Damals wie Heute, Sowjetrussland Juli 1964

THE EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM

To the Soviet propaganda machine the Rockefeller family had always been „capitalist enemy number one“. Some years before, Pravda had published a book on me and my four brothers entitled Ever Knee Deep in Blood, Ever Trampling Corpses. An article at about the same time in the English-language New Times magazine explained that „of all the billionaire dynasties reigning in the world, the most powerful is that of the Rockfellers.“ The thesis was that, having made exorbitant profits on oil during World War II, we then plowed the moneyinto armaments and took control of the manufacture of atomic weapons. The fact that the Rockefeller Foundation had helped rescue Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller from European Fascist regimes in the 1930s was provided as supporting evidence of our family’s intent to fuel the Cold War to increase our own profits.

David Rockefeller bespricht sein Buch Memoirs, ca. eine Stunde Laufzeit

Just a few months before I arrived in Moscow, Izvestiya editorialized that as chairman of the Museum of Modern Art I was promiting decadence in order to corrupt the population at large: „Under the Rockefellers‘ tutelage, abstract art ist summoned to play a definite political role, to distract the attention of thinking Americans from real life and to make them stupid.“

I met many Russians over the years who were convinced my brothers and I were a cabal, pulling strings behind the scenes to shape American foreign policy. The Soviets had no conception of how a pluralistic democracy works and believed elected officials, up to and including the president of the United States, were only figureheads acting out the roles dictated to them by the real „powers that be“ – in this case, my family. Not infrequently Soviet officials would admonish me to „tell your president to grant most-favored-nation trading status to us,“ or some other thing on their minds, as if it were just a question of my saying so, and it would be done. I would try to explain that the United States had a different kind of government and that I didn’t wield that kind of power, but it was clear that they didn’t believe me.

aus David Rockefeller Memoirs, S. 224f.