Bob Scheer Hanging with Rockefeller

Back in 1975, the journalist Robert Scheer, who now writes for the Los Angeles Times, spent several weeks with Nelson Rockefeller. His account of that encounter can be found in a collection of his articles published in 1988 called Thinking Tuna Fish and Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power (New York, Hill and Wang, 1988). I highly recommend the collection since even though they were written in the 1970s, they don’t feel dated. If anything Scheer was amazingly prescient, writing for example about the neocons before there was even a word for them, or about cold-blooded technocrats of the Empire in an article on Daniel Ellsberg and Vietnam that is unfortunately relevant today. In any case, I find his essay on Nelson Rockefeller revealing of how power is exercised in this country.

Scheer begins,

On our first pass over the tiny mountaintop airfield, it seemed like we were going to hit the side of the mountain, which would have meant the end of me, Nelson Rockefeller, and my story. But it would have been a bonanza for conspiracy buffs. What was the ex-editor of Ramparts, who had done so many CIA exposes, doing on a little prop plane with the Vice President, who was just then completing his committee’s investigation of the CIA? (p. 199)

Why did Rockefeller let a left-wing journalist hang around him like that?

Rockefeller’s most striking quality is his total confidence in his ability to coopt anyone, even an aging New Leftist like me. Once it was clear that I was just another intellectual and not a potential assassin, I was able to hang around with him for over a month. He permitted it because of his deeply ingrained assumption that people with brains or pens who could possibly annoy him by what they write can simply be hired and made to forget “all that negative stuff…”

The man does not feel that he can be hurt by words. Rockefeller’s aides cannot even get him to read major articles about himself, unlike Henry Kissinger, who begins his morning by reading clips of everything said about him on the previous day. We may have social mobility in America, but we also have an economic class structure and
Rockefeller knows that this is his country and his government, while Kissinger has always believed that he is passing and living on borrowed time. (pp. 199-200)

Scheer then describes a typical day hanging with Nelson:

Once we stopped to have cocktails with the entire Supreme Court, another afternoon it was an hour with the Empress and the Shah of Iran, and on a third occasion Rocky spent a relaxing evening at the Kennedy center with Nancy and Henry Kissinger. In the process, I kept finding myself squeezed up against a lot of the people whom I had spent most of my adult life demonstrating against. They are not a bad bunch of people to have hors d’oeuvres with, if you can forget things like the Shah’s secret police or Attica. But I came away from all this with no doubts at all that America has a ruling class and that it gets along quite smoothly with its counterparts abroad.

Ironically, I had just published a book (America After Nixon) on the power of the top
multinational corporations and the ways they run this country. The day I was trying to get on the Rockefeller plane, Business Week had just come out with a long, serious review. Although the reviewer considered me a Marxist, he said my main thesis about the crisis of corporate power was valid. As I stood in Morrow’s office, I looked down on his desk and saw my picture and the review staring up at me. My immediate thought was “Damn, it’s all over and the Secret Service is going to hustle my ass out of here in two minutes.”

But it was just the opposite. Rockefeller greeted me with “Hey fellow, I see ya got a best-seller on your hands. Looks like a really interesting book.” Since the main point of my book, which was hardly a best-seller, is that people like the Rockefellers pretty much run this country at the expense of the rest of us, I was perplexed. But after getting to know the man, I came to understand that Rockefeller implicitly believes in the Marxist analysis of economic classes and struggle—he’s just on the other side. (pp. 200-1)

Then there’s this:

Rockefeller: I’m a great believer in planning.
Scheer: What kind of planning?
Rockefeller: Economic, social, political, military, total world planning.
Scheer: Does the question of class enter into this at all?
Rockefeller: Not for me.

I asked him when we were on that plane ride about any possible conflicts between the needs of the multinational corporations and labor, and he said there were none: “My feeling is that that segment [labor] is terribly important, but they’re going to be taken care of if our economic system works, which is what I was talking to these guys about—we’re hobbling the economic system by accelerating social objectives.

The “guys” that he had been talking with were Arthur Burns, head of the Federal Reserve Board, and Alan Greenspan, the President’s top economic advisor.”

…I knew something important must be happening, because as I crossed the lobby with Morrow, he suddenly said, “Oh, there’s David. Hi, David, this is Bob Scheer. Bob, this is David Rockefeller and his wife, Margaret.”

David was in a golfing getup and was very relaxed and friendly, as was his wife, who wanted to know if Nelson’s wife, Happy, had gotten in yet. Within the next half hour I saw Thomas Murphy, chairman of General Motors, and Edgar Speer, head of U.S. Steel. (pp. 201-2)

The event was a quarterly meeting of the Business Council a group of the top two hundred business leaders. Scheer writes that after the friendly greetings, he “wandered the lobby in a daze. After fifteen years of doubts, college debates with professors, and confusion about whether America really has a ruling class, I had suddenly found myself right smack in the middle of it.”
(p. 202)

Rockefeller then addressed the group after dinner:

I enjoy this opportunity because, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I feel that those of you in this room symbolize, really, the essence of what our country stands for… Now we find ourselves in a situation in which many of these values are challenged as never before… No group knows this better than you, because you men and women—so many of you representing much-maligned multinational corporations… we, as Americans, should be so grateful that your ingenuity and your imagination and your drive has seen the opportunities that existed in this world. (pp. 202-3)

On the plane ride back, Scheer asked Rockefeller about his brother David.

He said, “Well, David is concerned with the world, he’s the banker, so he has to take care of the global problems, and I started with the domestic—how to build domestic consensus for what needs to be done.” (p. 203)

Here’s how the day ended for Scheer:

On the flight back to Westchester, I wondered how I was going to get down to Manhattan, but you soon learn not to worry about things like that when you’re around Rockefeller. A limousine, chauffered, no less, with a phone in the back, was put at my disposal. Chauffered limousines just suddenly appear when you’re on the right side. And, of course, what’s really scary is that all of a sudden an important part of you wants to be on the right side. (p. 204)

The weird thing about reading this article thirty years later, is how everything that has happened since then was planned out by Rockefeller and his people.

There is no question but that in terms of the current planning within the executive branch of government, Gerald Ford is a bystander—a small-town politician—and that Rockefeller’s old club is running things. It is certainly spinning the big visions about where things should go in this country over the next forty years and making decisions that will very dramatically affect our world. And we are not, in any sense, participating in those decisions.

Rockefeller believes that American corporate capitalism is at a point of crisis in the world, and he is quite frank in stating that the working out of concrete plans for the survival of that system is the main contribution that he must make in what remains of his life… He told me: “A lot of people don’t want to be bothered or upset or disturbed by these awful things that are happening abroad, but more and more they are coming to realize that this is the fact, and I happen to be a great believer in Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest, those who can adapt to their environment. Okay, that’s the way I feel [and then he pulls me closer with those almost whispered tones of the Godfather]. This is a very exciting, open period, and if we are as smart and intelligent as I think we are as a nation, we’ll work these things out, and if we get rid of the emotional things, I mean get them behind us… our emotional traumas are, I think, going to pass and we’ll be able to settle down and sort this stuff out and approach it intelligently. I’m very optimistic about the future. I’m glad to see you. You really understand me.”

By “awful things,” he means poorer people in the world wanting a share of the pie; by “emotional issues,” he means all of the resistance from Vietnam to Attica that people put up to his rule; and by being glad to see me, he means he thinks he’s got me conned because I kept my mouth shut and nodded appreciatively every few minutes. (pp. 217-8)

There's also a lot in the essay on the cultural politics of the Rockefeller-era establishment. It was basically two-tiered. High art could be critical as long as it didn't reach the masses. That is one thing that is very different in the post-Reagan, cultural war era. The right-wing establishment, having allied themselves with religious fundamentalists, now won't even tolerate critical art for a narrow elite.