The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Rockefeller family.md

category	aliases	tags	summary	location	relations	created	updated
Business & Finance	Rockefellers the Rockefellers	Person Family StandardOil Philanthropy LatinAmerica Banking	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.	New York, New York	type with start role fn founded Standard Oil 1870 John D. Rockefeller and associates 1 type with start fn funded Rockefeller Foundation 1913 2 type with start role fn founded Rockefeller Brothers Fund 1940 the five sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr. 3 type with role fn owned Chase Manhattan Bank family control of Chase National from the 1920s 5 type with role start fn participant_in Operations Coordinating Board Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of the Planning Coordination Group, a grouping of OCB members 1955-03-10 8	2026-09-22	2026-09-22

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.³⁴ 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 1981.⁵

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 CIAA, which subsidized 1,200 Latin American newspaper publishers dependent on its newsprint shipments.⁴⁶ After the war he set up two private development companies, the IBEC and the AIA.⁴ In 1955, as special assistant to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he chaired the Planning Coordination Group, set up in March 1955 within the Operations Coordinating Board to cover overt and covert action; its members were the under secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence.⁷ The Bureau of the Budget had proposed it as "a special grouping of OCB members chaired by Mr. Rockefeller," and Rockefeller was designated its chairman on March 10, 1955. The group was a grouping of OCB members, distinct from the Special Group of National Security Council 5412.⁸ The Brothers Fund's Special Studies Project of 1956 to 1961, which Nelson convened, had Henry A. Kissinger as its director, and Nelson kept him on afterward as his foreign policy consultant; Laurance sat on Kissinger's panel.³⁹ As vice president, Nelson chaired the Rockefeller Commission 1975 that Gerald Ford set up on January 4, 1975, to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency's domestic activities.¹⁰

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 Project MKUltra.¹¹ David founded the Council of the Americas in 1963 and in 1973, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission.⁴

Footnotes

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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, chs. 1, 5, 8, 13, as cited on the Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller pages. ↩︎

5. Colby and Dennett, ch. 13, as cited on the Chase Manhattan Bank page. ↩︎

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. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, Intelligence Community, doc. 210, Bureau of the Budget memorandum to President Eisenhower, with the annotation on the March 10, 1955 designation. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d210 ↩︎

9. Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017) and ch. 23, as cited on the Henry A. Kissinger page. ↩︎

10. Executive Order 11828, January 4, 1975. ↩︎

11. Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. Times Books, 1979, ch. 8. ↩︎