Rockefeller family

The Rockefeller family's fortune came from 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, 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, Laurance Rockefeller, Winthrop and David Rockefeller, who in 1940 set up the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to coordinate their giving.³⁵ 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, 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, which subsidized 1,200 Latin American newspaper publishers dependent on its newsprint shipments.⁵⁶ After the war he set up two private development companies, the International Basic Economy Corporation and the American International Association.⁵ In 1955, as special assistant to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he chaired the Planning Coordination Group, set up within the framework of NSC 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 as its director, and Nelson kept him on afterward as his foreign policy consultant; Laurance sat on Kissinger's panel.³⁸ As vice president, Nelson chaired the commission that Gerald Ford set up on January 4, 1975, to investigate the CIA's domestic activities.⁹

The Foundation paid for the founding in 1943 of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, where D. Ewen Cameron later conducted the depatterning experiments funded under MKULTRA.¹⁰ David founded the Council of the Americas in 1963 and in 1973, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission.⁵