“Think Britney Spears gets this many people?” an aide whispered to the reigning patriarch of American capitalism, who was hunkered behind a desk in a reception room at the University of Chicago signing books.
David Rockefeller smiled.
It wasn’t a big smile, more a knowing smile, assessing a crowd lined up to get autographed copies of his “Memoirs,” a 517-page tome that draws back the curtains on a family whose name has become a euphemism for wealth.
Yes, there was a buzz last week in the lounge of the International Club at 1414 E. 59th St., even though Rockefeller’s book, as more than one critic has noted, goes against type. As modern memoirs go, it doesn’t shout.
Nor does Rockefeller.
He spent an hour before the book signing on stage with U. of C. President Don Michael Randel, settling onto a set that looked like a corner of the Chicago Club, with comfy chairs, lamps, a side table and water, brought by a waiter.
It wasn’t “Oprah,” a public confession drawn from the world of celebrities who shriek at each other across kitchen tables, hurl furniture, get drunk or, in the case of Elvis Presley, shoot TV sets when perturbed by the programming.
Instead, Rockefeller gave new meaning to the word “civility.”
He discussed childhood adventures, such as roller-skating up 5th Avenue with a limousine trailing him; his “happy memories” of studying economics at the U. of C. in the winter of 1939-40; and his efforts to restructure, expand and globalize Chase Manhattan Bank, of which he is the retired chairman.
Seldom did his voice go up. Seldom did it go down.
Described on the dust jacket of his book as “a financier, a philanthropist and the ultimate ambassador without portfolio,” Rockefeller came across to the crowd–many of them graying alumni and faculty members–as basketball’s Michael Jordan of chief executive officers. This is a man who has been everywhere, met everyone and closed a lot of “big ones.”
“There’s the Establishment, and then there’s the Super Establishment,” murmured one awed audience member to a neighbor. “David Rockefeller,” he added, “has to be dead center among the Supers.”
It’s been a life that, to some in the crowd, has been wonderfully above it all.
“I once saw his private jet parked at the Shannon Airport,” one audience member said later, “and he was inside, picking out things at the duty-free shop.”
To others, it reflects an endless devotion to tedium, sitting through thousands and thousands of meetings, planning everything from the future of lower Manhattan to the development of Latin America and the Middle East.
Randel led Rockefeller through the principal areas of his life, beginning with Rockefeller’s favorite economic professor at the U. of C., economist Frank Knight.
Knight’s major book, “Risk, Uncertainty and Profit,” is “unusual in its insistence that ethical considerations had to be incorporated in the process of economic analysis,” Rockefeller said.
“I’m still a strong believer in the capitalist system,” he said, “but business must take account not only of the profit motive but of the good they can do in society.”
Rockefeller had harsh things to say about the corporate chiefs of Enron (“They should be punished”). He talked about the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center’s twin towers, sometimes known as “David” and “Nelson,” in honor of the two Rockefeller brothers who combined forces to get them built.
But there were more questions than answers.
“Time ran out before I could ask him about the Trilateral Commission,” complained one crowd member, referring to what cartoonist Garry Trudeau frequently lampoons “as a powerful coterie of statesmen and international financiers which periodically meets in secret to shape the destiny of the Western world.”
David Rockefeller was one of the commission’s founders.
