by Gerard Colby
David Rockefeller’s Chase Bank, of course, had long backed dictatorial reigns in Cuba, both Batista’s and that of his predecessor, Gerardo Machado. When the revolution came, there went the value of notes issued by these regimes, one of the largest holders of which was Chase.
Finally—and for one Rockefeller, fatally—there were the holdings of Freeport Sulphur in Cuba, one of the largest and richest nickel deposits in all the world. On Freeport’s board a number of Rockefeller allies and Rockefeller family members had sat.44
In 1959, on the heels of Cuba’s new tax laws (which effectively nationalized the country’s mineral resources, including Freeport’s rich Nicaro deposits), Freeport had initiated a search for a new, equally lucrative investment. The company found it in Dutch New Guinea, unleashing a chain of events that brought personal tragedy into Nelson Rockefeller’s life.
COPPER MOUNTAIN
Don Gregory was worried. The tropical night sea had turned ugly. Wind lashed his face with water from the twenty-foot tide swelling the black waters beneath him. His small boat no longer obeyed its rudder and bounced helplessly to and fro atop the wave. Time was running out.
The tide would rush up along the banks of the Eilanden River and then reverse itself, pouring back down toward him at the river’s mouth in a crashing wave. It was just such a wave that had swamped Michael Rockefeller’s catamaran, stalling its outboard engines and pushing Rockefeller and his companions out into the vast Arafura Sea. This south coastland of Dutch New Guinea, Holland’s last colonial possession in the South Pacific, was infamous for its treacherous waters.
The fuel gauge was low. Gregory informed the Dutch colonial policeman sitting at the other end of the boat. Both of them, hearing over the radio that Rockefeller’s party was lost at sea, had grabbed a boat and took a tribesman along as a guide through the mangroved coastland. They were the first to search the area. Gregory hoped to be useful as an interpreter. He belonged to the Evangelical Alliance Mission, whose members received excellent linguistic training in Australia from SIL. He was studying the language of former headhunters who lived along the Asmat coast where Rockefeller would have to come ashore. But now, after hours of searching in the dark, it was getting too dangerous. “There’s not much point in losing three more lives too,” Gregory said to his companions.45’ He turned the boat around and headed for shore, leaving Michael Rockefeller to God.
At the other side of the globe, 10,000 miles away, Nelson Rockefeller was lunching with David at Pocantico, when the phone rang. Over a scratchy radio telephone transmission, Nelson heard a Dutch official garble the ominous news: Michael was missing at sea. That night, Nelson boarded a plane for the South Pacific with Michael’s twin sister, Mary.
Of Nelson’s three sons, his second—impetuous, adventuresome Michael—was his favorite, probably because he most reminded Nelson of himself. Like Nelson when he was young, Michael had tried to please his father by working in various Rockefeller enterprises. He did his best at Nelson’s vast ranch in Venezuela and at an IBEC-owned supermarket in Puerto Rico. But a taste of Latin America only whetted his appetite for adventure.
Like Nelson before him, Michael rebelled at the thought of entering the family business. He preferred to leave the great weight of family responsibilities to his more staid eldest brother Rodman, much as Nelson had left the burden of administering Junior’s charities to his elder brother, John 3rd.
Michael, too, was probably unaware of the Rockefeller forces that shaped the circumstances of his own search for meaning and identity in Dutch New Guinea. His adventure in the South Pacific began a year after he graduated cum laude from Harvard. His interest peaked when his former Harvard roommate, photographer Sam Putnam, asked him if he would like to come as his assistant on the Peabody Museum’s anthropological expedition. Michael did not hesitate. “It’s the desire to do something romantic and adventurous,” Michael explained to his father, “at a time when frontiers in the real sense of the word are disappearing.”46
Nelson could not resist his son’s request to join the expedition. Michael offered to collect tribal art in New Guinea for Nelson’s new Museum of Primitive Art. It had been exactly thirty years before, while honeymooning in Asia, that Nelson had bought his first piece of primitive art on the island of Sumatra, then a Dutch East Indies colony. It was his first indulgence in what became a lifelong passion. Now his son, made a director of the Museum of Primitive Art, wanted to carry on the tradition.
To Westerners, New Guinea was like a gifted child pulled in opposite directions by covetous guardians. The Dutch clung to the western half as the sole remnant of their once-vast East Indies empire. Their longtime British allies, acting through Australia, controlled the eastern half. Neighboring Indonesians, on the other hand, thought that all New Guinea was part of their national territory, even if it was still colonized by Europeans.
In 1955, when nationalist Prime Minister Sukarno coined the term Third World at the first Conference of Non-Aligned Nations at Bandung, it was obvious that Indonesia, a mostly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu nation of almost 82 million people, would oppose the expansion of Western cultural influence not only in its own territory, but in nearby New Guinea.
In 1959, Freeport Sulphur, mindful of possible revenue losses from anticipated Cuban nickel expropriations, sent scientists to Amsterdam to blow the dust off a 1936 report on a rich copper outcrop found by a Royal Dutch Shell geologist deep in the central mountains of New Guinea, where Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey had joint exploration rights through a jointly held subsidiary. The Dutch were more than willing to assist. They had longstanding business ties to American financiers, including the Rockefellers. A team of American geologists went to Dutch New Guinea in 1960 to conduct a field survey. After consulting with evangelical missionaries about native traits, they plunged into the tribal highlands, traveling by dugout canoes and overland into the central highland’s Baliem Valley and the Ertsberg, the “Copper Mountain” discovered a quarter century before. When they emerged, they happily conveyed their secret to Freeport’s New York headquarters: They had discovered one of the world’s richest deposits of copper, indeed a whole mountain of almost pure copper.
Copper Mountain and the Death of Michael Rockefeller
Sources: Forbes Wilson, The Conquest of Copper Mountain; Milt Machlin, Search for Michael Rockefeller various contemporaneous news services.
There was only one problem: The mountain tribes were stubbornly independent and protective of their lands. Likewise, the tribes along the remote coastland to the south had only recently been persuaded to give up head-hunting for religious ceremonies.
Ten years of Dutch missionary efforts to pacify the tribes had failed to eradicate older tribal gods as powerful symbols of an indigenous culture. More missionaries were needed, especially linguistically trained American ones. Such recruitment goals required greater public interest in New Guinea in the United States. To win acceptance by American academe, however, and to pave the way for massive injections of U.S. foreign aid, the Dutch needed more prestigious American social scientists in New Guinea.
To both Freeport Sulphur and the Dutch, that meant social scientists from Harvard.
COLLECTING DEATH
In the early 1960s, just before Freeport Sulphur’s expedition got under way, the Dutch director of the Bureau of Native Affairs in New Guinea traveled to the United States to make the necessary arrangements. An experienced intelligence officer, Dr. Victor De Bruyn47 knew that Dutch control over New Guinea was facing a challenge: Indonesian nationalism.
In New York, he advised Freeport’s top geologist on how best to reach the Ertsberg Mountain with as little commotion as possible. Then he urged the Film Study Center at Harvard’s Peabody Museum to mount an anthropological expedition to the Baliem Valley. The center’s founder, thirty-five-year-old Robert Gardner, quickly mounted the expedition. To research New Guinea’s tribes he traveled to the New York headquarters of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (
C&MA), SIL’s closest collaborators. C&MA’s evangelical missionaries gave the unmistakable impression that the tribesmen were “deceitful and barbaric pagans, driven by the devil to loot and kill as they fancied.”
Arriving with the Harvard expedition in New Guinea in March 1961, Michael dove into his work with gusto. He had no airs. His natural curiosity worked wonders with the children of the Kurulu tribe, who were eager to have this friendly white man try to explain the marvel of a wristwatch or the miracle of tape recordings. His scientific interest grew. He taped the tribesmen’s strange means of making music by grinding their teeth with the same zeal he showed in recording their drums and war chants.
On a side trip to the Asmat, the southern coastal lowlands, in mid-August, he decried the violence done tribal psyches when the Euro-American economic hurricane ripped up the roots of an indigenous culture. “The Asmat is filled with a kind of tragedy,” he wrote his parents,
for many of the villages have reached the point where they are beginning to doubt their own culture and crave things Western. There is everywhere a depressing respect for white man’s shirt and pants, no matter how tattered and dirty, even though these doubtful symbols of another world seem to hide a proud form and replace a far finer … form of dress.… Like every other corner of the world [the Asmat] is being sucked into a world economy and a world culture which insists on economic plenty as a primary ideal.48
But he also found himself being drawn into this very process of destruction after he discovered the power and beauty of the art of the Asmat tribes. The Asmat villages brimmed with treasures. Michael started collecting all he could, trading steel hatchets, which the Asmat tribesmen found most useful.
Asmat art became important to Michael because it was a bond between the world of his father, whom he revered, and his own world of aesthetics and science. In the end, he amassed one of the largest collections of Southwest Pacific primitive art in the world.
Michael decided to stay when the Harvard expedition ended in September. After a brief visit home, where he encountered the upsetting news of his parents’ imminent divorce, he flew back to New Guinea and made preparations for a second trip to the coast, losing himself in his work.
There was a dark side to Michael’s work, however. He collected beautifully painted human skulls, rare in recent years, since missionaries had persuaded the tribes to give up head-hunting. “A single axehead in some areas could buy the labor of a small village for a day,” commented one investigator.49 Michael was offering ten steel hatchets for each skull.
The Dutch authorities were aghast. They tried to warn him off because “he was creating a demand that could not be met without bloodshed.”50
In two months, he had collected more than fifty pieces of Asmat art, including figurines, shields, and skulls. With two Papuan paddlers and a Dutch ethnologist who were collecting primitive art for Rotterdam’s museum, Michael set out in a catamaran and headed through the Arafura Sea to barter for skulls and elaborately carved totemlike bisj poles in villages along the coast. His simple craft was fashioned out of two dugout canoes lashed together with a support deck and an eighteen-horsepower outboard motor. Dutch missionaries warned him that the Arafura was treacherous; the twenty-foot tides would surge seventy-five miles up the river’s banks, rush back down, and collide with incoming tides, creating huge waves that overpowered the best Papuan oarsmen.
And that is what happened. A “rolling sea” swamped Michael’s catamaran, stalling its engine and pushing the boat farther out to sea. The two Papuans swam toward shore for help. They alerted the colonial authorities, prompting the radio news that inspired missionary Don Gregory’s futile effort to rescue Michael and the scratchy phone call that interrupted Nelson’s lunch with David.
Michael’s companion had been rescued. He had seen Michael alive twenty-four hours earlier, but only as a small speck in an angry sea, trying to reach the shore some three miles away. He saw Michael for half an hour, swimming for the shore. Then all he could see were three dots: Michael’s hat and the two bright red gasoline cans he had been using as buoys.51
Michael’s problem was that the tribe on that coast—the very tribe he hoped would save him—had a hatred of white men. Their war chief, Ajam, had sworn revenge for his kin who had been slain a few years before, when the Dutch military raided the coast in a punitive expedition that used submachine guns. In fact, the bisj poles, recorded by French filmmakers in The Sky Above, the Mud Below, were erected as revenge poles, their human figures appearing to be Europeans. In the film, Ajam is seen overseeing warriors carving the very poles that inspired Michael’s visit to Otsjanep. Later, when Michael finally emerged from the sea after his long swim, he found not rescue, but death from Ajam’s party. He was speared just below his left collarbone as he came ashore. He was still alive when taken upriver; killed with an axe; and, in the religious manner of cannibals seeking the strength of their victims, cooked with sago palm and eaten.52
A SHROUD OF DECEIT
The Dutch governor dared not admit anything that would give credence to Indonesia’s claim for Dutch New Guinea. Any mistreatment of native Papuans had to be covered up.
Nelson had cause to blame the Dutch. Despite Foreign Minister Luns’s personal assurances, the Dutch had not ensured Michael’s safety. They had appointed an ethnographer as Michael’s escort, not a patrol officer. The ethnographer had offered no protection for Michael in an area known by Dutch authorities to be potentially dangerous because of the 1958 killings. Moreover, he did nothing to prevent Michael’s fateful trade in human skulls and bisj poles.
Yet Nelson, in front of the press, had only praise for the Dutch colonial regime. Criticism would have given Indonesia’s President Sukarno ammunition. And Nelson, like the Dutch, had every reason to avoid that.
Standard Oil had been drilling in Indonesia since 1914. Because of large oil fields, mineral resources, and vast rubber plantations, the 2,000-mile-long archipelago had been considered one of the great prizes of the Pacific theater of World War II. Sukarno’s newly independent republic refused to grant any further concessions after 1948, and in 1960, two years after the CIA tried to overthrow him, he prohibited all exploration for oil by foreign companies.
The economic stakes were too high for Nelson to risk a personal vendetta against the Dutch officials for Michael’s death. He would only have undermined Holland’s argument that it had pacified the tribes of West New Guinea and was more qualified than Sukarno, the most outspoken proponent of Third World neutralism in the Cold War. Nelson showed exactly where he stood by staying at the Dutch district commissioner’s home during his entire visit.
On their return trip to the United States, Nelson and daughter Mary found his sons Rodman and Steven, Steven’s wife, Anne-Marie, and his brother David waiting at the airport. Turning to the reporters, Nelson quietly offered a brief eulogy to Michael. “Even as a little boy, he was always aware of people, their feelings, their thoughts. He always loved people, and was loved in turn.”53 Then he climbed into a waiting limousine and began the long, lonely drive to Pocantico through the night.
*As a speechwriter during the 1960 Kennedy campaign, Goodwin had invaded Kings turf, citing Latin America as proof of Republican incompetence. It was he who crafted the phrase Alliance for Progress to signal support for land reform and opposition to dictatorship. Goodwin’s friend and fellow task force member, Robert Alexander of Rutgers, had gone so far as to point out American corporate ties to Argentina’s Perón, Santo Domingo’s Trujillo, and Venezuela’s Pérez Jiménez in his book, The Struggle for Democracy in Latin America.
25
BUILDING THE WARFARE STATE
POCANTICO’S ARMS BAZAAR
Since leaving the Eisenhower White House, Nelson had emerged as the nation’s leading advocate of bomb shelters. He had a massive $4 million bunker built in Albany that could allow 700 top officials to sit quietly through a minimum of two weeks of nuclear hell.1 To lend the issue personal drama, he had a storeroom co
nverted into a shelter under his home at Pocantico2 and had other ones constructed in the basement of his Manhattan town house and his estate house in Washington, D.C. And he encouraged New York’s families to build the $200 bargain-basement models advocated by Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, by pushing tax exemptions in the legislature.
In the governor’s mansion, his passion became macabre: He covered the walls of the red room with maps displaying nuclear bombs exploding in living color.3 His pleadings for shelters became evangelical, whether with legislators or foreign leaders. “He talked to me about nothing but bomb shelters,” complained India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1960. “Why does he think I am interested in bomb shelters? He gave me a pamphlet on how to build my own shelter.”4
President John F. Kennedy worried about this aspect of Nelson’s politics, if only because it gave Nelson an entering wedge into the issue of national defense. Nelson’s chairmanship of the Governors’ Conference Committee on Civil Defense lent his maneuverings a troubling nonpartisan cover. Moreover, Nelson used this position to maintain old friendships at the Pentagon, where the efficacy of “limited” nuclear war had its supporters. Rockefeller, like Kissinger and other participants of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project, accepted this efficacy; Kennedy did not.
It was hard enough for Kennedy to have as his political opponent a liberal, urban-based multimillionaire whose family had longer ties to union leaders (like George Meany) and African American leaders (like Whitney Young), to say nothing of a level of wealth that made the Kennedy fortune seem puny by comparison. But when such economic and political power was allied with top military and civilian officials at the Pentagon, Kennedy’s nervousness had a more realistic foundation than that of an average politician’s paranoia.
