The Chase Manhattan Bank: Rockefeller's Bank

"After an epidemic of yellow fever in 1798, in which coffins had been sold by itinerant vendors on street corners, Aaron Burr established the Manhattan Company, with the ostensible aim of bringing clean water to the city from the Bronx River but in fact designed as a front for the creation of New York's second bank, rivaling Alexander Hamilton's Bank of New York" [from "The Chase Manhattan Bank", 1945-1985, John Donald Wilson, Harvard Business School Press, 1986]

Chase National Bank (formed in 1877, now JP Morgan Chase) was named for former United States Treasury Secretary and Chief Justice Salmon Chase, although Chase didn't have a connection with the latter entity.

Under his later successor, David Rockefeller, the bank became part of a bank holding company, the Chase Manhattan Corporation.

The Chase Bank has had a strong connection to the World Bank, as three presidents (John J. McCloy, Eugene Black and George Woods) all worked at Chase before taking up positions at the international bank. A fourth president, James D. Wolfensohn, is also closely associated with Rockefeller, serving as a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, amongst other family-created institutions.

Rockefeller has also for many years hosted annual luncheons at the family's Westchester County Pocantico estate for the world's finance ministers and central bank governors, following the annual Washington meetings of the World Bank and IMF. These luncheons were held at the Playhouse. These regular meetings were also attended by the other internationalist in the family, John D 3rd, up until his death in 1978.

It was through a recommendation from the World Bank's Eugene Black that Rockefeller gained a crucial executive assistant, Joseph Verner Reed, Jr., from the begininning of his Chase chairmanship; Reed had been an assistant to Black at the World Bank and had worked with Black when he was a Chase director, rising to become a Vice President. Reed was subsequently to become a crucial emissary for Rockefeller in the admittance of the Shah of Iran into the US, amongst other duties. Later, in 1987, Reed became Under Secretary General for Political Affairs at the United Nations, a pivotal senior position that is traditionally given to the United States, thus becoming the top-ranking American in the United Nations Secretariat.