My story is largely one of dependence. Like many of us, I have been a taker. When I needed to, I took and took. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. In a larger sense, I was what the Internal Revenue Service refers to as a dependent. That status has helped me realize something. No one is a self-made man.
Yes, I have shown determination throughout my life as a blind person, but here is my secret formula:
Without the support and love from so many people in my life, above all my wife and my family…without the close friendships with which I have been blessed…without the kindness so many people have spontaneously shown…without the oxygen of freedom and rule of law that the United States gave my family…without the education that in my darkness gave me material to help sustain my mind…without the example of great men and women in my life and in history… I am convinced that I would have lain where I fell.
Time and again, in this long journey up from that Detroit hospital bed I have depended on the sheer example of many people, both living and not. Selecting superior people and following the examples they set may (and probably will) change your life for the better. The choice comes at absolutely no charge to you, so there is no reason to choose any but from the top shelf—the best. If others of mankind—individuals or entire communities—have attained grace and produced lasting achievements, why not take guidance from their paths? It is a question of what we want ourselves to grow to be.
One example I have followed (or tried to) goes back to my days at Columbia University, not only as an undergraduate but later as an MBA candidate. Benjamin Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor (1949) and a fabulously successful investor himself, was a professor at Columbia and an inspiration for Warren Buffett, who studied under him as a graduate business student and then went to work for his investment firm.
Graham was an adherent of “value” investing, as contrasted with harried speculation and quick-as-a-flick profit taking. I believe this approach (which has also been Buffett’s) was a cultural inheritance of the Great Depression, but Graham’s principles were also consonant with the general tenor of Eisenhower’s America—which was a big part of my own cultural inheritance. Sensitivity to society at large and its needs, not just a monomaniacal drive for profits at any cost, was reflected in the stance of many of the immediate postwar business leaders—and continued to prevail in the lecture halls of Columbia’s business school for years after Graham departed the faculty in 1955. That is where I learned about value and finance, but finance of a character that fit me well. Its influence has enabled me to build my career in business unaccompanied by any lingering shame about exploitation.
To my surprise, then, what I subsequently encountered through friends and associates in Washington in 1966 and 1967 was quite a different kettle of fish. Unorthodox approaches to business were in the air. I made new acquaintances who were innovative business doers of a mind-set quite different from the supposedly ideal corporate leaders of the business-school world.
Tom Watson, for example—not the splendid golfer but the entrepreneurial-minded head of IBM. Tom gave me many ideas about what it really meant to be in business and finance and to build a company. He was especially emphatic on the importance of investing in research and development. Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard fame, a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee with which I was associated as a White House Fellow, also became a friend and contributed even more to my understanding of the emerging entrepreneurial ways of American business. Tellingly, all these friends and guides were avid devotees of technology. And yet the business school had been teaching none of what I was now learning in Washington!
I have been blessed and sustained by so many friends across such a broad field of endeavor that I find it hard to sort through them in any way accessible to readers. But David Rockefeller deserves a pedestal of his own. David was a member of the board of overseers at Harvard when I first came somewhat within his orbit. He was always interested in the young scholars at the university. He had been asked by President Johnson to provide private-sector funding for a new “White House Fellows” program, which he did. David was appointed chairman of the first Commission on White House Fellowships. Former secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon mentored me in the program and for many years thereafter, as did John Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
But David continued to have a large place in my life. Ever since meeting him, he provided me with informal, un-self-conscious tutorials in politics, finance (the two of us acting in concert at times), art, and philanthropy. And he showed an openness of spirit you might not expect in such an Olympian figure in finance and society, generously widening his friendship with me to embrace others in my circle, such as Jerry Speyer.
David was also instrumental in my becoming a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of the National Committee on US-China Relations. In the 1970s, during the early days when Communist China “opened up” to ordinary diplomatic contact with the United States, I was asked to host some of the first wave of Chinese diplomats in our Watergate home. This was an important period of broadening boundaries for the Chinese government and for us. I learned from my experience with those men how talking
