David Rockefeller, the famous banker and philanthropist with the
family name that controlled Chase Manhattan bank for more than a decade
and wielded vast influence around the world in the world of finance, has
died on Monday morning at his home in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. He was 101.
A family spokesman, Fraser P. Seitel, confirmed the death.
Below is an exccerpt of his obituary from the NYT:
Chase
Manhattan had long been known as the Rockefeller bank, though the
family never owned more than 5 percent of its shares. But Mr.
Rockefeller was more than a steward. As chairman and chief executive
throughout the 1970s, he made it “David’s bank,” as many called it,
expanding its operations internationally.
His stature was greater than any corporate title might convey,
however. His influence was felt in Washington and foreign capitals, in
the corridors of New York City government, art museums, great
universities and public schools.
Mr. Rockefeller could well be the last of an increasingly less
visible family to have cut so imposing a figure on the world stage. As a
peripatetic advocate of the economic interests of the United States and
of his own bank, he was a force in global financial affairs and in his
country’s foreign policy. He was received in foreign capitals with the
honors accorded a chief of state.
He was the last surviving grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the tycoon
who founded the Standard Oil Company in the 19th century and built a
fortune that made him America’s first billionaire and his family one of
the richest and most powerful in the nation’s history.
As an heir to that legacy, Mr. Rockefeller lived all his life in
baronial splendor and privilege, whether in Manhattan (as a boy he and
his brothers would roller-skate along Fifth Avenue trailed by a
limousine in case they grew tired) or at his magnificent country
estates.
Imbued with the understated manners of the East Coast elite, he
loomed large in the upper reaches of a New York social world of
glittering black-tie galas. His philanthropy was monumental, and so was
his art collection, a museumlike repository of some 15,000 pieces, many
of them masterpieces, some lining the walls of his offices 56 floors
above the streets at Rockefeller Center, to which he repaired, robust
and active, well into his 90s.
In silent testimony to his power and reach was his Rolodex, a catalog
of some 150,000 names of people he had met as a banker-statesman. It
required a room of its own beside his office.
Spread out below that corporate aerie was a city he loved and
influenced mightily. He was instrumental in rallying the private sector
to help resolve New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. As
chairman of the Museum of Modern Art for many years — his mother had
helped found it in 1929 — he led an effort to encourage corporations to
buy and display art in their office buildings and to subsidize local
museums. And as chairman of the New York City Partnership, a coalition
of business executives, he fostered innovation in public schools and the
development of thousands of apartments for lower-income and
middle-class families.
He was always aware of the mystique surrounding the Rockefeller name.
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