We continue today with David Rockefeller's memoirs...

..In mid-September 1936, Dick Gilder and I attended the Republican Convention in Cleveland and watched the nomination of Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas as the forlorn hope to run against the immensely popular President Franklin D. Roosevelt. My family had supported the Republican Party since the 1850s—Grandfather told me that he had voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860—and I considered myself a Republican as well. The party regulars were pessimistic about their chances and deeply divided between the progressives, who opposed the New Deal but saw a necessary role for government in the economic life of the country, and the conservatives, who were convinced that the United States was undergoing a Bolshevik revolution and wanted to return to the laissez-faire world of the nineteenth century.

With the convention over, Dick and I returned to Cambridge and reoccupied our old suite of rooms in Eliot House. Dick entered Harvard Business School, and I, with some trepidation, began the demanding course of graduate study in economics...

..It was a wintry afternoon in New York, and Peggy, Dick Gilder, and I were in a cab on Fifth Avenue headed to the Frick Museum. The cabby had his radio on when the announcer interrupted to tell of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We were all in shock. The three of us went on to the Frick and walked through the rooms in silence. Dick especially liked the Vermeers, and we looked at them together. Their beauty calmed us for the moment.

The next day Dick quit his job at Tiffany’s and enlisted in the Air Force. His action didn’t surprise me. Dick had believed war with Hitler was inevitable since our trip to Germany six years before. His views were not popular; most of the people I knew, including many of my family and most of Dick’s, were opposed to the United States entering the European war. That was natural enough given the horrors of World War I, and it was a much more widely held sentiment than we acknowledge today. The year before, Dick and I had been asked to join the Council on Foreign Relations, and I remember Dick arguing strongly for intervention on the side of the British. Many of our elders at the council vehemently disagreed...

full text
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2023/02/part-3-memoirs-david-rockefeller.html