The Modest Visionary

He was born into the world as the heir to a hated name. It was a harsh and heady time, when vast financial empires were rising on the bones of their crushed competition and the U.S. was racing toward its manifest destiny as a world power. No man was richer, more ruthless or less popular than John Davison Rockefeller, the lord of Standard Oil. and no man seemed less qualified to follow him than the shy and sheltered boy who was his namesake. Yet, when he died in a Tucson, Ariz, hospital last week, a frail and tired man of 86, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had turned the hatred and fear that surrounded his name into warmth and respect; he was mourned the world over, and he left the world a legacy that dwarfed the pyramids of the pharaohs.

The list of good works is dizzying: the 200-in. Mount Palomar telescope, probing the lightyears; Nobel Prizewinner Niels Bohr's atomic research projects in Copenhagen; vast national parks--Wyoming's Jackson Hole, the Virgin Islands National Park, Maine's Acadia National Park; Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art; the site of the United Nations; the restored Reims Cathedral; and the rebuilt Stoa of Attalus in Athens. Colonial Williamsburg rose from the American past, and Rockefeller Center pointed to the American future (and changed the New York skyline). Schools, from Louvain to Tokyo and from Harvard to the University of Chicago (which his father founded in 1890), benefited by $81,708,000. Religious causes, representing every creed, received another $80 million. All told, the philanthropies of the Rockefellers, father and son, amounted to more than a billion dollars, changed the face of the world and the course of human events.

Pennies & Pledges. As a boy on his family's estate outside Cleveland, young Rockefeller led an overprotected life, dominated by three older sisters, hovering nurses and governesses, and a doting mother. His father taught him caution and thrift; he had to account every week for all the money he earned in household chores, was docked 1-c- for such delinquencies as being late to family prayers. From his Baptist mother. Laura Spelman Rockefeller, he absorbed a sense of piety and duty. Dancing, the theater, cardplay-ing and other frivolities were frowned on; at ten, young Rockefeller made a vow. which he never broke, to abstain from "tobacco, profanity and the drinking of any intoxicating beverages."

During his student days at Brown University, "Johnny Rock" overcame some of his shyness, won a Phi Beta Kappa key and the heart of pretty Abby Aldrich, the daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich. At 23, the young man entered his father's austere offices at 26 Broadway, first filling the inkwells and performing other humble chores. Four years later he and Abby were married. When he asked her father for her hand, and awkwardly tried to explain that he could support her properly, Senator Aldrich gently changed the subject.

Paternalism to Philanthropy. As a young businessman, J.D.R. Jr. (as he afterward styled himself--although no one outside the family circle ever addressed him as anything but Mr. Rockefeller) began to show a humanitarianism and sense of managerial responsibility that were new in the cutthroat, turn-of-the-century world of high finance. Accompanied by W. L. Mackenzie King, a bright young labor-relations specialist (later the longtime Prime Minister of Canada), he visited the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. after a bloody and bitter strike, came away with a strong sympathy for the laboring man and a distaste for company-town paternalism. He translated his feelings into liberal labor contracts and an insistence on enlightened management at all Standard Oil plants.

Early in life he decided that his mission was to give his vast fortune back to the world, wisely and where it would do the most good. His motivation was not so much simple charity as a religious awareness that wealth is only a trust, and in redistributing his family's gain, he was in a sense carrying out the will of God. At 36. he resigned from half a dozen directorships, and for the next half-century he dedicated his life to philanthropy. "I have been brought up to believe," he said, "that giving ought to be entered into in just the same careful way as investing--and tested by the same intelligent standards."

His modesty was becoming. During the construction of Rockefeller Center, he resisted all efforts "to plaster the family name all over a piece of real estate." gave in only on the urgent pleas of his five sons. When his father died at 97, he refused to drop the "Junior" from his name, because, he said, there could never be more than one John D. Rockefeller. Just as there never can be another John D. Rockefeller Jr.

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