Word: colliers
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...MOST grandiose claim that Peter Collier and David Horowitz make about their huge new history of the Rockefeller family is that while "the Rockefellers had suffered from being treated either as saints or demons," they "would be part of neither camp." They're right about that --although the family has discreetly attacked the book--and their success at presenting a view of the Rockefellers that is not only objective but deep and understanding as well is genuinely impressive...
...Rockefeller family secrets were members of the alienated fourth generation of the dynasty, the great-grandchildren of the first John D. Rockefeller, the first members of the family who were not accustomed to being completely in control of the people around them. These Rockefeller Cousins apparently gave Collier and Horowitz access to parts of the vast family archives without trying, as their parents and grandparents had, to put the writers on the family payroll or to interfere substantially in their work...
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...