Though no longer directly involved with Chase, the 85-year-old former board chairman says he gave the merger of the two banks his unofficial approval when CEO William Harrison alerted him by phone. “Bill called me the day before, which I thought was nice of him, and I told him it sounded like a valuable deal,” says Rockefeller, who retired from the chairman’s office in 1981. In the 1960s he was a major shareholder in the bank, which for many years was considered the Rockefeller family’s preserve. Founded in 1877, Chase became the world’s biggest bank in 1930, when it merged with Equitable Trust, owned in large part by John D. These days the family has only a small stake in Chase. As to the marriage that will link two historic American families, Rockefeller says: “There was a time when Mr. Morgan would have felt he was a power in his own right and wouldn’t have been interested in joining my grandfather. A deal like this couldn’t have happened 20 years ago - even ten years ago. But those days have passed. Today it makes sense. The history is interesting, but it’s not relevant.”
