40 Facts About David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller was an American investment banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation.

David Rockefeller was the oldest living member of the third generation of the Rockefeller family, and family patriarch from 2004 until his death in 2017.

David Rockefeller was noted for his wide-ranging political connections and foreign travel, in which he met with many foreign leaders.

David Rockefeller's fortune was estimated at $3.3 billion at the time of his death.

David Rockefeller grew up in an eight-story house at 10 West 54th Street, the tallest private residence ever built in the city.

David Rockefeller's mother Abby was a daughter of Rhode Island US Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich and Abigail Pearce Truman "Abby" Chapman.

David Rockefeller attended the experimental Lincoln School at 123rd Street in Harlem.

David Rockefeller studied economics for a year at Harvard and then a year at the London School of Economics.

From 1941 to 1942, David Rockefeller was assistant regional director of the United States Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services.

David Rockefeller enlisted in the US Army and entered Officer Candidate School in 1943.

David Rockefeller served as a "Ritchie Boy" secret unit specially trained at Fort Ritchie, Maryland.

In 1946, David Rockefeller joined the staff of the longtime family-associated Chase National Bank.

David Rockefeller started as an assistant manager in the foreign department.

David Rockefeller served in other positions and became president in 1960.

David Rockefeller was both the chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan from 1969 to 1980 and remained chairman until 1981.

That year David Rockefeller traveled to China, resulting in his bank becoming the National Bank of China's first correspondent bank in the US.

David Rockefeller was faulted for spending excessive amounts of time abroad, and during his tenure as CEO the bank had more troubled loans than any other major bank.

In November 1979, while chairman of the Chase Bank, Rockefeller became embroiled in an international incident when he and Henry Kissinger, along with John J McCloy and Rockefeller aides, persuaded President Jimmy Carter through the United States Department of State to admit the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into the United States for hospital treatment for lymphoma.

David Rockefeller was criticized for befriending foreign autocrats in order to expand Chase interests in their countries.

Rockefeller met Henry Kissinger in 1954, when Kissinger was appointed a director of a seminal Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons, of which David Rockefeller was a member.

David Rockefeller named Kissinger to the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and consulted with him frequently, with the subjects including the Chase Bank's interests in Chile and the possibility of the election of Salvador Allende in 1970.

David Rockefeller supported his "opening of China" initiative in 1971 as it afforded banking opportunities for the Chase Bank.

David Rockefeller knew and associated with the former CIA director Richard Helms as well as Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt Jr.

In Cary Reich's biography of his brother Nelson, a former CIA agent states that David Rockefeller was extensively briefed on covert intelligence operations by himself and other Agency division chiefs, under the direction of David Rockefeller's "friend and confidant", CIA director Allen Dulles.

In 1964, along with other American business figures such as Sol Linowitz, David Rockefeller founded the non-profit International Executive Service Corps, which encourages developing nations to promote private enterprise.

David Rockefeller had a lifelong association with the Council on Foreign Relations when he joined as a director in 1949.

In 1992, at a Council sponsored forum, David Rockefeller proposed a "Western Hemisphere free trade area", which became the Free Trade Area of the Americas in a Miami summit in 1994.

David Rockefeller's and the council's chief liaison to President Bill Clinton in order to garner support for this initiative was through Clinton's chief of staff, Mack McLarty, whose consultancy firm Kissinger McLarty Associates is a corporate member of the council, while McLarty himself is on the board of directors.

David Rockefeller was a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, including in 1948, when Alger Hiss was president.

David Rockefeller served as secretary to the group, making notes of each meeting.

David Rockefeller ensured that selected members of the fourth generation, known generically as the cousins, became directly involved in the family's institutions.

In 1985, the David Rockefeller family mortgaged the property for $1.3 billion, with $300 million of that going to the family.

David Rockefeller published Memoirs in 2002, the only time a member of the Rockefeller family has written an autobiography.

David Rockefeller's will requires his estate, once assets are liquidated, to donate over $700 million to various non-profits, including David Rockefeller University, the Museum of Modern Art and Harvard.

In 1940, David Rockefeller married Margaret "Peggy" McGrath, who died in 1996.

David Rockefeller died in his sleep from congestive heart failure on March 20,2017, at his home in Pocantico Hills, New York.

David Rockefeller had a Manhattan residence at 146 East 65th Street, as well as a country residence at a farm in Livingston, New York, where his wife raised Simmenthal beef cattle.

David Rockefeller maintained a summer home, "Ringing Point," at Seal Harbor on Mount Desert Island off the Maine coast.

David Rockefeller owned a large estate on the French island of Saint Barthelemy.

Many years ago, the David Rockefeller family donated the land in the initial creation of the Saint Barth "Zone Verte," or Green Zone, which is an area which cannot be developed.