by Gerard Colby
Nelson Rockefeller was in good spirits when he arrived at Room 5600 on January 27. He was now the master of this realm, a hushed hive of scores of secretaries, accountants, and financial analysts busily working to preserve, protect, and defend the Rockefeller name and family empire. Here seventy-five family trusts, valued at more than $1 billion in 1974, were administered. But the family’s wealth was much greater. Because of a recent real estate boom, Rockefeller Center alone was worth several hundred million dollars. Twelve other foundations were also under the Rockefellers’ influence.
Greater than their money was their reach. David’s rule was unquestioned over a bank whose assets had grown from $13.6 billion in 1969 to over $30 billion by 1979. Through Chase, the family not only had access to credit for their own ventures, like IBEC, but had influence on the boards of scores of corporations and private companies and nonprofit institutions, here and abroad. Governments, too, listened to David Rockefeller; Chase’s huge trust department commanded a ready market for vital bond sales for everything from housing projects to hospitals, from nuclear power plants to hydroelectric dams, from computers to campuses. In Room 5600, insulated from Manhattan’s sirens and roaring streets, Nelson moved through a world of whispered deference to the very mention of his name.
It was a name he had always been comfortable with, unlike his father and his children. Rodman was the exception, hiding his shyness behind a haughty exterior, eager to prove his worth to a doubting father. Despite IBEC’s chronic failure to pay a dividend and losses in the tens of millions, Rodman was now drawing an annual salary of more than $100,000.39 Nelson had not been impressed by Rodman’s captaining of IBEC, but at least the company’s most important and potential lucrative assets in Brazil had been saved. If the Brazilian Miracle reappeared and the conquest of the Amazon was renewed, IBEC, or whatever firm bought IBEC, would be positioned to make a killing, especially in real estate. The value of the 1,030,000-acre Bodoquena ranch alone would be enormous. The development projects planned or pioneered by IBEC and AIA in areas like the São Francisco River Valley, Mato Grosso, and the Central Planalto would come to fruition eventually, as would scores of downsized versions of the hydroelectric dams and Great Lakes that had been proposed for flooding Indian lands along the Amazon, Xingu, Araguaia, Tocantins, Tapajós, Negro, and—yes—Roosevelt rivers. The economic boom on the frontier, in turn, could only help IBEC’s other ventures in the coastal metropolitan areas. Whether IBEC or its successor participated, all hinged on Rodman, which made Nelson uneasy. He and Rodman had never been close. Rodman was starved for affection, and Nelson, like his father before him, was unable to give it.
It had not been that way with Michael, and in these last years he had given the lost son much thought. Like his older brother Steven’s reflective retreat from power into antiwar sentiments, philosophy, and the classroom, Michael’s withdrawal into anthropology had puzzled his father. Michael had felt the need to step back—as far as New Guinea—to put the Rockefeller name into perspective within a broader human plane. Nelson had never felt such a need. He unquestioningly and eagerly accepted his legacy of power.
Only Laurance, of all of his generation, seemed to recognize the ideological fuel that fired Nelson’s drive and backed off from the Manichaean Calvinism that had penetrated and taken over his family’s early Baptist roots. With his characteristic sardonic smile, Laurance turned, instead, to his work in conservation and, ultimately, to the inner peace of Zen. His curiosity about venture capital adventures had grown into a belief that conservation and capitalism were not mutually exclusive, but, rather, were mutually dependent if both the planet and humanity were to thrive. It was as if a lifetime of investing in aviation (now extended into outer space through a holding company called National Aviation) had given him a U-2’s view of the world, where green—not people or their borders—is seen.*
Laurance still commanded the conservation side of the realm, which Nelson respected. But while Laurance gave beauty to the world, Nelson took it or, rather, bought it for his own possession. Even his decision to share his art collection through reproductions was based on an anticipation of pecuniary return. It was this that gave him such cheer on the morning of January 27 when he entered his office in Room 5600 and began work with his twenty-five-year-old aide, Megan Marshack.
Yet there was also a haunting quality to this effort. His first book on his collection had been of the carvings of New Guinea tribesmen. Other men may have balked at creating a memorial to a dead son by using the carvings of the people who had taken his life, but Nelson had no such qualms. He saw these carvings, like all art, as objets d’art, separate from the people who created them. If he had any interest in the artists themselves, it was only to enhance his own enjoyment of what they had created.
There was nothing new here in Nelson’s life. He had the same attitude when he thought he could destroy Diego Rivera’s mural because he—or others he respected—found it politically offensive. Placing the Asmat tribesmen’s art in a book or in a museum was not different from placing any “primitive” art for display; like pinned butterflies, they were beauty for the eye of the beholder. If anything, such practices were a time-honored tradition in the Americas, since Hernán Cortés dazzled Europe with the art of the slaughtered Aztec Indians and the descendants of European colonists in North America established the first museums to preserve the artifacts of the continent’s Native American dead. Nelson’s father, John, Jr., had collected Navajo rugs and exquisite pottery. John 3rd had collected George Catlin’s stoical portraits of “vanishing” Indians, including Catlin’s depiction of prairie Indians fleeing before nature’s fire. Laurance enjoyed Indian animist myths that enhanced the wonder of nature’s beauties. During a tour of South America, he was entranced by local Indian lore about the Iguaçu Falls between Paraguay and Brazil, which had “such obvious hydroelectrical potential,”40 but in his story for National Geographic he did not mention the Indians themselves or ask what had happened to them. The sufferings of indigenous peoples, although lamentable, were never mentioned in Rockefeller accounts of their art. The myth of the essential goodness of a country was not open to question; you either “believed” in the United States or Brazil and were patriotic or risked seeming un-American or un-Brazilian or, in Michael’s case, an ingrate before one’s European hosts.
Yet, had Michael known the recent political history of the Asmat’s clash with Dutch colonial authorities; had he known this origin of the bisj poles, the revenge poles that he craved for his father’s Museum of Primitive Art; or, finally, had he been told and had he only listened to what he heard, he might have broken the acquisitive habits of his family, of his culture, if only for the more selfish reason of protecting his own life. Because he had chosen adventure and taken the risks to possess art he admired, he had perished.
Nelson honored this trait in Michael, much as he honored it in himself. When he published the first volume of his art collection, Masterpieces of Primitive Art, it included pieces collected by Michael and himself, dating back to his first acquisition, the Sumatran dagger with the handle shaped like a shrunken human skull, hair and all. Mindlessly, Nelson had included this piece in a book he meant as a tribute to the son who best carried forward his own spirit, at least in this corner of Nelson’s capacity for love. He never questioned the more horrifying aspects of what the presence of such tribal art said about the advance of European civilization. Michael, near the end of his short life, did, showing more wisdom than his elders. “The West thinks in terms of bringing advance and opportunity to such a place,” he had written his parents from the Dutch colony. “In actuality, we bring a cultural bankruptcy which will last for many years. The Asmat, like every other corner of the world, is being sucked into a world economy and a world culture which insists on economic plenty as a primary ideal.”41
Now Nelson was preparing another book as a family memorial, this one to the person who had given him his love of art, his mother. He spent the day going over photogra
phs of Abby’s collection. Helping him was Megan Marshack, who buoyed his spirits with a good-natured bantering that only she seemed to get away with. Nelson obviously enjoyed her.
Later in the afternoon, Nelson excused himself and hurried over to the Buckley School, a private elementary school on East Seventy-third Street. Henry Kissinger had agreed to address the student body, which included Nelson’s sons by Happy, Nelson, Jr., and Mark. Nelson introduced the former secretary of state.
After the event, Nelson and the boys went to the Rockefeller apartment on Fifth Avenue. That evening after dinner, he said he was going to the office to work on the art project. Instead, he joined Marshack at Junior’s old town house on West Fifty-fourth Street, around the corner from Abby’s Museum of Modern Art. Nelson had used it as his office, governing the state from there rather than from the dreary Governor’s Mansion in Albany, which he seldom shared with either Tod or Happy. He had always had a roving eye. Now, well past the autumn of his years, he had found someone who gave him the illusion of youth.
At about 10:15 P.M., Nelson suffered a massive heart attack. Two hours later, he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Try as they might, his family and aides could not conceal the fact that Nelson had died in the company of a woman whose home across the street had been paid for by Nelson, as had the flowers he often sent her. Hoping to avoid any suggestion of adultery, Nelson’s closest aide, Hugh Morrow, initially told the press that Nelson had been discovered by his bodyguard, slumped over his work at Room 5600. But within twenty-four hours, the cover-up unraveled. Witnesses had seen Megan at Nelson’s town house and later at the hospital, still holding the oxygen bottle.
Steven Rockefeller, Jr., handled the matter with grace. Asked during a radio appearance what he would say if she walked in, he responded, “I would say to her, I hope you made Grandfather happy.”42
On Sunday, January 28, 1979, Nelson’s body was cremated. The next day, only his immediate family took part in the procession of limousines that accompanied his ashes to the small family cemetery at Pocantico. As the procession wound its way up a moss-covered road to the grassy hilltop overlooking the Hudson, a news helicopter hovered in the distance. For once in the Nelson Rockefeller story, the press was told to keep a distance.
Three days later, some 2,200 people poured into Riverside Church to attend an invitation-only memorial service. United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim led princes, ambassadors, and other dignitaries from seventy-one nations. Chief Justice Warren Burger, Nixon’s replacement for liberal Earl Warren, led the Supreme Court justices. Martin Luther King, Sr., prayed for Nelson’s restless soul. Lady Bird Johnson lowered her head in memory of her late husband’s friend as Dr. William Sloane Coffin, the liberal pastor who had opposed Nelson’s support for “LBJ’s War” in Vietnam, gave the invocation. Metropolitan Opera’s Roberta Peters sent “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” echoing through the vaulted Gothic cathedral Nelson’s father had built as Christian modernism’s answer to Fundamentalism.
While David Rockefeller eulogized his older brother, President Carter sat stiffly in the front pew with Happy, never anticipating how actions Nelson had already taken on behalf of the Shah of Iran would lead to his own fall from power within the year. Former President Jerry Ford was there, too, anticipating the coming Republican victory that might have been his—or Nelson’s—had he kept Rockefeller and won the critical northeastern states in 1976. Ford’s secretary of state and the next administration’s chief of the Central American Task Force, Henry Kissinger, his voice breaking with emotion, recalled his old friend in all his contradictions, his outrageous demands, his perennial optimism, and his loneliness at the top.
Yet it was the least eloquent eulogy that captured the essence of what it meant to be a son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Rodman, IBEC’s president, bearing a torch that now barely flickered, still staggered under the weight of the dream of what IBEC should have been and his father’s expectations. His prose, like his voice, was numb. “I thank God that the world is a better place because Nelson Rockefeller passed by,” he finally said, moving Happy to her only tears during the hour and a half ceremony. Rodman’s loss, terrible and final, had preceded this day by many years. It was, in its own stilted way Nelson’s most telling legacy.
Except for another: 1,610 works of “primitive art” collected from indigenous peoples around the world. He left them all, valued conservatively at $5 million, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to keep alive the name of the son whose memory haunted him to the end, Michael.
The day before Nelson’s memorial service, 3 million Iranians filled the streets of Teheran to cheer the return of the Muslim priest who had called the Shah “the servant of the dollar.” Ayatollah Khomeini, after years of exile, went immediately to his new home, a school on the poorer south side of the city in symbolic disdain for the posh homes that oil money had built in the northern sector. Khomeini was now denouncing American oil companies and the CIA with the same vehemence he had used to condemn the Shah’s effort to enfranchise women as an attempt “to corrupt our chaste women” and the Shah’s Literacy Corps as a plot to undermine the fundamentalist Muslim clergy in the countryside. Fewer than two weeks later, the Shah’s army, reeling before assaults by Islamic militiamen and pro-Khomeini mutinies, collapsed. Within weeks, the Carter administration was reassessing its open-door policy toward the Shah. The monarch, on bad advice, had waited too long to come to the United States; now, without his most powerful advocate, Nelson Rockefeller, to keep them open, the gates were closed. It would take David Rockefeller and Kissinger months to pull them open again, triggering the overrunning of the U.S. Embassy and the taking of hostages that would allow the election of Nelson’s arch foe, Ronald Reagan.
By then, a tide of religious fundamentalism had swept over not only Iran, but the United States as well. The Rockefellers’ choice for president, George Bush, would have to settle, like Nelson, for second place. Again, it was the socially conservative born-again movement that had rejected the “womanizing divorcee” from New York in 1964 that played a key role. Jimmy Carter had awakened them four years before into political life; after Carter revealed his liberal agenda, they joined forces with the young Turks of the New Right that had backed Reagan in 1976. Together, these forces had swelled into a powerful movement behind Reagan by 1979.
Nelson, quietly backing George Bush, had seen the Reagan wave coming and been appalled. What Nelson never knew was that the principal players in that movement included leaders of the Fundamentalist missionary organization whose success had been shaped by his own career and by his personal allies in government and business: the Wycliffe Bible Translators.
*The appearance of the disease in so remote an area and over such a wide range, far beyond the highway’s vicinity and the flies’ flight range, was as mysterious to some observers as the sudden disappearance over such a wide area of birds that had kept the fly population in check; for others, the noise accompanying the highway’s construction and subsequent deforestation offered a solution to the birds’ disappearance (at least in the road’s vicinity), while the fact that a human—not just flies—can carry the disease’s microscopic worms as a host offered a reason for the spread of the disease beyond the flies’ flight range.
*Crawford had prepared a confidential report to the Stroessner regime entitled Colonization in Paraguay as early as 1964. By 1966, he had drawn in the Buenos Aires office of the International Committee for European Migration (ICEM), which had been hired as researchers by one of the AIA’s top Venezuelan associates, Fernando Rondon. Rondon was assistant director of CBR (Consejo de Bienestar Rural, or Council of Rural Welfare), a colonization agency set up jointly by the AIA and Venezuela’s Technical Institute for Immigration and Colonization and funded by Mobil, International Petroleum, Shell Oil, and Nelson’s favorite, Creole Petroleum. CBR was engaged in a resource survey of Venezuela’s Orinoco River Basin when Rondon switched over to ICEM in Buenos Aires; from there it did not tak
e long for Crawford to draw ICEM into the Stroessner Colony Project of Alto Paraná and to bring Brazilians into consultations on setting up a rural credit system like Brazil’s Associação Brasileira de Crédito e Assistência Rural (ABCAR), the national system that AIA set up for then President Kubitschek.
*Even this perspective had its contradictions. National Aviation’s portfolio was as consciously oriented toward the Pentagon and the industry’s “struggling to adjust to the winddown of the Vietnam War” as it was to NASA’s space program; see National Aviation’s 1971 Annual Report, p. 7.
48
THY WILL BE DONE
RETREAT OF THE CHOSEN
William Cameron Townsend was not happy that one door after another in the Islamic world was slamming in the face of the Lord. Kenneth Pike, his top linguist, was about to visit Iran for consultations with the Shah’s government when the Islamic revolution erupted. Translators from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) already were there; now their prayers were whether to stay. The U.S. Embassy, after all, was still a formidable presence in Teheran.
Muslim countries to the east were also off limits. Afghanistan had balked on a contract despite SIL’s efforts that dated back to 1971; the recent communist coup made entry even less plausible. Pakistan’s President Ali Bhutto, despite his defense of minorities and Cam’s personal appeal, had also hesitated. When he was overthrown by General Zia, CIA-backed cross-border operations against the communist government in Afghanistan began in earnest, triggering the Soviet Union’s own massive military intervention.
It looked like Indochina all over again, without the jungle and with the roles reversed. This time, it would be Soviet soldiers dying in a hopeless war against well-armed guerrillas enjoying local support. It would prove to be Leonid Brezhnev’s worst mistake and the Soviet Union’s fatal adventure, but the CIA’s secret war—fought in the name of Allah—also barred Cam’s Christian missionaries from having an official sponsor.
