How the Rockefellers Created Hillary

by Richard Poe
Monday, January 21, 2008
12:00 am Eastern Time

PITY THE Rockefellers. Try though they might, they never manage to get a Rockefeller elected president. Governors, senators and even a vice president have borne the Rockefeller name. Yet the presidency eludes them. And so they busy themselves playing kingmaker behind the scenes. Their latest project is Hillary Clinton.

Last Thursday, the public interest group Judicial Watch published a memorandum which the Clinton Library was forced to release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The 24-page memo shines a spotlight on Hillary’s little-known relationship with America’s mightiest oil and banking dynasty. Dated May 26, 1993 and addressed to “Hillary Rodham Clinton”, the memo comes from Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia — better known as Jay Rockefeller — whose great-grandfather founded Standard Oil.

The memo lays out a detailed strategy for pushing the “Clinton reform plan” for universal health coverage. In it, Rockefeller snaps orders at Mrs. Clinton in the imperious tones of a man accustomed to obedience.

He instructs Hillary to get tough on critics of the health plan. “Impeach the credibility of opponents”, he writes. Portray them as “perpetrators”, “paid lobbyists” and purveyors of “ideological extremism”. Assign investigators to conduct “opposition research” on them and expose their “lifestyles”. Do not allow them “even one day without scrutiny”.

Regarding the need for a radio and TV advertising campaign, Rockefeller fumes, “Fundraising must begin immediately. I am frankly surprised that I have not been contacted or shown a plan for fundraising and media expenditures.”

Rockefeller plainly viewed Hillary as his subordinate, and the “Clinton reform plan” as his project. And no wonder. The plan we know as Hillarycare was originally Rockefeller’s idea.

“Health care was his major interest”, writes Joshua Green in The Atlantic. “The agony of watching his mother‘s lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s had made him a crusader for universal health insurance, and in the years before Bill Clinton was elected he had organized labor and health interests toward that goal.”

Many Democrats urged Jay Rockefeller to run for president in 1992, but he declined and backed the Clintons instead.

On January 25, 1993 — only five days after his inauguration — Bill Clinton appointed Hillary chairman of his National Task Force on Health Care Reform. Prior to that, she had no history as a health care reformer. In order to carry out the assignment, she had to make a crash study, “bearing down and learning the mind-numbing intricacies of the health-care system”, The Atlantic reports.

More importantly, Hillary relied on the guiding hand of Jay Rockefeller, who watched closely over the Task Force. In their book The System, Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder note that Senator Rockefeller was “largely responsible for creating the coalition of pro-reform groups to campaign for passage of the Clinton plan and had opened his mansion in Rock Creek Park… to them for their first strategy meeting.”

Hillary might have been short on health care experience, but she had carried much water for the Rockefellers, especially David Rockefeller, Jr., son of the family patriarch David Rockefeller who led Chase Manhattan Bank for 21 years, as president, then chairman and CEO.

As late as 1989, Hillary was not yet known as a national policymaker. She worked for a crooked Arkansas law firm. Radical education reformer Marc Tucker hired Hillary that year as a lobbyist for his National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE).

Tucker dreamed of imposing a Soviet-style school-to-work system on Americans, whereby the government would manage every citizen’s life, steering young children into career tracks, then placing them in jobs after graduation, in corporations vetted by government overseers. Rockefeller money funded Tucker’s think tank and David Rockefeller, Jr. sat on Tucker’s Board.

Eight days after Bill Clinton’s election, Marc Tucker wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton which began: “I still cannot believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move. I met last Wednesday in David Rockefeller’s office with him, [Apple Computer CEO] John Sculley, Dave Barram and David Haselkorn. It was a great celebration. Both John and David R. were more expansive than I have ever seen them — literally radiating happiness. My own view and theirs is that this country has seized its last chance.”

Why David Rockefeller would be “radiating happiness” at the Clintons’ ascension to the White House is not clear. However, it is worrisome.

Something fishy is going on with the Clintons and Rockefellers. This election season, Americans need to dig deep and learn their hidden agendas.