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Then the chairman called Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to the stand. He had by some device or other not been in the main hearing room. I guess the police were still keeping him pretty well protected, because there had been all kinds of threats on his life. He took the stand. I was standing right next to the stand. He had just engaged Ivy Lee as a public relations adviser. Public relations adviser was a new profession in those days. I suppose there were some people who had done it, but it had been done informally and wasn't a very well-known profession. I guess Ivy Lee was almost the first in the business who called himself a professional public relations adviser.

Mr. Rockefeller's appearance in itself was a sensation because it had been the policy of his life, up until that time, never to appear a anything. He never gave his name to be a member of a committee. He was a man with as passionate a desire for privacy as any New Englander I ever know, including my own family who were horrified when I had my name in the paper when I went into this public work. That was a dreadful thing. I have always understood that in him, because it was just the same kind of reaction against any kind of publicity. He was a very shy man, naturally shy man.

Rockefeller had engaged Ivy Lee in a moment of desperation, feeling that public relations were so bad that his children were in danger of being kidnapped or killed.