Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (82 page)

• He founded the nonprofit, research-based Population Council in 1952 and became an activist in the problem of world overpopulation, taking the unusual (for his time) position of advocating the use of contraception (though the family’s focus on population control has sometimes been attributed to an interest in eugenics).

• In 1956 he became the first president of the Lincoln Square Renewal Project in Manhattan and the moving force behind the creation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

• Died in a car accident near the Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, in Westchester County, NY.

• Even as a child, Nelson was considered the leader and most forceful personality of the brothers. He had trouble reading (probably due to undiagnosed dyslexia) and was an underachieving student.

• He married Philadelphia socialite Mary “Tod” Clark in 1930, six days after graduating from Dartmouth. They had five kids, but the marriage was not a happy one. They announced their separation in November 1961; almost simultaneously their son Michael was reported missing on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea.

• In 1932 he convinced Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to paint a a wall of the new Rockefeller Center, but when the left-wing Rivera refused to remove the figure of Lenin from his mural, Rockefeller halted the work and had the entire mural destroyed.

• His mother was a founder of the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in New York in 1929. He became president of MoMA in 1939, overseeing its expansion into a new building.

• He convinced his father to buy and donate land for the United Nations complex in order to keep the U.N. from moving to Philadelphia; the $8.5 million purchase was made in 1945.

• He was elected governor of New York in 1958 and served four terms before resigning in 1973. He was widely recognized for his achievements in education, public transportation, and massive building projects. (He was accused of having an “edifice complex.”) He was also known for quadrupling the New York state budget, for the “Rockefeller drug laws” that meted out heavy prison sentences for minor offenses, and for the suppression of a riot at Attica State Prison, during which 29 inmates and 10 prison guard hostages died.

• “I’m a politician,” he asserted. “That is my profession. Success in politics, real success, means only one thing in America.” That one thing was the presidency, which eluded him repeatedly. He ran for the Republican nomination in 1960 (Nixon got it), in 1964 (Goldwater got it), and in 1968 (Nixon got it again).

• In 1974 he was nominated by President Gerald Ford and confirmed by Congress to be vice president. (Ford had become president after Nixon resigned.)

• He died of a heart attack, age 70, in the home of his 25-year-old aide while still married to his second wife, “Happy” Rockefeller.

• Laurance was known as the quiet, reserved, reclusive Rockefeller and the best businessman of the brothers. His greatest passions were venture capitalism and conservation.

• He sought out and invested heavily in unproven new businesses (especially those pushing the “frontiers of technology”), including biotechnology, aviation, electronics, and computers. A 1959
Wall Street Journal
article reported that the $9 million Laurance had invested in the 14 years since World War II had yielded more than $28 million.

• He combined his two passions in Rockresorts, Inc., a company that developed environmentally friendly resorts in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and other places. Caneel Bay, on St.
John in the Virgin Islands, his first resort, opened in 1956. Swimming, snorkeling, and nature-walking were permitted; telephones, air conditioning, and tipping were not. Later he bought 5,000 acres surrounding the resort and gave it to the federal government to create the U.S. Virgin Islands National Park.

• An advisor to every president from Eisenhower on in matters of conservation, wilderness preservation, and ecology, he was pivotal in the movement to establish and improve national parks across the country. In 1968 he successfully negotiated a deal between the Sierra Club, the lumber companies, and the state of California to preserve 58,000 acres for Redwood National Park.

• Among the many honors he received were the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Theodore Roosevelt National Park Medal of Honor, the National Institute of Social Sciences Gold Medal, Commander of the British Empire, and the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University.

• Went to his office as usual on Wednesday, July 7, 2004, and died four days later at the age of 94.

• Winthrop got off to a very different start from his brothers, dropping out of Yale in 1934 to work as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields. He returned to New York in 1937 to try settling down as an executive, but in 1941 he enlisted in the wartime Army as a private.

• After World War II, he lived a playboy lifestyle in New York. He married showgirl “Bobo” Sears in 1948; they had a son and separated within a year, and were embroiled for five more years in an acrimonious divorce.

• He moved to Arkansas in 1953 and promptly poured $8 million into Arkansas land, colleges, mental health programs, public school systems, and the arts. One newspaper called him “the Big Rock of Little Rock.” In 1954 Governor Cherry said, “The people wish Winthrop Rockefeller had been quintuplets and that they had all come here.”

• In 1955 Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus appointed him to head the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission; during his nine-year tenure, he brought 600 new factories, 90,000 new jobs, and $270 million in new payroll to the state.

• He recognized that real social and political change was impossible until the entrenched Democratic machine led by Faubus was ousted, and began a drive to make Arkansas a two-party state again. He won the governorship in 1966 (the first Republican governor in 94 years), with African-American voters giving him the margin of victory, and won again in 1968 (at that time Arkansas governors served two-year terms) but lost in 1970. His reform programs were repeatedly rejected by a Democratic state legislature.

• Was the only Southern governor to hold a public ceremony of mourning when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

• With a drinking problem, a dissolving second marriage, and a political agenda that Arkansans no longer wanted, he withdrew from public life. He died of pancreatic cancer in Palm Springs, California, in 1973, at the age of 60.

• David graduated from Harvard in 1936 and received a Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago in 1940. He married Margaret McGrath the same year. (They remained married until her death in 1996.) He chose international banking and finance as his sphere of influence.

• Enlisted as a private in the Army (refusing to take the commission his family could easily have gotten for him), was discharged as a captain in 1945, and returned to New York to begin a career at Chase National Bank. He started as assistant manager, rose to senior vice president in 1952, and by 1961 he was bank president.

• In 1949 he became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy study organization considered one of the world’s most influential nongovernmental agencies. From 1970 to 1985 he was the council’s chairperson. In 1979 he convinced President Carter to allow the shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment, which led to the seizure of American hostages in Iran and ultimately to the downfall of the shah (and, in the U.S., to Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election).

• He helped found the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association to represent and advance the interests of major downtown businesses (including Chase Manhattan Bank), and chaired it from
1958 to 1975. He was instrumental in developing the plans that led to the construction of the World Trade Center.

• In 1982 he became chairman of Rockefeller Center. In 1989 he sold an 80 percent share to Mitsubishi for $1.373 billion. In 1995 Rockefeller Center went bankrupt, and he bought it back with a group of other investors. He sold it again in 2000 for $1.85 billion.

• In 2002, contrary to the Rockefeller reticence about revealing anything personal, he published his memoirs. “Well,” he explained, “it just occurred to me that I had led a rather interesting life.”

The children of the Rockefeller Brothers (and of their sister, Abby) are the fourth generation of immensely wealthy Rockefellers. There are 23 of them, sometimes called the Cousins Generation. Although they had the advantages of wealth and power, many of the cousins felt burdened by (and angry at) their parents’ and the world’s expectations of them. Eventually they made peace with their parents and took their own places on the boards of the various Rockefeller foundations, trusts, and philanthropies, while continuing to pursue their own interests—and they have plenty of money to back up their chosen causes.

On the other hand, although the Rockefeller name may be synonymous with enormous wealth, each generation inherits less because more and more people have a share in it. What about the fifth generation, the grandchildren of the Rockefeller Brothers? The family has always guarded its privacy, and family members are not forthcoming about the actual value of their assets. Researchers have been unable to discern exactly how much money any individual Rockefeller has; all they know is that the trust funds that support the fifth generation don’t begin to compare to the fortunes of the second, third, and fourth generations.

“The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.”

—
Lady Astor

Right now, depending on where you are, there might be a raccoon family living under your floorboards, bats sleeping in your attic, birds nesting in your trees, not to mention the squirrels, mice, and snakes that inhabit your yard and a coyote that comes around at night. (And don’t forget about all of the insects and spiders.) Yet despite their greater numbers, we often don’t even notice these animals until one of them has torn through our garbage cans. Can we all survive together in harmony…or does someone have to go?

Basically, there are three choices when dealing with a wild animal in an urban setting: Relocate it, exterminate it, or coexist with it. Until recently, relocation was the most common tactic, but it has serious drawbacks. According to the National Audubon Society: “In the vast majority of cases, relocation is an ineffective, inhumane, and ecologically destructive method for dealing with urban wildlife.” The first problem: Unless an experienced professional sets the trap, the animal can get injured or killed—as could a curious house pet. Trying to capture the animal yourself could lead to a nasty bite (and even nastier rabies shots). There’s also the potential of catching and relocating a nursing mother, leaving her orphans to fend for themselves. But of even more concern is what can occur when the wild animal is released into a brand-new area.

Take the raccoon population in the BRI’s hometown of Ashland, Oregon, a valley town surrounded by forested mountains. Homeowners trap the raccoons that have invaded their yards and then release them in the woods around nearby Emigrant Lake. But raccoons are considered an
invasive species
; when they enter a new ecosystem, they tend to throw it out of balance—that is,
if
they
survive. For most transplanted animals (whether they’re mammals, birds, or reptiles), the stress of being trapped and released often leads to a quick death, either from starvation or predation. Those that do survive infringe on other animals’ established territories and diminish the food supply. Worse yet, raccoons can spread a form of canine distemper similar to rabies. And when the native berry supply runs out, where do the transplanted raccoons go? Into the backyards of the homes surrounding the lake—as do the bears who are forced to find new food sources because the transplanted raccoons ate up all of the berries.

These kinds of scenarios are being played out every day in and around towns and cities throughout North America. And the problem is growing. According to Susan Barnes, a biologist for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, “The more urbanized we get, the more people don’t know how to tolerate urban wildlife.” And as more and more patches of forests turn into neighborhoods, these encounters will only increase. The Audubon Society reports that every year, Portland, Oregon, citizens capture and relocate 5,000 raccoons, opossums, foxes, coyotes, rabbits, and skunks, into the forests around nearby Mt. Hood, one of several ecosystems threatened by invasive species and their city-born diseases.