Rockefeller as vice president under Section 2 of the 25th Amendment. After a nearly four-month confirmation process, the Senate confirmed the nomination 90-7 on December 10, 1974, and the House confirmed 287-128 on December 19, 1974. Rockefeller was sworn in as the 41st Vice President on December 19, 1974, the second person appointed vice president under the 25th Amendment (Ford having been the first).²⁵

Death

Rockefeller died on January 26, 1979, of a heart attack at his townhouse at 13 West 54th Street in Manhattan, in the presence of Megan Marshack, a 25-year-old aide who had worked for him during his vice presidency and to whom he had provided financial assistance in purchasing a condominium nearby. After Rockefeller suffered the cardiac event, Marshack called her friend, television journalist Ponchitta Pierce, to the townhouse; Pierce phoned an ambulance approximately one hour after the attack. Initial reports, quickly corrected, stated he had died at his desk at Rockefeller Center. The circumstances received extensive press coverage but diverted attention from his political legacy.²⁶

The Pocantico Network

The Rockefeller family's 3,600-acre Pocantico Hills estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York, served as both residence and operational headquarters for family strategic planning. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, co-organized in 1940, became the vehicle for coordinating family philanthropy, "soft" intelligence operations, and policy influence across generations. Nelson used the RBF to channel funds into psychological warfare and counterintelligence programs, with his brother David reluctantly acquiescing to Nelson's demands. The Rockefeller Archive Center, which holds the family papers and is located at Pocantico, holds the primary records for Rockefeller's government and private activities.²⁷