Rockefeller Largesse Still Shapes American Life

Oct. 19 -- No American family has left so many imprints on the country, and our lives, as the Rockefellers have. No matter where you live in America, practically anywhere you look, this family has left its mark.

David Rockefeller, now 87, is the youngest of the generation known as "the Rockefeller brothers." Though he has worked hard all of his life, he has lived in what appears to most people to have been another world.

The Rockefeller family's home base, high above the Hudson River, half an hour north of Manhattan, is the size of a small town. The main house was built at the turn of the century by the family patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, and is surrounded by gardens, fountains, riding trails, and art.

Growing up on the 3,400-acre estate was great, David says. As a child he had tennis courts, horses, a golf course, a swimming pool and even bowling alleys to occupy his time.

To help raise him and his four brothers and sister, David's parents had a staff of nurses, tutors, secretaries, waitresses, kitchen maids, parlor maids, chamber maids, chauffeurs, and chefs.

David recalls taking food baskets to the poor when he was a child. He said his driver would carry the baskets up the stairs of the tenement houses because they were too heavy for him. He also remembers his unusual trips to school as a child. "Father thought I should get exercise," David said, and so he would roller skate part of the way, with a family limousine following behind him.

Ambition Without Remorse

The Rockefeller legend — and fortune — began with John D. Rockefeller.

His father was a snake-oil salesmen and a bigamist, but John Davison Rockefeller parlayed a few years of high school and megawatts of raw ambition into the largest personal fortune this country had ever seen.

He did it in the oil business — buying out his competitors, or crushing them, to create the mammoth Standard Oil Company. "A lot of things that he did were legal then, perhaps would not be now," David said, adding, "monopoly is a good example." David says his grandfather never expressed the slightest remorse about his business dealings.