by Gerard Colby
The only awkward moments for Dilworth came when New York Representative Elizabeth Holtzman questioned his statement that the Rockefellers and their investment adviser were “totally uninterested in controlling anything” and that the family’s role was as passive investors, using the $60,000 financing of the derogatory Goldberg biography as an example of a financial, not a political, undertaking. It “defies credibility,” said Maryland Republican Laurence J. Hogan, that this was a “straight investment.”
ADMITTED ROCKEFELLER FAMILY STOCKHOLDINGS (1974)
Aggregate of Major Stock Holdings of 84 Members of the Rockefeller Family
Market value
Company
Total shares
Percentage of outstanding shares
$21,600,000
Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey)
315,507
.14
16,100,000
IBM
85,218
.06
14,900,000
Standard Oil of California
594,838
.35
12,000,000
Chase
429,959
1.34
12,000,000
Mobil
325,290
.33
5,800,000
Eastman Kodak
81,069
.11
5,400,000
AT&T
116,231
.02
5,200,000
General Electric
137,016
.08
4,700,000
Standard Oil of Indiana
53,784
.08
4,700,000
Dow
22,400
.08
4,200,000
IBEC
379,430
78.60
3,300,000
Aluminum Co. of America (ALCOA)
99,633
.30
2,800,000
Texas Instruments
37,644
.17
2,600,000
International Paper
63,470
.14
2,300,000
Coherent Radiation
316,805
19.08
2,200,000
Caterpillar Tractor
41,227
.07
2,200,000
Marathon Oil
58,783
.20
2,100,000
Motorola
47,000
.17
2,100,000
Thermo Electron
189,129
9.79
2,100,000
Allied Chemical
65,985
.24
2,000,000
Sears, Roebuck
38,584
.03
1,900,000
DuPont
17,533
.04
1,600,000
Lubrizol
39,283
.19
1,500,000
Daniel International
102,125
1.46
1,500,000
Archer Daniels Midland
89,404
.59
1,400,000
Weyerhaeuser
50,414
.04
$138,200,000
Total
Aggregate of Major Stock Holdings in Trusts Created by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for Benefit of His Descendants
Market value
Company
Total shares
Percentage of outstanding shares
$135,100,000
Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey)
1,972,664
.88
98,300,0001
Rockefeller Center
1,125,000
100.00
70,400,000
Standard Oil of California
2,815,000
1.66
56,500,000
IBM
298,824
.20
51,600,000
Mobil
1,436,916
1.41
32,600,000
Eastman Kodak
454,904
.28
30,000,000
Merck
455,100
.61
14,900,000
Texas Instruments
203,900
.90
14,200,000
General Electric
372,936
.21
13,700,000
Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing.
221,700
.20
10,900,000
Monsanto
213,273
.64
10,100,000
Aluminum Co. of America (ALCOA)
306,150
.92
9,200,000
Caterpillar Tractor
172,752
.30
8,700,000
Xerox
86,900
.15
8,300,000
Kresge
336,800
.28
7,600,000
Motorola
169,200
.60
7,000,000
Standard Oil of Indiana
80,868
.12
5,400,000
Johnson & Johnson
62,000
.11
5,100,000
Marathon Oil
135,434
.45
4,600,000
Hercules
130,000
.31
4,100,000
Allis Chalmers Pfd.
430,000
3.45
3,900,000
Coca-Cola
62,200
.10
3,600,000
Weyerhaeuser
130,000
.10
3,000,000
Upjohn
65,000
.22
2,000,000
Chesebrough Pond’s
45,311
.29
1.700,000
J. C. Penney
40,596
.07
1,400,000
Dun & Bradstreet
73,400
.28
$613,900,000
Total
$752,100,000
Grand Total
Additional Holdings Not Specified By Dilworth
$224,600,000
Securities owned by 7 charities (particularly Colonial Williamsburg and Rockefeller University) whose investments were managed by finance committees advised by Rockefeller Family & Associates.
Additonal Holdings Not Included in Dilworth’s Disclosure
Eastern Airlines: 216,000 shares (preferred, convertible at $63); Laurance Rockefeller held control of 100 percent of the preferred shares of Eastern Airlines, whose assets were then worth over $1 billion.
$229,976,000 in investments by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (managed by the United States Trust Company).2
$13,000,000 in investments by the Rockefeller Family Fund (managed by two firms, Battery March and Franklin Cole).2
“It was an underwriting, sir,” Dilworth corrected, “not an investment,” inadvertently contradicting his own point about the venture not being a political undertaking and confirming Hogan’s.
But such gaffes did not really matter.
The Congress of the United States seemed grateful that the Rockefellers had merely complied with a partial disclosure before placing Nelson Rockefeller at the head of the line of presidential succession.
Years later, when many of the House Judiciary Committee’s files were declassified and released by the Ford Presidential Library, historians could see that the congressmen had much more information on Nelson’s family than they let on during the hearings. The focus of a go
od part of the Congressional Research Service’s investigation was on Latin America. The CRS prepared detailed reports on Nelson’s intelligence activities, his IBEC investments, and on development activities of the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA), including David Lilienthal’s survey in the Amazon and Nelson’s extensive holdings in Brazil.
Yet, deprived of the meaning that these holdings had for their own lives, most Americans remained uninterested in Latin America, what Nelson was doing there, or what the U.S. government was doing there in their name. Nelson felt free bluntly to confess his support for the Kissinger-Nixon policy against the Salvador Allende government in Chile, which had led to the bloody military coup of the previous year and subsequent executions, terror, and dictatorship. The CRS report on Nelson’s intelligence activities in Latin America, including his possible knowledge of CIA efforts to overthrow Allende and the purported CIA ties of one of the admitted recipients of Nelson’s gifts, Bolivia’s Victor Andrade, remained locked away in the committee’s files. Most Americans would never read these reports, but Nelson’s allies in the Ford White House would, and they would keep them from public exposure.
Finally, after eight days of hearings and forty-eight witnesses, Nelson was confirmed by the Senate on November 22. House confirmation followed on December 19. In January 1975—one month after receiving the Christmas present of his life, confirmation as the vice president—Nelson received his first assignment. It was, considering all that he had gone through in recent months and all that still remained secret, apropos: He was to chair the President’s special investigation of the CIA’s abuses.
THE LATIN LEGACY
While Nelson had been battling his way into the White House, a strange undercurrent of intrigue had swept through Washington. The fall of Richard Nixon may have brought Nelson Rockefeller into the White House, but it also threatened to bring down a carefully constructed network of bureaucratic dikes that had been built over a quarter of a century to compartmentalize the flow of information in the executive branch and keep state secrets from the American people, including Congress. The architect of their design was the CIA. Nixon was no friend of the CIA. He believed, with some justification, that the Agency was run by the same pin-striped Eastern Establishment that had always looked on him with disdain. He believed that the CIA had given candidate John F. Kennedy false claims about a missile gap with the Soviets and tipped off Kennedy on plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, prompting Kennedy to call for U.S. action against Fidel Castro exactly when Nixon could not for fear of compromising the mission.
But there was something else about the CIA and Cuba that Nixon knew, something he believed he could use against Richard Helms, the current director of the CIA appointed by Lyndon Johnson. Nixon knew that several people who were involved in the Watergate break-in had worked for the CIA, specifically in the operations surrounding the Bay of Pigs invasion. He also knew that several ex-FBI men had headed up “dirty tricks” operations in J. C. King’s Western Hemisphere Division before and after the invasion.
Nixon ordered H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman to meet with the CIA to pressure the FBI to curtail its investigation of the Watergate burglary.8 “Just say [unintelligible] very bad to have this fellow [E. Howard] Hunt,” Nixon instructed Haldeman, “he knows too damned much, if he was involved—you happen to know that? If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate—both for the CIA, and for the country, at this time, and for American foreign policy.”9
E. Howard Hunt, the man in charge of the Watergate plumbers, had been the CIA’s overseer of the Cuban exile force in Guatemala and Nicaragua, the training and staging areas for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He had intimate knowledge of the invasion’s strategy. Being a seasoned veteran of the 1954 Guatemala coup, he could not have been unaware that both the choice of location for the invasion (an isthmus far from mountain havens and cut off from the interior by swamps except by causeways) and the use of propeller planes to fight Castro’s jet fighters meant that direct intervention by U.S. armed forces might very well be necessary to save the invasion from failure. Indeed, having put the men on the beach even after a poorly informed air strike had missed knocking out Castro’s jets, the CIA did make such a last-minute effort to convince Kennedy officials to use U.S. armed forces to back the invasion. But Kennedy, besides the use of uninitialed jet fighters for a botched escort rendezvous with the exile brigade’s bombers, would not allow himself to be manipulated, earning the hatred of the CIA officers who had been closest to the exiles while they were training in Guatemala. “If someone had gotten close to Kennedy, he’d have killed him,” recalled Robert Davis, CIA station chief in Guatemala City at the time of the invasion. “Oh, they hated him.”10
Was this risky manipulation of a president and its failure—with direct consequences for Cubans, Kennedy, and the world when Castro turned to the Soviet Union for missiles for defense—“the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” as Nixon called it? Or was it CIA plots to assassinate Castro just prior to and during the invasion? Or similar CIA plots after the invasion, even during the tense Cuban missile crisis? Or the unauthorized CIA assassination plots against Castro in 1963? Or the unauthorized CIA-backed sabotage raids of that year by Bay of Pigs veterans that forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to order FBI raids against training camps for Cuban exiles outside New Orleans? Or links between these embittered exiles and people who were the subject of investigations of the assassination of President Kennedy? Or, finally, the role of Howard Hughes’s agent, Robert Maheu, in the CIA-Mob-Cuban exile assassination plots against Castro and Hughes’s secret $100,000 contribution to the Nixon presidential campaign?*
Any of these activities—especially when tied to Hunt’s CIA background and his having been given listening devices and disguises by the CIA for the plumbers’ use—could severely damage the CIA’s reputation, if not jeopardize its very existence.
Nixon wanted the FBI to stop its investigation of Watergate. But he needed leverage with the successor to the deceased J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s acting director, L. Patrick Gray. So he decided to blackmail the CIA into persuading the FBI to drop Watergate and, in the process, set up the CIA to take the fall for Watergate. He dictated what Haldeman, when meeting with Director Helms and Assistant Director General Vernon Walters, should advise the CIA to tell L. Patrick Gray: “Just tell him [Gray] to lay off.”11 By doing so, Nixon crossed the line of legality and entered the realm of crime: attempting to obstruct justice.
Nixon based his strategy of playing the FBI and the CIA against each other on his knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover’s long-running dispute with Helms over turf. Hoover was reluctant to cooperate with the CIA’s requests for the FBI to install electronic eavesdropping devices and use mail-opening operations. Hoover had also refused to agree to an unprecedented interagency Committee on Intelligence that would use illegal techniques to spy on Americans who were opposed to the Vietnam War and certain domestic policies. This plan would involve the CIA in domestic operations against citizens who clearly had no ties to foreign spies. This was a violation of the CIA’s legal charter and an intrusion into the FBI’s area of responsibility. Hoover was not opposed to such “dirty tricks”; he had authorized such activities by the FBI against Martin Luther King, Jr., and thousands of other Americans as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. He just wanted the CIA to stay out of his territory. Knowing the limits of the CIA’s charter, Hoover had sought legal counsel from the Justice Department. Hearing of Hoover’s breach of confidence, Helms had been furious.12
Helms continued domestic surveillance anyway. He later fell back on the classic rationale of military hierarchy: He was only taking orders from his superior, the president. This rationale got the CIA into an enormous legal mess, for not only did Nixon approve of its engaging in domestic spyi
ng to obtain foreign policy objectives, he also approved of using the Agency in the realm of domestic politics. Nixon, after all, had obtained the CIA’s cooperation in providing equipment from Dr. Sidney Gottlieb’s Technical Services to the ex-CIA men, who, led by Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, constituted the Watergate burglars.
The CIA’s operations in Latin America, particularly those against Cuba, set into motion the forces that brought Nelson Rockefeller within a heartbeat of the presidency. Helms’s resistance to Nixon’s efforts to make the CIA responsible for Watergate forced Nixon to take desperate measures, warning the CIA about “the Bay of Pigs thing.” The CIA was well aware that Hunt’s burglary team had ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Hunt had even recruited Eugenio Martinez into the Plumbers Unit by arranging to meet him at a time and place loaded with symbolism: on April 16, 1971, the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and at Miami’s Bay of Pigs Monument. “We talked about the liberation of Cuba, and he assured us that the ‘whole thing is not over,’” Martinez, who reported the meeting to his CIA case officer in Miami, confessed later.13
By the end of 1972, the CIA backgrounds of Watergate burglars Martinez, James McCord, Hunt, and Bernard Barker had given Nixon the excuse to make Helms the sacrificial goat to the president’s “CIA-dunnit” line. McCord, loyal to the CIA, had written Helms in July exposing the ploy. In December, McCord fired Gerald Alch, his lawyer from the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). During the trial, a Nixon aide would offer McCord money to pay for his legal defense, if he would fall in line as the other members of the Plumbers Unit had done.
