John D. Rockefeller III

John Davison Rockefeller 3rd was born on March 21, 1906, in New York City, the second of the six children and eldest son of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller Jr. He attended the Browning School in New York City and the Loomis Institute in Windsor, Connecticut, and then studied economics at Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry, writing his senior thesis on industrial relations.⁠[1][1][1]

In 1928 he was appointed a director of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, beginning a lifelong concern with population and birth control. In the summer before his graduation, he worked as an assistant in the information section of the League of Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland, beginning his long engagement with international relations.⁠[1][1]

In 1929 he received a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton with high honors in economics, then traveled around the world, ending in Japan, where he worked at a conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. His family expected him to take the lead in the philanthropy of his generation; in December 1929 he began working in his father’s office at 26 Broadway in Manhattan, becoming deeply involved in the operations of the various family-related institutions and serving successively as a trustee or officer of the Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation headquartered in New York City. It was chartered by New York State legislation in 1913 with funding from Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, with the mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” In its early years it funded global public health, medical education, and yellow fever vaccine research; in the mid-20th century it supported agricultural programs that came to be known as the “Green Revolution”; and in recent years it has focused its work on energy, health, food, and climate.Open the full entry, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical ResearchThe Rockefeller UniversityThe Rockefeller University is a biomedical research university on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City, devoted mainly to scientific research and graduate education; it grew out of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research founded by John D. Rockefeller.Open the full entry (today The Rockefeller University), Colonial Williamsburg and the China Medical Board, among others.⁠[1][1][1]

In 1932 he became chairman of the juvenile delinquency committee of the Boys Bureau in New York City, which in 1938 published Youth in the Toils, a report with recommendations on the treatment of young offenders. The same year, at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he married Blanchette Ferry Hooker, daughter of Elon Hooker, founder of the Hooker Electrochemical Company.⁠[1][1]

In July 1942, Rockefeller joined the U.S. Navy and served as a lieutenant commander in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, taking part in an interdepartmental working group planning postwar policy for Japan. He left active duty in 1945.⁠[1][1]

His wartime experience led to his appointment as cultural adviser to John Foster Dulles during the negotiation of the peace treaty with Japan, charged with studying ways to improve U.S.–Japanese relations, which gave him a deep interest in Japan and in Asia as a whole; Japan later became a “second home” for him and his wife, and the couple began collecting Asian art in a modest way. In the early 1950s he revived the dormant Japan Society.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 1952, Rockefeller convened a conference on population in Williamsburg, Virginia, to discuss food supply, industrial development, the depletion of natural resources and the political instability brought by unchecked population growth. After the conference he founded the Population Council, providing $1 million from his own discretionary philanthropic funds for its first year of operation. His travels throughout Asia had convinced him that less developed countries could not achieve political stability without controlling population growth; he regarded “population control” as a means of addressing poverty and economic development rather than as an end in itself.⁠[2][2][2][1][1][2]

In 1956 he organized the Asia Society, which, like the Japan Society, was dedicated to promoting cultural and educational exchange between East and West. He also founded the Council on Economic and Cultural Affairs (later renamed the Agricultural Development Council) to provide assistance to Asian farmers, and became an American adviser consulted by many prominent Asians.⁠[1][1][1]

He led the committee of civic leaders that planned Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and was the key figure in raising funds and coordinating city officials, society figures and artists. He served as Lincoln Center’s first president from 1956, became chairman of the board in 1961, and was elected honorary chairman in 1970.⁠[1][1]

In 1963 he incorporated the JDR 3rd Fund as his principal philanthropy, covering areas of interest beyond the Population Council and the Asia Society. The fund had no endowment and was financed by his annual contributions, usually about $10 million. It ran three main programs: the Asian Cultural Program, which promoted cultural understanding between East and West, with Porter A. McCray as its founding director; the Arts in Education program, which sought to bring the arts into education at all levels; and the Youth Task Force, established in October 1970 to foster collaboration between young people and business and professional leaders.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][4]

In 1967, Rockefeller initiated and lobbied hard for the World Leaders’ Statement, which was signed by 30 heads of state including U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. The statement urged governments to make population a major factor in long-range planning, drawing attention to population growth as a world problem and building political support for family planning.⁠[2][2][2]

In 1970, President Richard Nixon appointed Rockefeller chairman of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The most contentious issue within the commission was abortion, on which members were divided, and a majority recommended establishing a “clear and positive framework” for abortion on request. Nixon rejected the commission’s recommendations, and Rockefeller was thereby drawn into the public debate over legalizing abortion.⁠[1][2][2]

In 1973, drawing on his experiences in the 1960s, he published The Second American Revolution, which portrayed the United States as a pluralistic democratic society emphasizing cooperation between public and private institutions. The book laid the groundwork for his later involvement in planning the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, in which he took part through the National Committee for the Bicentennial Era and the JDR 3rd Fund’s bicentennial program grants.⁠[1][1]

In 1974, at the World Population Conference, Rockefeller delivered his “Bucharest speech,” calling for “new and urgent attention” to the role of women in modern development. Many people who had long worked on contraceptive technology and on family planning as the main means of controlling population growth saw the speech as a repudiation of their work and of themselves, and it became controversial.⁠[2][2][2]

On July 10, 1978, Rockefeller died in a car accident in Mt. Pleasant, New York. After a memorial service at Riverside Church in Manhattan, his ashes were interred in the Rockefeller family cemetery. The JDR 3rd Fund was dissolved after his death, and its Asian Cultural Program was continued in 1980 by a newly established nonprofit organization, the Asian Cultural Council.⁠[1][1][3][4]

In the late 1960s, Rockefeller launched a campaign on public policy toward philanthropy, arguing that private philanthropy was a unique social force indispensable to America’s continued success. He became a leading spokesman for private philanthropy, lobbied Congress for regulatory and tax laws favorable to private giving, and helped bring about the creation of the Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy (known as the Peterson Commission) and the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (known as the Filer Commission).⁠[1][1][1]

In the 1960s, the Rockefellers became major collectors of Asian and American art, advised by Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and a specialist in Asian art, and by the American art specialist Edgar P. Richardson. Regarding himself as a temporary custodian of the works, he ultimately bequeathed his Asian art collection to the Asia Society in New York and his American art collection to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.⁠[1][1]