Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations

9 DEAL

194 9 Deal If the United Nations needed further evidence of its increasingly precarious relationship with Westchester County, a single memorable event on a Saturday afternoon in October provided it. One of the UN’s staunchest friends, Nelson Rockefeller, invited one thousand delegates and alternates to lunch at his family’s estate, Pocantico Hills, near Tarrytown in Westchester County. But more than two hours after the “typical American” luncheon was to begin, more than half of the expected guests were missing. They were not snubbing one of the nation’s richest and most influential families—they were lost in the unfamiliar terrain beyond Manhattan . Even the staid New York Times delighted in the symbolism as it reported , “United Nations delegates, long accustomed to complications of international politics, were baffled today when confronted with the geographical problems of navigating darkest Westchester in chauffeur-driven cars.” The diplomats were hapless wanderers on back country roads. “For all anyone knows,” a Times reporter noted in the next day’s newspaper, “some statesmen may still be floundering around Tarrytown Lake, hoping the gasoline holds out.”1 Within this incident also lay a clue to the eventual resolution of the United Nations’ dilemma. Throughout 1945 and 1946, little public attention had been paid to the recurring role of Nelson Rockefeller, the grandson of the nineteenth-century oil baron John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefeller estate lay in Westchester County, but Nelson Rockefeller was deeply involved with the booster campaign to attract the United Nations to New York City. In fact, the Rockefeller family had been enmeshed in the world capital competition intermittently since it began. In the spring of 1945, when the frenzy was just beginning, Nelson Rockefeller held the position of assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs. The energetic , charismatic heir to a family fortune was just thirty-seven years old, but he already had been president of Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He had been on Capitol Hill one day Deal 195 in March 1945 when a congressman from South Dakota approached him to make the oddest suggestion—that the United Nations should consider placing its headquarters in the Black Hills. Three months later, at the first United Nations conference in San Francisco, Rockefeller encountered this strange idea once again. Although he was in the thick of negotiations over the regional interests of Latin America, he also came away with the business card of Paul E. Bellamy, the chief booster for the Black Hills.2 By the end of 1945, Rockefeller was out of the State Department and pursuing business projects in Latin America. But like other members of his family, he remained intensely involved in the business, cultural, and social whirl of Manhattan, and this included the campaign to bring the United Nations to New York City. With footholds in the realms of local affairs, international diplomacy, and big capital, Nelson Rockefeller knew how to finesse a deal, how to make things happen, and how to have a good time in the process. In January 1946, at the end of the ill-fated site tour that led the UN to Greenwich, Connecticut, Rockefeller made sure that the visiting diplomats had tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. And when the UN ran into difficulties settling into New York, he was the man whom the mayor and the chief American delegate, Edward Stettinius, called. For a time, Rockefeller tried to arrange for the General Assembly to meet in the Rockefeller Center theater. Gradually, mostly out of the public eye, Nelson Rockefeller became the individual at the center of events that would end the search for the Capital of the World.3 Nelson Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., also became drawn into the UN site question, although not by choice. Well known for his interest in international affairs as well as his wealth, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had given the League of Nations $2 million for a library, which still stood in Geneva. With the creation of the United Nations, a remarkable number of people felt entitled to write letters to Rockefeller appealing for his help in securing this or that location, from as near as Manhattan to as far away as Oklahoma. Closest to home, Westchester County’s earliest overtures to the UN—from government officials who did not anticipate the outcry that might follow—included the idea that the organization might move into Rockwood Hall, the estate of the late William Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller’s...