by Gerard Colby
The Rockefellers were not withdrawing from IBEC or from Brazil, only from the management side of the Brazilian securities market they had helped bring into existence. At first, this decision appeared to be based on a desire to keep the fruits of success. Now that Brazil’s securities market was off and running, the Rockefellers had decided to participate as investors. They did, in fact, use some of IBEC’s proceeds from the BIB sale to purchase Brazilian short-term securities.
Nelson Rockefeller and Brazil’s Advancing Northern Frontier
Rockefeller’s economic activities in Brazil’s Center-West pushed the colonization of Goias and southern Mato Grosso with migrants from the restless, impoverished Northeast, developing what one of the leaders of the 1964 military coup, General Golbery do Couta e Silva, called the “central platform” for the conquest of the Amazon. Golbery explained that colonization would “advance from a forward base, developed in the central west and coordinated with an east-west progression following the bed of the great [Amazon] river, [in order] to protect certain frontier points and inundate the Amazon forest with civilization.” Golbery founded the dictatorship’s dreaded secret police, the SNI, which kept close ties with Rockefeller allies. Rockefeller himself carried back from his 1969 visit a secret message from SNI senior officers to President Nixon at a time when repression, Amazon development through U.S. corporations, and Indian genocide were the top items of international concern about U.S. aid to Brazil.
Sources: AIA Archives, IBEC Archives, and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center; Jerry Shields, The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig; Susan Branford and Oriel Glock, The Last Frontier: Fighting over Land in the Amazon; Alexander Cockburn and Susanna B. Hecht, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon.
But the Rockefellers actually had little choice. They could not risk tying up IBEC’s liquid assets in long-term securities. Rather, their recent move out of the management of Brazilian securities was part of global shifts in capital flows resulting from Europe’s and Japan’s economic recovery and their growing productivity differentials with older industries in the United States. These shifts had resulted in trade deficits for the United States and Nixon’s clumsy effort to cut this deficit by devaluing the dollar to lower the price of exports so they could win back foreign markets. In an earlier age, Nixon’s arbitrary monetary policies might have served as a jump-start for longer-range economic investment in new technology in American industry. But world capitalism was now too integrated. West European holders of American dollars could not tolerate a devalued dollar that limited the financial horizons of their own rebuilt postwar industries. A devalued dollar also meant less buying power for Middle Eastern shahs and sheiks, whose oil revenues were based on oil prices pegged to the dollar, and less collateral for European investors in the face value of American bonds and notes. The Middle Eastern oil producers responded with oil price hikes that aggravated inflation in the West. Nixon’s arbitrary monetary moves not only undermined a unified Western response, but threatened even more chaos in the financial markets.
During Nelson’s 1969 tour of Latin America, not even the most cynical Rockefeller-baiters discerned that after the Gold Crisis of 1968, Nelson’s shift in his public image—from an entrepreneur-philanthropist espousing development with democracy to one arguing for development without democracy (“New Military” dictatorships) in a Dollar Zone in the Western Hemisphere—might have been precipitated by anticipation of this shift in financial relations between the American Eurodollar and a revitalized North European capitalism. In 1973, David Rockefeller gave Nelson’s case for putting the priority on political stability a stunningly bold financial rationale and broader interpretation, applying it now even to Communist states in Eastern Europe and socialist countries in the Third World. “In terms of straight credit risk,” he explained, “the presumption is that there is greater continuity in government in certain socialist states than in nonsocialist states.”18
Since Europe and Japan’s rebuilt postwar industries had the technological edge and Japan had restrictions on foreign imports and foreign financial penetration of its companies, the Rockefeller brothers took preemptive action to stall hemispheric-level competition. In the post-World War II era, the United States had enjoyed enormous, almost exclusive, world power as the West’s only superpower militarily and as controller of the all-important Middle Eastern oil. Now, the Rockefeller brothers offered to share the power.
In July 1972, one month after the Watergate burglary, David Rockefeller hosted a meeting at Pocantico. Some of the most influential foreign policy strategists in the United States, Japan, and Europe gathered to plan the founding of what David called an “International Commission for Peace and Prosperity”: the Trilateral Commission.
The conference was designed to reassure major U.S. allies in the Cold War that Nixon’s protectionism would not prevail, that wiser, more experienced, and more powerful forces were opposed to it and were prepared to offer Europe and Japan an alternative. Neither the nationalism that led to two world wars in this century nor the hemispheric walls that Nelson and David actually had championed in the Western Hemisphere was necessary—at least, not before mutually satisfactory roles could be worked out.
The commission would formally begin its work in July 1973. Columbia University’s Zbigniew Brzezinski, promoter of a “community of developed nations” and professor at the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Russian Institute,19 would soon be appointed the commission’s first director. Under Brzezinski, the commission’s dominant topics for deliberation would be consistent over the next two years: “global redistribution of power,” the problems of building a “trilateral community,” and the troublesome “governability of democracies.”
Nelson kept a low profile. He did not attend any of the commission’s meetings and never even joined the commission, thereby avoiding any appearance of working behind Nixon’s back. But Nixon’s “economic nationalism,” as it was derided by the Trilateralists, ran squarely against IBEC’s new activities in Brazil.*
In November 1972, Nelson visited Nixon at Camp David to get his own commission off the ground. The idea was for a more national version of the Trilateral Commission that would dovetail with many of David’s goals on the international level. Membership would overlap in some cases, to promote a common Rockefeller-led agenda for a new world order that could ultimately include the Russians, although none of this agenda was ever explained to Nixon. The same willpower that had created the CIAA, laid the foundation of the OAS military alliance, launched the crucial study panels on winning the Cold War through bankrupting Russian Communists with an arms race and counterinsurgency warfare, and braved riots to lead the “fact-finding” mission to Latin America would again prevail.
In March 1973, Nelson announced his Commission on Critical Choices for Americans. To finance it, Nelson had a federal bill drafted allocating $20 million. By the time he began lobbying Congress in May, that figure had drifted down to a more reasonable $1 million. But even that amount was too much for the Senate, and the bill died. Nelson quickly came up with the kind of solution that had made the name Rockefeller unique in American politics: his own $1 million contribution to the commission’s tax-exempt Third Century Corporation. Reliable Laurance kicked in a similar amount, and a few corporate foundations threw in the rest. Then, with himself as chairman, Nelson announced its panels of “prominent Americans.” These were some of the most powerful men—and women—in government, big business, academia, law, banking, science, and the arts—as well as two CIA contractors and, of course, brother Laurance.
This was the kind of power that made Richard Nixon feel unsafe. Nelson had stacked his commission with the very Eastern Establishment types who had frowned on Nixon’s own rise to power from southern California. The following October, Nixon surprised no one—except Nelson—when he passed over Nelson and chose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to replace his disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew. Agnew�
��s plea of nolo contendere to accusations of financial misconduct while he was Maryland’s governor was more damaging to the Nixon administration than was his actual resignation. It raised a cloud over the White House, suggesting occupancy by crooks, exactly when Nixon was trying to convince the nation that he was not one. Gerald Ford was the perfect antidote: hardworking, decent, unimpeachably conservative, and, it was rumored, not bright enough to prove a threat or succumb to intrigues that were disloyal to the president.
Nelson still managed to believe that Nixon might choose him as his successor. It was only the latest example of the headstrong attitude he had exhibited all his life, what his secretary Ann Whitman came to call his “I can do anything if I want to” air.20
Yet another trait that Nelson acquired in childhood proved a boon. The Rockefeller penchant for secrecy served Nelson well. As long as a goal was in sight and attainable, Nelson, like Senior and Junior, never lost control of himself in public over things that were out of his control; he shrugged them off and moved ahead. But even here, Nelson added his own fateful twist: He never looked back.
Two months later he resigned as governor of New York. He could now spend the next three years gaining national visibility and strengthening his power base with his Commission on Critical Choices.
The latest Arab-Israeli war and Arab oil embargo prompted him to focus the commission’s search for solutions to oil and uranium shortages in two traditional Rockefeller haunts: the American West and Latin America. The two regions had become mirror images of an entrenched development policy focused entirely on the extraction of wealth with little regard for the consequences.
THE MOST CRITICAL CHOICE: ENERGY AND WOUNDED KNEE
Nelson commissioned Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, to report on the oil potential in the West, especially in its shale rock.21 Teller’s background in nuclear physics would have inclined him to look into potential sources of uranium as well. He played an important role in shaping the commission’s interest in nuclear power and coal as supplements to increased oil development in the Southwest. Like Herman Kahn had prescribed for the Amazon, Teller initially advocated excavation by nuclear explosion.22 Teller identified shale oil deposits in the Green River Formation of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming that were capable of yielding an estimated 100 billion barrels of oil. “The federal government owns four fifths of the nation’s oil shale-bearing land in the Western states,”23 Nelson wrote, not mentioning that most of the uranium, coal, and oil in the West were located on Indian lands.
For instance, rich coal deposits on 58,000 acres of Hopi land in New Mexico had been strip-mined by Kennecott Company, the giant mining conglomerate that was owned, in part, by the Mormon church and that listed among its board members Rockefeller allies J. Peter Grace and John Schiff. Under Johnson’s secretary of the interior, Stuart Udall, a member of a rich and powerful Mormon family, Kennecott’s Peabody Coal had secured leases to mine coal on the Hopi Indian reservation from the Hopi Tribal Council, one of the elected Indian councils that John Collier’s “Indian New Deal” had brought into being.24 It was not long before ash-spewing coal-fired electricity plants sprouted up at Four Corners, New Mexico,* to provide energy to Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles through a consortium of 223 utility companies.
The plants burned ten tons of coal every minute and pitted the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)-controlled tribal councils against Navajo and Hopi tribal elders and environmentalists. Grass began to die near Shiprock, the same area to which Junior had brought young Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers some fifty-four years earlier. Sheep and people became sick, while the Black Mesa’s precious aquifers were tapped and drained for the mining and power-plant operations.25 This “development” program brought little to most Indians. The majority continued to live without electricity and many without running water. Meanwhile, the uranium miners among them began to come down with lung cancer. Shiprock Hospital admitted the first of seventeen Navajo men who would be diagnosed by 1979 as having lung cancer; fifteen of them had mined uranium26 at the Shiprock uranium mine operated by Kerr-McGee.
“It was not our responsibility to warn them,” one BIA official would assert years later. “That was the job of the landowner.”27 The landowner was the Navajo tribe, administered by the elected tribal council—the Western democratic structure that John Collier had championed to replace traditional tribal elders. If Collier had hoped that the tribal council would be a step forward in Indian self-rule, he was sadly mistaken. The elected leaders of the tribal council simply became middlemen for the oil and uranium companies.
Some of the largest concessions went to Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Mobil (Standard Oil of New York), and United Nuclear, a company that Laurance Rockefeller helped found in the 1950s.28
The BIA evaded responsibility for the deaths of Navajo miners and the poisoning of their ancestral lands. So did Kerr-McGee. Missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), who had been working among the Navajo since the 1940s, remained silent, too, even after the existence of lung cancer, a hitherto unknown disease among the Navajo, became public knowledge.
Meanwhile, one of SIL’s largest contributors, the Pew family, was guiding its Sun Oil Company (SUNOCO) into strip-mining coal near Gillette, Wyoming, joining Exxon and Kerr-McGee in shifting from the largely unionized Appalachian region. The Pews’ Cordero Mine in Wyoming was south of the Northern Cheyenne and Cree reservations in Montana, where the BIA had been urging the Indians to grant coal concessions to corporations since 1966.29 The reservations, coincidentally, were subsequently identified by SIL as “urgent areas where Bible Translation needs to be undertaken.”
As in Brazil, the government agency that was supposed to be dedicated to the Indians’ welfare was collecting revenues by leasing out Indian lands to corporations. And as in Brazil, SIL missionaries were being sent into the same tribes. SIL went to work among the Apache, whose language had been translated centuries before by Catholic missionaries, but whose Jicarilla reservation in New Mexico was discovered to contain an estimated 154 million barrels of oil and 2 trillion cubic feet of gas. In Alaska, SIL’s linguistic surveys soon brought teams into Inuit communities at St. Lawrence Island in the Yukon Delta; by 1975, SIL’s Operation Deep Freeze had reached Barrow, just west of the giant Kuparuk and Prudhoe Bay oil fields. The fields had been discovered in 1969 by Sinclair Oil, the same firm that had bought up the Ganso Azul field in Peru near SIL’s Yarinacocha jungle base, and by Sinclair’s new owner, Atlantic Richfield Oil Company (ARCO), and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon).
Still another “urgent area” was the land of New Mexico’s Keres Indians, which was identified by the Energy Research and Development Administration as containing uranium. Other SIL-chosen tribes were the Havasupai-Walappai of northwestern Arizona and the Shoshone of Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, both of whom owned uranium-bearing lands; the Cree of Canada, who were soon confronted by the James Bay hydroelectric project backed by Chase Manhattan Bank; the Eastern Ojibwa of New York, who were resisting land encroachments near aluminum plants; the Tsimhian of Canada, whose lands were to be crossed by the Alaskan oil pipelines carrying oil from the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea, where both the Rockefellers’ Exxon and the Pews’ SUNOCO owned huge oil concessions; and, despite over a century of Euro-American acculturation, the Cherokee and Creek of Oklahoma, whose lands happened to lie on the route of a proposed coal-slurry pipeline to energy-hungry Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
This increasing pressure on Indian lands already had pushed Indians into confrontations, first with tribal council leaders; then with the BIA; then with the FBI; and, finally, with the entire power structure of the U.S. government. In November 1972, following the killings of Indian activists by police, Indians who participated in a “Trail of Broken Treaties” caravan to Washington, D.C., would no longer accept rebuffs by Nixon officials and occupied BIA headquarters. After a standoff with U.S. marshals under the glare of the news media, the Indians left peaceably. BIA off
icials, infuriated over the bad publicity and the release of captured BIA documents, brought charges against leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who conducted negotiations on behalf of the protesters.
The following February, AIM responded to a call for help from Lakota and Oglala Sioux Indians in South Dakota, including two leading AIM members, Russell and Bill Means. Money due from BIA leases had not been paid, and the recently elected chairman of the Sioux Tribal Council, Richard “Dickie” Wilson, was suspected by some of the Indians.30 Moreover, Wilson favored taking money from the Interior Department’s Indian Claims Commission in exchange for all claims to the Sioux’s sacred Black Hills. (There, gold had once lured General George Custer along with prospectors, prompting the Sioux to fight back to defend their rights to the hills guaranteed by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The results, despite Custer’s hopes for a military campaign that would earn him a presidential nomination and profits from a mining company he was involved in,31 were disastrous for Custer and thousands of Indians.)
Now, as Standard Oil of California’s Chevron Resources joined Anaconda, Phillips Uranium, and Union Carbide in negotiating for leases to explore for uranium in the Black Hills, and the National Park Service pressed the tribe to sell 133,000 acres of the Pine Ridge Reservation, the traditionalists worried that Dickie Wilson’s willingness to sell the tribe’s birthright would find its way through the legal grist mill set up to facilitate cash settlements by the Indian Claims Commission.
