Word: colliers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bonding as powerful as this, Collier and Horowitz imply, is bound to start working against itself at some point, to become a destructive force. That's something that happens in a lot of families, but in the case of the Rockefellers, particularly the third generation of David, Nelson and their three brothers, the working out of family relations has had a subtle, important effect on America and the world. The third generation and its children form the center of the book, and through their stories Collier and Horowitz make a case for a slow decline in the family dynasty. David...
Presenting the Rockefellers as a family in decline is sometimes a difficult task--it works only using their own wildly glorified terms of what constitutes human success and failure. Collier and Horowitz consequently spend a great deal of time building up the awesome status of the family in order to be able to bill it later as a flop. The status, of course, has always been there, and is easy to portray; this is without question the richest and most powerful family America has ever seen, and the reach of its money and influence is staggering. The failures, however...
...WHICH seems like so much quibbling, albeit understandable quibbling. What Collier and Horowitz are trying to do is to create a grand, novelistic family epic where personal sins and relationships have an exact coincidence with the world the Rockefellers dominate. Thus the Ludlow massacre, and its strikingly similar grandchild at Attica, are made to seem as if they hover over the family consciousness like a dark cloud--but in a world as protective and as solipsistic as the one the Rockefellers inhabit, that may very well not be the case at all. Collier and Horowitz make a convincing argument...
This is not to imply that Collier and Horowitz gloss over the impact of the Rockefellers in favor of describing exquisite intertribal tensions. Particularly in detailing the history of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s five powerful sons, they carefully document the extent and form of the family's influence. In this modern, financially stable stage, their lives are inextricably bound up with the course of the nation, through a welter of foundations, governmental bureaus, financial institutions and the family specialty these days, report-writing panels of experts...
...these concerns they were able to have a major hand in the Vietnam War, the growth of the CIA, the shaping of the Cold War, presidential and cabinet selections, even world population patterns. All these things are tangential to the central, family-related drama of the book, and indeed Collier and Horowitz leave the way open for someone else to do a book on what the Rockefellers did to everyone else, rather than just themselves. Still, the very incidental way in which world events are portrayed--the virtual colonization of Venezuela, say, as a good maturing experience for Nelson...