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    Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
    Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
    Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
    Ebook1,809 pages30 hours

    Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil

    By Gerard Colby, Charlotte Dennett and Mark Crispin Miller

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    A “blistering exposé” of the USA’s secret history of financial, political, and cultural exploitation of Latin America in the 20th century, with a new introduction (Publishers Weekly).

    What happened when a wealthy industrialist and a visionary evangelist unleashed forces that joined to subjugate an entire continent? Historians Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett tell the story of the forty-year campaign led by Standard Oil scion Nelson Rockefeller and Wycliffe Bible Translators founder William Cameron Townsend to establish a US imperial beachhead in Central and South America.
     
    Beginning in the 1940s, future Vice President Rockefeller worked with the CIA and allies in the banking industry to prop up repressive governments, devastate the Amazon rain forest, and destabilize local economies—all in the name of anti-Communism. Meanwhile, Townsend and his army of missionaries sought to undermine the belief systems of the region’s indigenous peoples and convert them to Christianity. Their combined efforts would have tragic and long-lasting repercussions, argue the authors of this “well-documented” (Los Angeles Times) book—the product of eighteen years of research—which legendary progressive historian Howard Zinn called “an extraordinary piece of investigative history. Its message is powerful, its data overwhelming and impressive.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateNov 21, 2017
    ISBN9781504048392
    Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
    Author

    Gerard Colby

    Gerard Colby is a writer, investigative journalist, and educator. He has written for the North American Newspaper Alliance, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times,  In These Times, and TowardFreedom.com. Colby has taught the history of the political economy of Central America at Burlington College and political science and international economics at Johnson State College in Vermont, and is currently studying for a master’s degree in American history at the University of Vermont. Colby is a cofounder of the Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund and former president of the National Writers Union. He is the author of DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, coauthor with Charlotte Dennett of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, and a contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, edited by Kristina Borjesson.

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      Book preview

      Thy Will Be Done - Gerard Colby

      Thy Will Be Done

      The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil

      Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett

      By the descriptions of all who had seen them, there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet than the forest Indians of Brazil, and brusquely we were told they had been rushed to the verge of extinction. The tragedy of the Indian in the USA in the last century was being repeated, but it was being compressed into a shorter time.… The official report said pioneers leagued with corrupt politicians had continually usurped Indian lands, destroyed whole tribes … in which bacteriological warfare had been employed, by issuing clothing impregnated with the virus of small pox, and by poisoned food supplies. Children had been abducted and mass murder gone unpunished. The Government itself was blamed to some extent for the Indian Protection Service’s increasing starvation of resources over a period of thirty years. The Service had also had to face "the disastrous impact of missionary activity."

      Norman Lewis

      The Sunday Times (London)

      February 23, 1969

      To the forty-seven journalists killed while reporting in Guatemala during military dictatorships between 1978 and 1985, and to their colleagues of the press who have died similarly in Brazil and other countries, trying to bring to the world the news of what is happening in the frontiers of developing nations.

      The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the supression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is preservative of the whole.

      —JOHN PETER ZENGER

      (1697–1746)

      CONTENTS

      Series Introduction

      The End of an Era: An Introduction and Brief Update for the 2017 Edition

      Introduction

      I

      THE LEGACY

      1 The Baptist Burden

      2 The Fundamentalist Controversy

      3 Rethinking Missions

      4 The Apostolic Vision

      5 The Rites of Political Passage

      6 Good Neighbors Make Good Allies

      7 The Mexican Tightrope

      II

      WORLD WAR II: THE CRUCIBLE

      8 The Coordinator

      9 The Sword of the Spirit

      10 The Shining Dream

      11 The Dancer

      12 Preempting the Cold War

      13 Latin America’s First Cold War Coup

      III

      ARCHITECTS OF EMPIRE

      14 American Wings over the Amazon

      15 The Pretender at Bay

      16 The Latin Road to Power

      17 In the Wake of War—and the CIA

      IV

      PROPHETS OF ARMAGEDDON

      18 Ike’s Cold War General

      19 Disarming Disarmament

      20 Messengers of the Sun

      21 The Hidden Persuaders

      22 The Brotherhood

      23 Ascent of the Hawk

      V

      THE DAY OF THE WATCHMAN

      24 Deadly Inheritance

      25 Building the Warfare State

      26 Miracles Déjà Vu

      27 Camelot Versus Pocantico: The Decline and Fall of John F. Kennedy

      VI

      THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

      28 To Turn a Continent

      29 Operation Brother Sam

      30 Beneath the Eyebrows of the Jungle

      31 Mistaken Identities

      32 Poisons of the Amazon

      33 Death of a Continental Revolution

      34 The Enemy Within

      35 Apocalypse Now: The Tribes of Indochina

      36 Nation-Building Through War

      37 Tet: The Year of the Monkey

      38 Nelson’s Last Charge

      VII

      A NEW WORLD ORDER

      39 Invasion of the Amazon

      40 Rocky Horror Road Show

      41 Forging the Dollar Zone

      42 In the Age of Genocide

      43 Critical Choices

      44 Hiding the Family Jewels

      VIII

      DAYS OF JUDGMENT

      45 SIL Under Siege

      46 The Betrayal

      47 The Great Tribulation

      48 Thy Will Be Done

      Appendix A: The Rockefeller Mission to the Americas (1969)

      Appendix B: Members of the Rockefeller Commission on CIA Abuses (1975)

      Notes

      Selected Bibliography

      Index

      Acknowledgments

      About the Authors

      SERIES INTRODUCTION

      I

      We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

      Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations—church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

      Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too obscene to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as antifamily, Satanic, racist, and/or filthy, from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

      II

      And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

      How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) dropped into the memory hole in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of national security or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then dumped, as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as conspiracy theory, despite their soundness (or because of it).

      Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

      III

      The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

      These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

      Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

      The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

      Mark Crispin Miller

      THE END OF AN ERA

      AN INTRODUCTION AND BRIEF UPDATE FOR THE 2017 EDITION

      David Rockefeller Sr., who died at the age of 101 on March 20, 2017, was sitting in his office on the fifty-sixth floor at 30 Rockefeller Center when he gazed out the window facing south and saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapse, first one and then the other. In a matter of minutes, two of the tallest buildings in the world had cascaded floor by floor into a smoldering heap of rubble. To most Americans, the attacks of September 11, 2001, were the result of a horrific and brazen act of terror against their country. To CBS anchor Dan Rather, it was an attack on the very symbol of American economic and international power. To David Rockefeller Sr., who, with his brother Nelson, was most responsible for building and financing the World Trade Center, the 9/11 attacks were, quite simply, unbelievable.

      Sitting in a sparsely decorated room and dressed in a well-tailored suit, David was asked by ABC what he thought as he watched the buildings collapse. Looking straight into the camera, his square face, now lightly creased with age, betrayed a seemingly earnest attempt to hide his emotions. It was hard to believe what I saw was actually happening, he said.¹ Then he paused, sighed, and turned slightly away, his eyes cast downward, as if in mournful reflection over what it all meant for the country, for his family, and for business.

      On October 21, 2002, David was asked again about the World Trade Center when he appeared on the Charlie Rose television show to discuss his newly published book, Memoirs. Rose asked if he, as head of Chase Manhattan, and his brother, as governor of New York, were responsible, really, for the World Trade Center?

      David, smiling, nodded his head yes, We worked together on that. He went on to explain his role in revitalizing downtown Manhattan as chairman and founder of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association. He and Nelson, as governor, were convinced there was a need to focus on trade which had always been the heart of New York’s business and there was no incentive for that trade. And therefore the World Trade Center, which was built by the Port Authority … was the right thing to do at the time.²

      Before the attacks, the summit of the World Trade Center featured a pictorial display of a world without borders. This was a vision of corporate globalization. It reflected the views of the two men whose business interests spanned the globe. Both were lifelong advocates of free trade as the key to prosperity and the means to avoiding dangerous trade wars, which, they believed, led to world wars. The Standard Oil heirs had combined their formidable resources to create two giant monuments to free trade—and to themselves, as savvy New Yorkers wryly nicknamed the Twin Towers Nelson and David.

      If David had the inclination to reflect more deeply on the meaning of 9/11 in his Memoirs, he ultimately chose not to. Archivists, however, at the depository of his family’s papers in Sleepy Hollow, New York, did take up the subject soon after the attacks. The Rockefeller Archives Center devoted its Fall 2001 newsletter to the Twin Towers, inviting scholars to read firsthand from original sources about the history of the World Trade Center. In a section entitled Globalization, the editors made a remarkable confession: "To the extent that international terrorism must be understood as a reaction to, and to some degree a manifestation of, globalization, the Rockefeller Archive Center is a substantial research resource with material regarding many aspects of international trade, diplomacy, and collaboration:

      The [materials] range from (but are not limited to) documentation of the international investment and philanthropic activities of the Rockefeller family; to the service of Nelson A. Rockefeller in five US presidential administrations; to the interest and activity of John D. Rockefeller 3rd in east and south Asia; to the global activities of the Rockefeller Foundation; [to] the West African, Southeast Asian, and Eastern European programs of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund."³

      The fact that the Rockefeller Archives Center, in a traumatized post 9/11 America, so readily attributed globalization as a cause of terrorism—and so readily acknowledged the family’s leading role in globalization—speaks to a reality that escapes most people except those who have had the opportunity to delve into the Rockefeller family archives: At every turn, the founder, John D. Rockefeller Sr., and his second and third generation heirs, were met with resistance as they built and expanded their empire out of oil, mining, agribusiness, commercial real estate, ranching, and banking.⁴

      Yet, even as the family archivists acknowledge globalization as a huge modern-day challenge, David, in his book, ignores its roots. The expansion of his forbears’ business interests into America’s rural south and southwest, as described and documented in Thy Will Be Done, brought severe economic disruption to people’s lives and an undying hatred of the Eastern Establishment. In this respect, his memoirs, with all their details about the people he met (and influenced) around the world, are ultimately, an effort to bring out the best of the family legacy, written if for no other reason, he told Charlie Rose, than for my children and descendants—and, arguably, to answer the family’s critics once and for all.

      Burnishing the Image through Good Works

      While globalization is now a household word, the names of its most passionate promoters are not. The eclipse of the 1 percent is no accident. It was a century ago that John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid Ivy Lee a handsome fee to burnish the villainous public image of his father, Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Sr., whose ruthless business practices earned him many enemies. The public began seeing photos of an aged Senior smiling as he handed out dimes to children during the Great Depression, while educators, scientists, and healers pulled in tens of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation to perform good works for the wellbeing of mankind, as John D. Rockefeller Jr. described his new foundation’s mission.

      Today, the Rockefeller Foundation’s board is free of Rockefellers, but not the legacy of Rockefeller influence, which includes the extensive investments in fossil fuel companies that continue to this day. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a newer foundation—the Rockefeller Family Fund, which the fourth generation of Rockefellers established to advance their more liberal agendas—quietly dole out additional millions to liberal and progressive organizations, universities, nonprofits, and the media. While the Rockefellers’ good works through their tax-free foundations generate a lot of publicity and praise from mass media, their banks, corporate ventures, and, of course, the political influence gained by their wealth, get very little, if any, critical attention. Accordingly, they have escaped criticism for their nonexistent withdrawal of oil holdings from their foundations and personal portfolios—and their name’s involvement in New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal, allegedly because Democratic officeholders were stalling on approving the Rockefeller Group’s projected real estate projects in the area. ⁵

      Recasting the Legacy of Nelson Rockefeller

      When this book first came out in 1995, the only thing most people knew about the leader of the third generation, Nelson Rockefeller—other than his being governor of New York (1959–1973) and, for a brief time, vice president under Gerald Ford (1974–1977)—was how he died in the middle of a sex act with his young mistress. Few people had any idea that Nelson, as President Roosevelt’s coordinator of inter-American affairs and then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, had shaped US foreign policy in Latin America during World War II. Hardly anyone was aware of how he had used his many connections to Latin American businessmen, media moguls, and generals to try to effectively control the destiny of a continent after ridding it of German, Italian, Japanese, and British competition.

      No one knew, it seems, that Nelson Rockefeller was heavily involved in intelligence and national security matters, becoming President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s special assistant in charge of cold war strategy and psychological warfare, and chairing the National Security Council’s supersecret Special Group that oversaw CIA covert operations.

      No one knew that his mentor in Latin American affairs, former assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle Jr., had a role in overthrowing Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas in 1945 and, with Rockefeller’s confidante Col. J. C. King, CIA director of Clandestine Operations in the Western Hemisphere, had a role in overthrowing Brazil’s President João Goulart in 1964.

      Nor did anyone know that President John F. Kennedy—who once admired and even relied on counterinsurgency strategies developed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Panel on National Security Studies chaired by Henry Kissinger (a protégé of Nelson)—later came to fear the Rockefellers. I never saw more concentrated attention given to any political subject, said Kennedy appointee and friend, Roswell Gilpatric"⁶—and for good reason: Gov. Nelson Rockefeller soon became the first Republican candidate to challenge Kennedy for the presidency shortly before Kennedy’s assassination.

      All of this and much more was documented in Thy Will be Done in 1995, but David Rockefeller’s Memoirs gives an entirely different slant to some of the events described above, or ignores them entirely.

      David’s Memoirs ignores the Kennedy Administration’s curtailment of Nelson’s ambitious plans for developing Brazil’s interior. He reinterprets Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, with its emphasis on providing government-to-government loans to Latin American countries rather than going through private banks like Chase, as a mere difference of opinion. Writes Rockefeller, I strongly supported the President’s initiative [for the Alliance for Progress] not the least because it meant there would be an energetic response to the threat presented by Castro’s Marxist regime in Cuba and Communist subversions in other parts of the hemisphere. However, I felt the Alliance had to be a public-private partnership if it was to be successful, while its U.S. architect had a decided preference for state-directed economic development.⁷

      Following the murder of President Kennedy in November 1963 and the overthrow of Brazilian president Goulart four months later, the conquest of the Amazon by American corporations began in earnest. Yet, some forty years later, while writing his memoirs, these details have escaped David’s memory. He characterizes this transitional period as essentially uneventful: Kennedy’s death cut short the promise of the Alliance for Progress. … [The] Johnson White House, preoccupied with its own War on Poverty in the United States and the real war in Vietnam, lost interest in Latin America.⁸

      As recounted in Thy Will Be Done, this was not the case with the CIA, American corporations, and American evangelical missionaries known as the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) in the US and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) abroad. Shortly after the coup, SIL conducted a survey for the Brazilian military dictatorship, describing potentially hostile tribes in Brazil and pinpointing their locations on maps. The missionary linguists reported their findings in an English-language book published in 1967 by the CIA-connected Institute for Cross Cultural Research⁹ entitled Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century. The map in Thy Will Be Done entitled SIL’s Hostile Tribes and Rockefeller Allied Companies in the Brazilian Amazon confirms the old adage: A picture—or map—is worth a thousand words. As we stated there: "[Indians of Brazil] appeared to be a harmless cataloguing of tribes—their location, their culture, their population size, and their acceptance of Brazilian domination. But it also offered a road map for American penetration into the Brazilian interior, much like that which occurred a century earlier in the American West, including warnings about ‘hostile’ areas."

      Missionaries and the Methodology of Conquest

      Thy Will be Done has been called a methodology of conquest—once understood, it can be applied to many parts of the world. Yet the role of well-funded and, most often, well-intentioned fundamentalist Christian missionaries in aiding and abetting conquest seldom gets mentioned, just as religion itself has escaped the kind of scientific scrutiny that other fields undergo.

      Thy Will be Done began with a conundrum: How could the world’s largest nondenominational Christian missionary organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and its more secular sounding twin, the Summer Institute of Linguists, turn a blind eye to the genocide of more than one hundred thousand Amazon Basin Indians, many of them assigned by governments as their wards during the 1960s and 1970s? It was only by scaling the mountain, that is the heights of Rockefeller power, that the pieces of the puzzle finally began to fall into place some four years into the investigation. The declassified papers of Nelson Rockefeller and Rockefeller mentor Adolf Berle Jr., along with a wealth of family history at the Rockefeller Archives Center in Pocantico, New York, provided that mountaintop panorama, which turned out to be crucial to solving the mystery. The Rockefeller view of the world was spectacular in its reach and depth of political, economic, social, and cultural interrelations. The interactions on the ground revealed WBT/SIL’s missionaries/linguists’ patterns and also those of anthropologists, medical teams, aid workers, NGOs, women’s organizations, government officials, and clandestine operatives who worked among them. Many were well meaning, thinking they were agents of modernization. Most, however, were quite naïve regarding the way their respective spheres of activity helped to enhance and reify the power of the Americas’ wealthy 1 percent. It was the cumulative effects of these actors that supported that 1 percent in their never-ending search for stability through corporate political power and the ever-expanding profits that keep their global system functioning.

      It is no accident that WBT/SIL, in the service of globalization, have expanded beyond their original proving ground in Latin America (where they were challenged for collaboration with the CIA and, in some cases, expelled) to every corner of the so-called underdeveloped world—Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—as part of Wycliffe’s Global Alliance. Today, according to its official website, Wycliffe’s Global Alliance operates in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei, Cyprus, Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea, East Timor, Gaza Strip, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Macao, Malesia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Republic of (South) Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Republic of China (Taiwan), Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, the (Palestinian) West Bank, and Yemen.

      As before, and perhaps even more so, as a result of this book, SIL/WBT is circumspect about naming its large secular supporters in government and business, failing to make such disclosures or those of its stockholdings in their 990 reports to the Internal Revenue Service. But the sheer size and scope of their operations today leaves little doubt that their funding extends far beyond churchgoers’ donations. A writer for Forbes magazine questioned how Bible translating could become a multimillion-dollar operation when he headlined his 2013 story, The Big Business of Wycliffe Bible Translators and Why They Might Lose Money.¹⁰ He found that Wycliffe International from 2006 to 2010 received over twenty-two million dollars in public support. The numbers didn’t make sense. Wycliffe, he mused, is translating 20 Bibles and they have 5,500 staff members. … When you have that much money and that much in staff resources, then why does it take such a long time to translate a Bible?¹¹ Had he dug deeper, he would have discovered that WBT, SIL, and Wycliffe Global Alliance make up a huge operation¹² and that Bible translation, while central to its mission, is a means to an end: literally, the End of the World and Christ’s Second Coming. For the linguist/missionaries, this means reaching every untouched tribe in the world (depicted in WBT’s early days as 2,000 tongues to go). For multinational developers, it means pacifying millions of tribes in advance of pushing deep into Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia to extract resources and develop markets for the first world.¹³

      Today, SIL/WBT missionaries are at the forefront of the US penetration of Africa, eagerly embarking on Bible translations where oil has been discovered in large quantities. For example, it is working in Ghana among three Ghanaian tribes—the Jwira-Pepesa, Wasa, and Bissa—all of whom live in Southern Ghana, once called the Gold Coast and now called the Black Gold Coast. Many of the African tribes are Muslim, which has created difficulties for the translators.¹⁴

      In 2014, the London Guardian described Ghana as Africa’s newest petro-state in an article on the film Big Men about the meeting of Ghana, oil and Wall Street. Featured below the Guardian headline was a large photo of a banner draped over a shanty town with the words: National Prayer and Thanksgiving Service for Oil Discovery in Ghana and a Peaceful Half Year … All Are Cordially Invited. Be Aglow for Jesus.¹⁵ Ghana’s huge offhshore oilfield, discovered in 2007, is said to contain up to 1.8 billion barrels of oil.

      In May 2015, ExxonMobil joined fellow oil giants, Chevron and Shell, to negotiate with the Ghanaian government to secure oil blocks in the country. As the CEO of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, Alex Mould, explained to a local radio station, They are the big boys. They wait for you to develop the fields, and then they come in when they believe the prospectivity is within their range.¹⁶ Rockefeller Financial Services (which manages investments for wealthy clients and was chaired until recently by David Rockefeller Jr.) has huge stock holdings as of September 2016 in all three companies, owning shares worth over $44.6 million in Chevron, over $90.7 million in ExxonMobil, and over $7 million in Royal Dutch Shell.¹⁷

      Such is the pattern of conquest the Rockefellers, with their enormous wealth and power, have utilized throughout the world for decades.

      Something Had to Be Done

      As witness and purveyor of global expansion for nearly a century, David Sr. had to face down numerous eruptions around the world in protest against what rural Americans once called The Great Octopus with its tentacles of Rockefeller influence. As he often stated when explaining a crisis in his Memoirs, Something had to be done.

      To contain the populist upheavals in Latin America beginning in the 1960s, David realized he needed a concerted effort [by] the private sector, and in October 1963, he formed the Business Council of Latin America. Two years later, he assumed the chairmanship of the council, which boasted two hundred corporations as members and in 1970 changed its name, dropping the word business and creating the Council of the Americas.

      To arrest the spread of electoral socialism in Latin America in 1973, David and Nelson, along with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, looked forward to the overthrow of Marxist president Salvador Allende of Chile, who had campaigned, according to David, for the presidency on a platform of radical land reform, the expropriation of all foreign corporations, the nationalization of banks, and other measures that would have put his country firmly on the road to Socialism.¹⁸

      To weaken the Iranian revolution in 1979 which overthrew their close friend and ally, the Shah of Iran, David and Nelson were able to convince President Jimmy Carter to freeze Iran’s petro-dollar deposits in Chase bank in retaliation for the revolutionaries’ taking diplomats and CIA spies hostage, thus preventing Ayatollah Khomeini’s planned withdrawal of millions from Chase’s London branch.¹⁹

      To alleviate concerns in the investment community following the 1994 Zapatista revolt of indigenous Maya against NAFTA, Chase Manhattan’s Emerging Markets Group circulated an internal memo on January 13, 1995 (subsequently leaked to the press), stating, The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy. A subsequent disclaimer by Chase—that the offending passage had originally merely stated the need to eliminate the Zapatista threat—did little to quell Zapatistas’ suspicions of attempted US intervention against them.²⁰

      To curtail the spread of radical Islamic movements after 9/ll, David created an Iran Working Group made up of former ambassadors to the Middle East; the group ultimately succeeded in negotiating with moderate Iranians the framework for the controversial 2016 nuclear deal.²¹

      Through every crisis, Rockefeller has never wavered in his belief in a capitalist world to set things right. To achieve his ends, he has joined, and, in some cases formed, international forums where some of the world’s most powerful leaders could congregate to discuss the world’s problems: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission (created by David and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 when the Bilderberg Group refused to admit Japan into its discussions on creating a new world order.)

      Crusaders for a New World Order

      Calling himself a proud Internationalist, David, in his Memoirs, debunks the populist paranoia of ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum who attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. … Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal … conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.²²

      David admitted that the Trilateral Commission has been particularly controversial. Why? The answer lies with the first powerful leader to emerge from the Trilateral Commission: Georgia governor and future president Jimmy Carter. Described by Rockefeller as an obscure Democratic governor of Georgia, Carter’s attendance at the first Trilateral meeting would produce an unintended consequence. Carter would go on to run for and win the presidency of the United States. He loyally touted free trade during his campaign and gave a Trilateral-sponsored speech in Brazil, but David claims his well-funded election came as a surprise. David’s self-proclaimed astonishment did not end there: There was a great deal of surprise, then, when he chose 15 members of Trilateral, many of whom had served in previous administrations, for his team, including Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security advisor. Predictably, Rockefeller observes, I was accused of trying to take control of Carter’s foreign policy.²³

      In fact, the Rockefellers have tried to control, or at least shape, the foreign policies of many US presidents before and after Jimmy Carter. The Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (which David chaired from 1970 to 1985) alienated many career State Department officials during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because CFR officials involved in its secret postwar studies group took over most of State’s postwar planning committees.

      Early in his term, President John F. Kennedy relied on counterinsurgency strategies that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Panel on National Security Studies chaired by Henry Kissinger had developed. A chart in Thy Will be Done reveals the High Kennedy Appointments from the Rockefeller Network.

      Bill Clinton, an eager member of the Trilateral Commission whom the Council on Foreign Relations mentored in power and global corporate strategy, owed his rapid rise to governor of Arkansas and, eventually, US president, to the support of followers of former Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller, the wealthiest and one of the most powerful corporate leaders in the state.²⁴

      The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission similarly mentored Barack Obama. He owed his meteoric rise to the White House largely to financial support from allies of liberal Democratic senator John D. Jay Rockefeller IV, former governor of West Virginia and son of John D. Rockefeller III. Jay can be seen smiling in photos as he stood behind Barack Obama during the latter’s first inauguration. Jay threw elaborate fundraisers for Obama at his estate near Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC.²⁵

      Another enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama was former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a protégé and advisor of Nelson and David Rockefeller. After Obama’s election, Kissinger enthused on MSNBC in January 2009 that Obama would give new impetus to American foreign policy, partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It’s a great opportunity. It isn’t just a crisis. ²⁶ As it turned out, Barak Obama was not able to deliver a new world order, due to massive dislocations of populations resulting from endless wars in the Middle East, NAFTA, and the scourge of climate change.

      Reforming ExxonMobil

      It is not without irony that some of David Rockefeller’s children and their cousins have played a major role in acknowledging, rather than denying, the role of fossil fuels in creating global warning. The decision to take on ExxonMobil, the largest of the corporate offspring of their great-grandfather’s illegal Standard Oil Trust, began in 2006 when Sen. Jay Rockefeller, asked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to cease financing groups that, against almost all scientific findings, still denied climate change. Jay Rockefeller got nowhere. A decade later, David’s daughter, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, went public against ExxonMobil in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times entitled Why I lost faith in Exxon Mobil, and donated my shares.

      Neva charged that Exxon, in the 1980s, despite an earlier acceptance of climate warming by some of its scientists, began to finance think tanks and researchers who cast doubt on the reliability of climate science.²⁷ For years, she and other family members introduced shareholders’ resolutions calling for the corporation to begin the move from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. They couched their advocacy by heralding their great-great-grandfather’s genius in having the foresight to invest in oil in the nineteenth century and build Standard Oil into an unparalleled success. They were troubled that ExxonMobil had become Public Enemy No. 1 as a result of the company’s lying about the effects of climate change and its disastrous environmental record. This, they reasoned, could affect the company’s bottom line. ExxonMobil had already emerged as one of the worst polluters in US history, responsible for huge oil spills in New York, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alaska.²⁸ But they expressed their concerns in financial rather than moral terms, challenging ExxonMobil to stop lagging behind other oil companies’ (profitable) commitments to transition away from fossil fuels.

      However, if they were hoping for family unity at the shareholders meetings, they were disappointed. Nelson Rockefeller Jr. and Mark Rockefeller, the younger sons of Nelson Rockefeller and his second wife Happy, were conspicuously absent from the roster of signers. So were three of the four children of Nelson’s conservative son Rodman: Michael S. Rockefeller, Meile Louise Rockefeller, and Peter Clark Rockefeller (although brother Stuart signed). Nelson’s grandson Steven Rockefeller Jr. did not sign, although his sister Jennifer and Aunt Mary did. George Dorr O’Neill Jr., son of Abby Rockefeller O’Neill, did not sign, unlike his sister Abby M. O’Neill and his brother Peter M. O’Neill, one of the leaders of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s later planned disinvestment from fossil fuels. None of Winthrop Rockefeller or Laurance Rockefeller’s families signed, despite Laurance’s daughter-in-law Wendy Gordon Rockefeller’s stated concerns for the environment.

      Their resolution was soundly defeated.²⁹

      Moving beyond this embarrassment, the Rockefeller cousins then announced in September 2014, that they had no choice but to publicly withdraw their support for ExxonMobil’s fossil fuel policy and divest their ExxonMobil stocks.

      ExxonMobil, led by CEO Rex Tillerson, denied any intentional wrongdoing when confronted with subsequent investigations by the attorneys general of New York and California, claiming its questioning of scientists’ warnings was before the evidence was conclusive, insisting that climate science was in an early stage of development, according to emails from Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers to CBS MoneyWatch.³⁰ In January 2017, at his carefully watched confirmation hearings to be Trump’s secretary of state, Tillerson cautiously acknowledged that climate change was real, but that the threat it posed was still unclear.³¹

      President Trump’s choice of the CEO of the most powerful oil company in the world put to rest any doubts that oil and American foreign policy are inextricably linked (and indeed have been since the term oleaginous diplomacy in Washington, DC, emerged in the aftermath of World War I).³² By 2015, with $349.49 billion in assets generating $21.96 billion in net income, Tillerson’s ExxonMobil was truly a force to be reckoned with as the world’s largest oil refiner, largest of the super-major energy companies, and Fortune 500’s second most profitable corporation in the world.³³

      The Russian Connection

      Rex Tillerson has played a major role in advancing ExxonMobil into Eastern Siberia. He and Vladimir Putin struck a deal in 2011 when ExxonMobil entered into joint development projects in the Tuapse field in the northeast Black Sea and the East-Prinovozemelsky field in the far-north Kara Sea.³⁴ ExxonMobil’s partner in these projects was Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil company with close ties to Putin. The partnership was working so well that the following year, Rosneft struck another agreement with Tillerson to have ExxonMobil assess the prospect of producing tight oil locked in Western Siberia’s shale formations.³⁵ After a massive oil discovery by ExxonMobil in Russia, however, Tillerson lost all four promising projects when the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Rosneft in retaliation for Russia’s annexation of the strategic Crimea and its backing of an ethnic Russian separatist movement in northeastern Ukraine.³⁶ ExxonMobil’s loss from the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration could amount to one billion dollars unless the Trump administration, including Tillerson now as secretary of state, reverses Obama’s policy.

      Although Rockefeller family members are absent from the board of ExxonMobil, this does not mean they are not investing in oil,³⁷ including oil in the former Soviet Union. Indeed, one member of the Rockefeller family who has chosen not to challenge ExxonMobil’s positions on climate change at its annual meetings is Nelson’s grandson, Steven Rockefeller Jr. Young Rockefeller has quietly formed his own oil company and is investing heavily in Russia’s Western Siberia.

      On July 5, 2012, he incorporated Rockefeller Oil Company and on February 17, 2014, was joined on this company’s board by Dietrich Wilhelm Prinz von Erbach-Schönberg, a direct heir to the Erbach-Schönberg fortune, one of the oldest in Europe. Together, they had Rockefeller Oil buy 100 percent of one of Russia’s largest oil and gas companies, the giant Techneftinvesta, with over 180 million tons of oil reserves and 20 billion cubic meters of natural gas, so large, in fact, that private Russian oil firms backed off, leaving the field to Steven’s $1 billion bid.

      With unnamed collateral, Steven arranged this huge financing through Russia’s VTB Bank,³⁸ bankrupting Techneftinvesta’s major creditor to the tune of $291 million in debt. This deal made Steven Rockefeller Jr. one of the largest owners of Russian oil and gas.

      Steven’s sister, Valerie, who chairs the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is married to Steven Wayne, a major investor in real estate in St. Peterburg.³⁹

      This experience within the former Soviet empire was shared by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s former president Stephen Heintz. In 1990, Heintz became director of the Institute for East-West Studies’ European Studies Center in Prague, Czechoslovakia. With the help of Douglas Bennet, President Clinton’s former head of the State Department’s Agency for International Development (AID), Heintz landed the job in time to witness the revolts in Soviet-controlled Central and Eastern Europe.⁴⁰ Heintz made his way back to New York and to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2000, thanks to grants to his Prague center by the Fund. Working under David Rockefeller’s son, Richard Gilder Rockefeller, Heintz oversaw RBF’s growth as its endowment increased from corporate investments during the stock market boom of 2001–2006.

      In 2006, David Rockefeller gave RBF another $225 million to launch the David Rockefeller Global Development Fund, ballooning the RBF endowment to well over $860 million.

      Despite the triumphalism he felt when the Soviet Union collapsed (a feat attributed largely to Zbigniew Brzezinski),⁴¹ David had to reconcile himself with certain realities, including the survival of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and the emergence of popularly elected, progressive governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia during the Middle East–centric administration of George W. Bush.⁴² These countries’ rejection of foreign control over their destinies, to the point of electing to form their own trade blocks—such as the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China)—has kept David’s Council of the Americas busy in casting doubts on their viability.⁴³

      In Brazil, conservative politicians actually facing legal charges of corruption were able to launch a successful democratic regime change to impeach and remove President Lula da Silva’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, on charges of budgetary manipulation. Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer, immediately pushed for austerity cuts including the minimum wage for pensioners. But even Temer has been snared in Brazil’s widening corruption scandal, having been caught on tapes demanding bribes—charges similar to those which have already landed in jail his ally who led the impeachment campaign against Rousseff in the Brazilian Congress’s lower house, former speaker Eduardo Cunha.⁴⁴

      With the return to power of new-liberalism to Brazil has come renewed assaults on the Brazilian Amazon and its indigenous tribes. In August 2017, a group of gold miners went on a murderous rampage against ten members of an uncontacted tribe. They were later overheard boasting in a bar about cutting up their bodies and tossing them into the river. Reported the New York Times, federal prosecutors in Brazil have opened an investigation into the reported massacre. … The latest evidence that threats to endangered indigenous groups are on the rise in the country. Funding for the protection of Indians has been slashed under Temer as he seeks support from powerful agricultural, ranching and mining lobbies to push economic changes through Congress and shelter him from a corruption investigation.⁴⁵

      As with Venezuela, so with Brazil, the Council of the Americas has weighed in on the side of the conservative opposition.⁴⁶ James Naylor Green, author of We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, in 2016 foresaw the Brazilian senators’ coup as part of a plan that had been articulated by sectors of the opposition—to eliminate the president from her office; then to find a way to make Lula, President Lula, ineligible for election in 2018 to the presidency; then to install a neoliberal economic policy.⁴⁷ In July 2017, Green’s predictions were borne out: Lula was convicted of corruption and money laundering and sentenced to more than nine years in prison, a move described by the Washington Post as a stunning blow to a man once hailed across the hemisphere as an innovative leftist leader. … The verdict represents a major setback for the popular leader’s political aspirations. Lula remains a free man while appealing the verdict.⁴⁸ The Brazilian people, meanwhile, have been left exhausted, according to Intercept columnist Glenn Greenwald, by endless corruption scandals and contemptuous of the entire political class.⁴⁹

      David Rockefeller did not live to see a hoped-for downfall of the leftist former president, and his Council of the Americas (COA) was cautious with its predictions following the verdict. For Brazil’s Lula, It’s Not Over Yet, wrote COA Quarterly editor Brian Winter:

      The 71-year-old former labor leader oversaw a long economic boom from 2003 to 2010, and left office with an approval rating of almost 90 percent. While tarnished since then by Brazil’s economic collapse and the Car Wash [corruption] case, Lula remains a folk hero to many. He leads polls for elections next October, and is rising as some Brazilians hunger for a return to the stability and prosperity of the 2000s, ethics be damned⁵⁰

      Predictably, David’s Memoirs reflected his long-held belief that capitalism would triumph over all, noting at the end that he was still convinced that the ability to make profits is a critical element in society’s progress.⁵¹ Just before David’s death, however, Richard Haass, current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a book with the unsettling title, A World in Disarray. It describes how rules that have guided the world since World War II have largely run their course and that the gap between the challenges generated by globalization and the ability of the world to cope with them appears to be widening.⁵²

      Trilateral Commission cofounder Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died three months after David on May 27, 2017, was equally wary when he decided in April 2016 to put the past four centuries—centuries, which in fact correspond with the birth and expansion of corporate capitalism—under a more discerning microscope in order to understand the startling upsurge of worldwide discontent against corporate globalization. In an article appearing in The American Interest, he provided an extraordinary recitation of crimes against humanity, or as he calls it, the slaughter of colonized people brought on by Western European (and US) powers.

      As one of the national security theoreticians of the upper class 1 percent, Brzezinski was forced to face an inescapable and potentially dangerous reality: In today’s postcolonial world, a new historical narrative is emerging. A profound resentment against the West and its colonial legacy in Muslim countries and beyond is being used to justify their sense of deprivation and denial of self-dignity.⁵³

      This could be interpreted as a way of saying that the time has come for the world’s rulers to update their political inoculations against spreading revolution to include the race for global development before time runs out.

      One of the world’s more prescient billionaires, Amazon.com investor Nick Hanauer caused a sensation with his 2014 essay in Politico entitled The Pitchforks Are Coming … For Us Plutocrats He warned fellow zillionaires that if we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.⁵⁴

      Neither Brzezinski nor Hanauer, nor, for that matter, the fourth and fifth generations of the Rockefeller dynasty, seemed willing to discuss how corporate capitalism per se has played a role in a worldwide upsurge of anger, whether a new economic system is needed, or that a new system might grow out of the old and what it might look like. For now, as long as the profits continue to roll in, the painful process of reassessing corporate capitalism and the power of its elites seems to have been put on hold.

      But reassessment cannot be indefinitely delayed. The world is becoming too educated and too informed by the internet, as Mr. Brzezinski pointed out in his 2010 address to the Council on Foreign Relations:

      [A] major change in international affairs is that for the first time in all of human history ... people know what is generally going on in the world and are consciously aware of global iniquities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. ... Mankind is now politically awakened and staring. ... The diversified global leadership [and] politically awakened masses, makes a much more difficult context for any major power including, currently, the leading world power, the United States.

      David Rockefeller, in his later years, set about restoring the image of the first three generations of Rockefellers as wise stewards of wealth and generous givers of money. This image, carefully cultivated for decades by the Rockefeller family offices at Rockefeller Center and the family foundations, had been tainted in 1969 when Nelson, envoy of newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon, was greeted with riots and pelted with rocks and tomatoes during his goodwill tour of Latin America. Then came the embarrassing revelation of details of the family’s finances in 1973 during Nelson’s confirmation as vice president of the United States.⁵⁵ David disclosed in his Memoirs that he was determined to reverse what he called the dismal decades⁵⁶ of the 1960s and ’70s—the very period chronicled in Thy Will Be Done on Nelson Rockefeller’s impact on our southern neighbors.

      In 1994, David Rockefeller donated one million dollars to Harvard University to set up the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Its aim was to increase knowledge of the cultures, economies, histories, environment, and contemporary affairs of past and present Latin America. Rockefeller pledged to give another ten million dollars over time.

      In 2010, in anticipation of his ninety-fifth birthday, David Rockefeller was heralded by Poder magazine as a Lion of the Americas. According to the magazine’s Facebook page, Poder (which, intriguingly, is Spanish for power) is a magazine with extraordinary clout: the premier Hispanic business publication for U.S. Hispanic/Latino leaders, entrepreneurs and decision makers with a focus on intelligence for the business elite.

      Poder’s tribute predictably gave the business elite’s point of view on David’s impact on Latin America, with Nelson’s decades-long involvement in all conceivable aspects of Latin American life reduced to one sentence mentioning his service as secretary of state for Latin America during World War II:

      Few if any individuals have had a greater personal impact in the Americas than David Rockefeller, whose lifelong interest has contributed significantly to building a regional policy framework that promotes democracy, open markets, and the rule of law. Latin America has been in the Rockefeller family DNA since early in the last century, from his grandfather’s well-known and documented commercial interests to older brother Nelson Rockefeller’s service as the first Assistant Secretary of State for the region. Later on, nephew Rodman Rockefeller took an active leadership role of the Mexico-U.S. … [After] World War II, David Rockefeller launched the next phase of his life by going to work for Chase bank and leading its expansion throughout the hemisphere.⁵⁷

      What the 2010 Poder tribute to David did not anticipate, however, was a sudden and dramatic shift in world public opinion against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that David, above all businessmen, promoted into law. This shift in opinion came to a head during the Obama administration, when the much-promised fruits of corporate globalization began to turn sour as corporations shuttered factories in the American homeland and moved to cheap labor and growing consumer markets abroad in countries like China.

      Until his death, David kept in touch with what was going on in the world. He retained honorary board titles at the Council on Foreign Relations (which hosts the Studies Office he oversaw for years and now bears his name), the Council of the Americas/Americas Society, and the Trilateral Commission. He still owned a summer home on Mount Desert Island, Maine; a luxury apartment at Manhattan’s East 65th Street; his late wife’s farm in Livingston, New York; a 4,000-acre resort in the Virgin Islands, a 15,500-acre sheep ranch in Argentina, and a cattle ranch in Argentina. His main residence was Hudson Pines, the family’s Pocantico estate overlooking the Hudson where he died. At sylvan Pocantico, David’s portrait hangs in what had been the Playhouse for him, his brothers, and his sister. He is depicted in a World War II army captain’s uniform. Portraits of his older brothers John III, Laurance, and Winthrop also hang here, resplendent in their service uniforms proudly worn during World War II—but there is no picture of a uniformed Nelson due to his civilian status as the coordinator of inter-American affairs and assistant secretary of state for Latin America.

      Yet, if David owed most to any of his brothers, it was to Nelson. It was Nelson who urged David to found Chase Bank’s Latin American division, whose success contributed, along with his family’s stockholdings, to David’s rise in the bank. It was Nelson who first pushed for economic integration of the Americas during the 1960 presidential campaign and stimulated David’s founding of the Council of the Americas a few years later—an initiative that eventually found fruition after Nelson’s death by David’s push in Congress and the Clinton White House for NAFTA. It was Nelson who, as New York governor, brought crucial state office rentals to the World Trade Center promoted by David. It was Nelson who brought Henry Kissinger into David’s life as a trusted confidante and friend. It was Nelson who encouraged the founding of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund during World War II and brought the brothers into the secret world of Cold War intelligence, including David’s friendship with CIA Director Allen Dulles. It was Nelson who offered to make David a US senator by appointing him to the Senate seat made empty by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination (David declined). Finally, it was Nelson, the family bully, who—as usual—got his way in his demands on David and his brothers over the use of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in soft intelligence. David, who writes extensively about Nelson’s efforts to control the RBF, describes his brother as ever the hard charger, [who] refused to be bridled. ⁵⁸

      Nelson Rockefeller cast a long shadow over his siblings’ lives. Now, at the end of David’s life, it is to the extraordinary influence of Nelson’s life that we now turn.

      —Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Burlington, Vermont, September 2017

      1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PePhZyxNfrM This is a compilation of clips from various sources about David Rockefeller and the building of the World Trade Center. The scene of him describing how he watched the towers fall shows a credit to ABC, but no date is provided.

      2 Charlie Rose show, October 12, 2002.

      3 Rockefeller Archives Center Newsletter, Fall 2001.

      4 The four brothers’ investments diversified well beyond these basic fields. For example, in the obituary of Laurance S. Rockefeller (1910–2004), the Rockefeller Archives stated that Laurance became well known as an investor of risk capital in young enterprises whose future was based primarily on scientific and technological developments. Over the years his investment interests included the fields of aviation, aerospace, electronics, high temperature physics, composite materials, optics, lasers, data processing, thermionics, instrumentation and nuclear power. Beginning in August 1969, his venture capital investments in these areas were made through a venture capital group, Venrock, formed by members of the Rockefeller family. Thy Will be Done (at page 373) has a chart entitled Rockefeller Investments in the Military Industrial Complex that would surprise many readers, especially regarding the extent of the family’s investments in nuclear power. Young Justin Rockefeller’s involvement in promoting data-mining technology at Silicon Valley and stewarding the wealth of billionaires is outdistanced easily by Steven Rockefeller Jr.’s investments in Russian oil and gas and Chinese real estate developments.

      5 Amy Davidson, A Hostage to Christie in Hobokine, The New Yorker, January 20, 2014. See also Re-Investment Firm Pays $11 million for Newark mixed-use space, December 12, 2013. https://www.law360.com/articles/495289/re-investment-firm-pays-11m-for-newark-mixed-use-space

      6 Roswell L. Gilpatric, interview, Columbia University Oral History Project, 83.

      7 David Rockefeller, Memoirs, (New York: Random House, 2002), 427.

      8 Ibid.

      9 The Nation, February 27, 1967.

      10 The Big Business of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Forbes, March 6, 2013.

      11 Ibid.

      12 Who the top donors are of Wycliffe Associates is undisclosed in its annual report and its 990 IRS filings.

      Wycliffe Translators Foundation applies the same lack of disclosure about its corporate holdings. Wycliffe Translators Foundation reported in 2014 investments worth $23.6 million; of that, 5.4 million was invested in undisclosed corporate common stock, $1.3 million in undisclosed corporate bonds and $13 million in undisclosed mutual funds. In addition, $4.9 million more was deposited with RIA Charitable Investment Funds (RIAC II), an investment fund set up at SIL International’s Dallas headquarters as a pool for Wycliffe Global Alliance members and sister organizations, which reported assets of $75.5 million in 2014. RIA Charitable Investments describes itself a religious fundraising organization that brings in $58.3 million in annual income and, according to its website, is one of the largest organizations of its kind. Its stock holdings also were undisclosed in its 990 IRS report in 2015, but it did reveal the structure of Wycliffe International’s corporate shells: the Wycliffe Seed Company and the Wycliffe Bible Translators International, Inc., which is in turn a voting member of Wycliffe Bible Translators International (Wycliffe International).

      13 Maps and charts describing this process in Latin America appear in Thy Will Be Done.

      14 Thirty percent of Ghana’s population are Muslim. WBT/SIL has been criticized by fellow evangelists and mainstream Protestants for omitting the words God the Father and Son of God from their Bible translations to avoid offending Muslims, who view Christ as a great prophet but not the son of God. Beginning in 2012, the Presbyterian Church of America rebuked the WBT for its waywardness and recommended that its local churches withdraw financial support unless the translations were corrected to conform with traditional Christian theology. See, e.g., Michael Ross, The Son of God and Muslim Idiom Translations, The Christian Research Institute 2013, http://www.equip.org/article/the-son-of-god-and-muslim-idiom-translations and Ruth Moon, Will New Guidelines Solve Wycliffe’s Two-Year Bible Translation Controversy? Christianity Today, May 10, 2013. Notes Moon: The translation tension also points to the broader challenge of communicating the gospel with Muslim cultures. … The Christian gospel directly contradicts Muslim teaching by saying that Jesus is also God, and there’s no way to avoid that teaching without losing the gospel message.

      15 Oliver Bach, Big Men: The New Film about the Meeting of Ghana, Oil and Wall Street, The Guardian, April 2, 2014.

      16 Chevron, Shell and Exxon Mobil express interest in Ghana’s oil, JoyOnline, May 6, 2014. http://www.myjoyonline.com/business/2014/June-5th/chevron-shell-and-exxon-mobil-express-interest-in-ghanas-oil.php

      17 www.nasdaq.com/quotes/instituional-portfolio/Rockefeller-Financial-Servces. September 30, 2016.

      18 David admitted to discussions among his friend Augustin Edwards, publisher of Chile’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio, and Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger, leading to an increase in clandestine financial subsidies by the Nixon administration to groups opposing Allende. When CIA efforts failed to stop the ascension to power of Allende, the Chilean leader made good on his promises to nationalize large scale industries and banks. He expropriated American corporate holdings and carried out seizures of land, including Edwards’ property, for redistribution to landless peasants. David gave the expropriated Edwards family shelter and support in the United States. What happened next David summarized in one short paragraph: The Chilean middle class became alienated, the military under General Ugarte revolted and stormed the presidential palace, and Allende committed suicide. Rockefeller, Memoirs, 433.

      In 2011, the state-run Chilean TV network, TVN, reported uncovering a secret military report that indicated that Allende did not kill himself but instead was assassinated. Chile TV: Secret military report on Allende’s death raises doubts about suicide, The Washington Post, May 31, 2011.

      19 Charlotte Dennett, The Hostage Families, Suffering in Silence, The Nation, December 13, 1980. David Rockefeller, for his part, devotes a chapter to his relationship with the Shah in his Memoirs and states that President Carter’s freeze of official Iranian assets, protected our position, but no one at Chase played a role in convincing the administration to institute it.

      20 Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, 75 Years Later, Today’s Zapatistas Still Fight the Rockefeller Legacy, The Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1995.

      21 For more on the involvement of the Rockefeller

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