--- aliases: - Rockefellers - the Rockefellers category: Business & Finance created: 2026-09-22 location: New York, New York relations: - fn: 1 role: John D. Rockefeller and associates start: 1870 type: founded with: '[[Standard Oil]]' - fn: 2 start: 1913 type: funded with: '[[Rockefeller Foundation]]' - fn: 3 role: the five sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr. start: 1940 type: founded with: '[[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]]' - fn: 4 role: family control of Chase National from the 1920s type: owned with: '[[Chase Manhattan Bank]]' summary: American family whose Standard Oil fortune endowed the Rockefeller Foundation and Chase, and whose sons Nelson and David ran wartime propaganda, covert-action coordination and hemispheric banking. tags: - Person - Family - StandardOil - Philanthropy - LatinAmerica - Banking updated: 2026-09-22 --- The Rockefeller family's fortune came from [Standard Oil](/organizations/standard-oil/). In 1870 John D. Rockefeller and his associates formed the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), with the largest refining capacity of any firm in the world; in 1882 the Standard Oil Trust took in Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, with headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York; after a Supreme Court decision in 1911 it was broken up into 34 companies.[^1] The family's philanthropies followed: the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and, chartered in 1913, the [Rockefeller Foundation](/organizations/rockefeller-foundation/), which by the 1920s owned stock in thirteen oil companies and nine pipelines. When Charles Evans Hughes, a Standard Oil counsel and Foundation trustee, became secretary of state, the British Foreign Office complained that "Washington officials begin to think, talk, and write like Standard Oil officials."[^2] ### The Five Brothers John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller had five sons, John D. III, [Nelson Rockefeller](/people/nelson-rockefeller/), Laurance Rockefeller, Winthrop and [David Rockefeller](/people/david-rockefeller/), who in 1940 set up the [Rockefeller Brothers Fund](/organizations/rockefeller-brothers-fund/) to coordinate their giving.[^3][^5] The family had controlled the Chase National Bank since the 1920s; merged with the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1955 as [Chase Manhattan Bank](/organizations/chase-manhattan-bank/), it was run by David, president from 1961 and chairman from 1969 to 1981.[^4] Nelson, a director of Standard Oil of New Jersey's Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole Petroleum, in the 1930s, was named on August 16, 1940, to head the office that became the [Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs](/organizations/ciaa/), which subsidized 1,200 Latin American newspaper publishers dependent on its newsprint shipments.[^5][^6] After the war he set up two private development companies, the [International Basic Economy Corporation](/organizations/ibec/) and the [American International Association](/organizations/aia/).[^5] In 1955, as special assistant to President [Dwight D. Eisenhower](/people/dwight-d-eisenhower/), he chaired the Planning Coordination Group, set up within the framework of [NSC](/organizations/national-security-council/) 5412, which governed covert operations; its members were the under secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence.[^7] The Brothers Fund's Special Studies Project of 1956 to 1961, which Nelson convened, had [Henry Kissinger](/people/henry-a-kissinger/) as its director, and Nelson kept him on afterward as his foreign policy consultant; Laurance sat on Kissinger's panel.[^3][^8] As vice president, Nelson chaired the [commission](/events/rockefeller-commission-1975/) that [Gerald Ford](/people/gerald-r-ford/) set up on January 4, 1975, to investigate the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/)'s domestic activities.[^9] The Foundation paid for the founding in 1943 of the [Allan Memorial Institute](/organizations/allan-memorial-institute/) in Montreal, where [D. Ewen Cameron](/people/d-ewen-cameron/) later conducted the depatterning experiments funded under [MKULTRA](/programs/project-mkultra/).[^10] David founded the Council of the Americas in 1963 and in 1973, with [Zbigniew Brzezinski](/people/zbigniew-brzezinski/), the Trilateral Commission.[^5] [^1]: ExxonMobil, "Our History," corporate history timeline, entries for 1870, 1882 and the 1911 dissolution. https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/company/who-we-are/our-history [^2]: Colby, Gerard, and Charlotte Dennett. *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon.* HarperCollins, 1995, chs. 2-3. [^3]: Colby and Dennett, ch. 25, as cited on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund page. [^4]: Colby and Dennett, ch. 13, as cited on the Chase Manhattan Bank page. [^5]: Colby and Dennett, chs. 1, 5, 8, 13, as cited on the Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller pages. [^6]: Council of National Defense order establishing the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, August 16, 1940; Executive Order 8840, July 30, 1941. [^7]: Hughes, Rowland, memorandum to the President, March 3, 1955, *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community,* doc. 210. [^8]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017) and ch. 23, as cited on the Henry A. Kissinger page. [^9]: Executive Order 11828, January 4, 1975. [^10]: Marks, John. *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.* Times Books, 1979, ch. 8.