Poor Little Rich People

THE 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.

The secret of their success seems to derive from their being around at a point in the history of the family when it was possible to do the kind of study they had in mind. Their conduits to the 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.

The very existence of the archives is another key to why this is such a fascinating book: the Rockefellers are a family totally obsessed with itself. They record everything. They fund major studies of themselves. In college, they write their theses about some aspect of the dynastic history. And at least since the first John D. made the family fortune, the major theme of each Rockefeller's life seems to have been figuring out where he or she fits into the scheme.

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 and Nelson's generation are presented as ambitious and deeply flawed people, and their children as a neurotic, basically ordinary group that will never shape society.

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, are a little forced. Nelson got divorced and remarried, something common enough in America, but Collier and Horowitz build that up into a life-destroying crisis. Their billing of David as a failure has to do with the Chase Manhattan Bank losing a little gound to its chief rival. Even Winthrop, the most convincingly unsuccessful of the brothers, doesn't elicit much sympathy for his lowly role as millionaire cattle rancher and governor of Arkansas.

ALL OF 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 for wealth having immeasurable influence on the characters of those who possess it, but they draw the relationship a little too strongly. After all, these are people who, by any standards except perhaps their own, are extraordinarily happy and free from want, able to do whatever pleases them. We should all have their problems.

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.

Their influence and range of activities are all the more amazing because none of them really strayed far from family-owned concerns in their perambulations; through these concerns in their perambulations; through 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--is a testament to the family's power.

The Rockefellers is an ambitious book. It seeks not only to describe the psychological inner workings of one extremely complex family, and not only to recount the fortunes of that family. Beyond that, seeing the family's story as the story of big capitalism in America, it seeks to tell that story too. A task that ambitious is practically impossible to carry out, and Collier and Horowitz are weakest at drawing all the necessary connections such a complicated scheme entails.

THEIR MISSION is most successful at its most narrowly construed, for their picture of the family rings absolutely true. It explains as well as could be explained how a group of people could, out of motives that were to them of the noblest quality, do things that were sometimes good and often bad. It also explains why it took four generations for the deeper questions to sink through the thick layers of pride and business and charity.

The Rockefellers who are left are a motley crew, but they do seem to have shed at least their fathers' staggering self-confidence in their own ability to cruise through life doing good. Their pretensions are fewer, their guilt greater, their conflicts with their background more explicit. The change has a great deal to do with the state of America, and a great deal to do with the state of the family; it's a mark of the family's uniqueness that for the younger generation, the two are so deeply entwined. "My father," Nelson's daughter says, "well, I love him for his warmth. But he stands for power, and I think it's important how one relates to power. It stands as a warning." The striking thing about the Rockefellers is that it took them a century to reach that conclusion.