The Twilight of the Rich

...This should be true especially at a time like now, when the class immediately above them-the dynastic families with inherited money and power, epitomized by the Rockefellers and Kennedys-is so clearly in disarray...

...Or look at the Who’s Who entries of the members of Carter’s cabinet-you’ll find steady climbs through big institutions, not inherited status...

...everL opportunity, an obligation...

...But for those blue-collar workersthose hapless variable costs-is it any wonder that the desire for security is so strong...

...Perhaps Harvard students are more two-faced than most, but I suspect David Ignatius is a former editor of The Washington Monthly who now lives in Pittsburgh...

...Interndly, I the rich seem to be becoming more ordinary with the passing of generations, as their desire for great quantities of money and power aadually dwindles away over time...

...When it’s booming, they’re raking in overtime pay...

...Quite often the Americans come away asking a simple question: “Why don’t these people do something useful with themselves...

...Or that sons and daughters of mill hands who’ve managed to get to college and climb aboard the fixed-cost gravy train tend to guard their positions on it...

...The rich-the bastardscan break the rules and get away with it...

...Like most white-collar workers, their employment costs will be absorbed by whatever bureaucracy they’ve made their home...

...Look at the clubs where, according to Fortune, the newly made men of stature take their lunches: in Boston, it’s the stuffy Somerset Club, founded in 1851...

...For at least a century, European societies have sustained in their midst a prosperous, rebellious aristocracy, whose younger members amused themselves by attacking almost every aspect of the established, bourgeois order...

...John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who inherited his father’s oil fortune and used it to build an empire of good works, set forth the family’s (and thg country’s) mission: ‘‘Evey right implies a responsibility...

...Because people with brains have allowed themselves to become prisoners of people with money-and live captive within the bureaucracies that money and power have created-meritocracy has somehow become entwined with the rot in our society...

...In the current generation, the elite is unraveling, decomposing, losing its will to command...

...It’s likely, for example, that part of the attraction of John Kennedy was the intuition that he was the sort of man who kept up an awesome pace of philandering...

...Even Jackie Chassis appears to be on the skid‘s, supolanted by Farrah Fawcett-Majors as queen of the supermarket magazines...

...The final,exhilarating leap into t o tal indifference has yet to be made...

...I know a young banker from Citibank who is starting out with much brains but little money...

...Nelson, though not the eldest, pushed himself forward to family leadership and political power by talking like a ward boss...

...Even Jackie Onassis appears to be on the skids . . . , I? Fascists and Libertines In this development, American society may be maturing toward a phenomenon long familiar to Eyyopean nations...

...Nelson Rockefeller, once assurped to have the presidency at his fingertips, is back at the family estate after two humiliating years as Gerald Ford’s vice president...

...Perhaps Russians and 2hinese feel the same bewilderment today when they read about Stewart Mott tending vegetables atop his penthouse, or Abby Rockefeller selling dung...

...In the sixties these families seemed invincible, able to attain any prize...

...Fallows came back with a favorable piece, saying that despite all his flaws Kennedy was a first-rate senator...

...Alth it wasn’t always apparent in the buoyant, prosperous period in which they made their reputations, the two most prominent of John D. Rockefeller, k ’ s four sons were seriously flawed...

...We’re not dependent on the rich themselves...

...And people who succeed within it ought to be the freest citizens of all...

...But they also tend to be fascinated-intoxicated, evenby their world, and eager for a place in it...

...Rockefeller’s presence had tumed that sleepy post into a “stepping-stone to the White House.’’ But last year, when Rockefeller took what would logically seem to be a far more important step toward power by winning the West Virginia governorship, the election aroused little interest...

...But many members of the fixedcost class have the talent or the money to do what they want in the world...

...To date, its offerings to society include: the exclusive franchise on a Scandinavian system for transforming dung into compost (Abby Rockefeller, daughter of David...

...Nelson Rockefeller, once assumed to have the presidency at his fingertips, is back at the family estate after two humiliating years as Gerald Ford’s vice president...

...Americans abroad seemed unable to understand how a ruling class could rule...

...If you doubt it, open the annual report of a large corporation and count the number of Italian, Irish, and Jewish names among the top officers...

...Today, the confirmation of this intuition in the newspapers leaves us cold...

...They are meritocrats, and they probably don’t worry too often about getting laid off or going hungry...

...He, at least, seemed to have proven himself in the real world...

...Meritocracy also ought to be an irresistible force for efficiency, competence, an d innovationsweeping away fat-headed, timewasting, card-punching bureaucracy...

...They seek out the comfortable institutions of the dying elite that preceded them...

...that our ambivalence toward the rich was fairly typical...

...For example, the accepted wisdom often seems tb be that private enterprise is barren afid worthless, rather than the pillar of righteousness one hears discussed at the Duquesne Club...

...His luncheon invitation summons you to a private room at the club, where the banker-only in his twenties-does his best to act like he was reared on Virginia spots amandine veronique, the house specialty...

...For people without money -who aren’t willing to expose their families to unnecessary risks-the responsible, secure career path can seem the only rational choice...

...They find themselves being transferred from job to job and place to place so often that they’re’ lucky if they can keep up acquaintance with their own spouse and children...

...We may need the security their institutions provide, and envy the sense of tradition and community their money buys, but deep down, we’re full of resentment...

...For the most part, these are people who started off with little money, learned to discipline themselves, and by punching all the nght buttons and taking a few fortuitous risks, made it to the top...

...Their every move was closely chronicled...

...in politics, the public’s fascination with those who have money and style has tended to outweigh its simultaneous sense of resentment...

...With so many of us having similar stories to tell, it would be foolish to dismiss the sacrifices that were made on our behalf...

...Because meritocracy imposes so many deprivations, those who manage to succeed within it hold a special grudge against those who are able to cut corners, including the rich...

...Most of us sense that we’re probably more competent than they are-that we can do a better job than the carefully groomed son of the board chairman...

...In just a few short hours, he broke my stereo, screwed his girl in my bed, and left, poker-faced, without And, apparently, on themselves...

...Casting aside his father’s code of noblesse oblige, he became, in the words of one associate, “the most ruthless man in politics...

...The tragedy for the rest of us is that we fcel it’s necessary to choose between the two...

...Economists characterize this element of a company’s workforce-the class of people who get “laid off’ when times are bad-as the firm’s “variable costs...

...The Twilight of the Rich by David Ignatius We all have stories to tell of our encounters with the rich, and most of them aren’t very flattering-either to the rich or to the rest of us...

...His behavior was outrageous, and I was outraged...

...In this citadel of meritocracy, the Kennedy boy was widely regarded as a recipient of special favors, an indifferent student who on the strength of his birth had passed through the magic gates that everyone else had entered through self-driving effort...

...And this may be one small sign that the balance of our ambivalent emotions toward the rich may be shifting away from fascination toward something more sensible...

...Their money and visioq shaped what deserved to be called, uptil the 1960s, the !‘American Century...

...I can recall, for example, an evening five years ago, when one of Robert Kennedy’s sons visited my apartment while I was a student at Harvard...

...On the treadmill year after year -allowing ourselves to be examined, placed, and reviewed each step of the way-it isn’t surprising that we begin to long for security, for a sense of being rooted in something more permanent than our own test scores and job resumes...

...It doesn’t have to be this way...

...There was a time when Americans stood against this sort of thing...

...But the sense of claustrophobia -of the surrender af creative, free thought for status and security-is identical...

...While the rest of us have to start hustling in our late teens if we want to end up on top, young Rockefellers are described as spending their twenties luxuriating in indecision, testing out various options, making their life plans with no urgency or sense of lost possibilities...

...In its place, we have h e tremulous groping of the younger generation, which, if it isn’t less talented than its forebears, is (with the exception of Jay) certainly less ambitious in the conventional Rockefeller sense...

...Most of them already have or are fighting to get tenure, giving them an unshakable spot in the other class-the “fixed-cost” class...

...T-he D ream of the Underlings It would be nice to think that the collapse of the Rockefellers and the Kennedys will liberate the rest of us, allowing us to develop our creative potential to the limits of our imagination...

...The Times covered it much like any other statehouse race...

...David, the last-born and in many ways the cleverest, climbed the management ladder at the Chase Manhattan Bank until he became a respected spokesman for American business...

...And we can now see that the much-admired competence and stability of the Rockefellers has act been sagging for soqe time...

...In their salons in New York, Cambiidge, , and Washington, the habitat and code of behavior are qifferent...

...Away from Pittsburgh in more liberal circles, thy ladder up leads toward another wng of the aristocracy: the black sheep from Wasp families, the cultivated literary and academic elite...

...Their insecurity and consequent mobility, it is argued, contribute to the efficiency of the economy...

...It is far better to rebel, in almost any direction...

...When Jay Rockefeller, for instance, was elected Secretary of State of West Virginia, New York Times dispatched Richard Reeves, then its hottest political reporter, to cover him...

...But what it all brought him, finally, was the back of the hand from Jerry Ford and the rest of the resentful right wing of the Republican Party...

...Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem very likely, for the meritocratic system, which is fast replacing the dynastic power of the great families, holds most of us prisoner in a new way...

...Last year The New York Times Magazine commissioned James Fallows, a former editor of this magazine, to write a piece about Teddy Kennedy...

...every pogsession, a duty.’’ Regardless of yhat you think of the world the Rockefellers helped create, it’s important to grant that they had a glear sense of class identity and purpose...

...The dynastic families aren’t dead yet, but they’re losing their grip on the rest of us...

...Ambitious, upwardly mobile people deeply resent the rich and their effortless access to power and status...

...This fall of the dynastic families from power and from the public’s grace has allowed us, for the first time in years, to see the flaws of the rich clearly...

...Yet already he is learning to live the boring life of the rich...

...Thus, the mystique for the rest of us of Hyannisport and Pocantica Hills: the family compound, where each member of the family can return each summer to experience community, continuity, and renewal...

...Paradoxically, it may be meritocracy itself that drives us toward the rich...

...I am told that several years later, another of Robert Kennedy’s sons got a similar reception at Harvard...

...When it’s flat, they’re thrown out of work...

...Take something simple, like the ability to meet regularly with your parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles...

...Thus, the mystique for the rest of us of Hyannisport and Pocantico Hills: the family compound, where each member of the family can return each summer to experience community, continuity, and renewal...

...The young Rockefellers, along with a remarkable number of their fellow young aristocrats, are at sea...

...Professors lowered their usual admissions standards to allow him into special, elite courses...

...Through what amounted to a private shadow gpvernment-the Rockefeller Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and many more-they financed the network of institutions that have given cohesion and identity to the American elite...

...An Upward March I don’t want to dismiss this choice outright...

...Of course, meritocracy isn’t those things, or at least it isn’t yet...

...In just a few short hours, he broke my stereo, screwed his girl in my bed, and left, poker-faced, without so much as a nod of appreciation...

...In both cases, people with brains are cozying up to people with money...

...Consider the Rockefellers: for nearly a century they have dominated American political and cultural life...

...The Kennedy brothers have, beginning with Chappaquiddick, been thoroughly demystified, perhaps too much so...

...To a surprising extent, we are already close to realizing the meritocratic ideal in America: the “A” students, the achievers, the descendants of people who couldn’t stand the stifling confinement of the old world, today very nearly run the United States...

...In the navels of Henry James, for example, one encounters earnest young Americans with money struggling to understand their dissolute European counterparts...

...attractive, intelligent women pursued him...

...There’s no clearer proof of the shift than the change over the last decade in the status of America’s great political families, the Kennedys and the Rockefellers, who used vast fortunes to launch themselves in public life...

...So they might as well believe in themselves-and in their right to creative self-expression...

...Perhaps Russians and Chinese feel bewilderment today when they read about Stewart Mott tending vegetables atop his penthouse, or Abby Rockefeller selling dung...

...the Times rejected it...

...and the fruits of an organic vegetable farm (Marion Rockefeller, daughter of Laurance...

...It’s not just their awe the meritocrats have to overcome to be truly free, but their resentment as well...

...The nature of our prejudice towards the rich has changed, but the prejudice itself lives on...

...Nestled in theit corripounds, the rich are able to retain what the meritocrats amG forced to give up...

...p a t is, at least, the picture that emerges from Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s study, me Rockefellers...

...They’re very tasty...

...Once they’ve arrived, they’ll never have to worry about getting laid off if the demand for algebraic topology should suddenly die...

...Meritocracy ought to be a means toward liberation and full self-expression...

...The desire for security is even more understandable a few rungs down the economic ladder, in a place like Pittsburgh...

...But having arrived, with the economic freedom and talent to do what they want, the self-made men often act as if they’ve lost the capacity for self-expression...

...Even at our best, we tend to act like ambitious family retainers-hoping to find security in the corporations they founded, striving to get a little piece of the money they made, afraid to risk stepping off the ladder that we hope will carry us toward their clubs and weekend homes and dinner parties...

...When a layoff or strike can still sabotage a family’s ability to meet payments on a house or car, is it surprising that people tend to be cautious, conservative, and averse to the risks of full self-expression...

...To put the matter in personal terms, many readers of this magazine probably share a debt similar to that which I owe my parents, who accustomed themselves to a controlled, disciplined, upward march-a life based on the fundamental importance of securitypartly so that their children could have the freedom to experiment with ill-paid professions like journalism...

...The basic truth is that the children of the elite have had no interest in filling the leadership roles available to them...

...Life is different on the other side of the tracks...

...But we are dependent on the institutions of the rich, created several generations ago for the most part, which still provide our most important definitions of stability and self-worth...

...indeed, it’s now apparent that they were never all we cracked them up to be...

...Until quite recently, this would have been good advice for any aspiring politician...

...They’re ashamed of the family name, guilty about how the money was made-and they long, above all, to be like the rest of us, who are forced to muster enough luck or guile to make our way through the world...

...They’re struggling-admirably, in their own way-to define themselves apart from the identity based on the money and iower they inherited...

...Most of the time, most people choose security...

...in Pittsburgh, the Duquesne Club, once the haunt of Frick and Mellon...

...That strong-willed creed is dying aut in the Roclgefeller family...

...I can recall, for example, an evening five years ago, when one of Robert Kennedy‘s sons visited my apartment while I waq a student at Harvard...

...The rich are losing their hold...

...The rich seem to have both the freedom and security, and that may be what makes their lives-however fruitlessly pursued-so enviable...

...and clever students who made nasty remarks behind his back struggled for admittance to his circle of friends...

...For most working people on the ladder up, this becomes all but impossible...

...But to be honest, the next time I saw him I greeted him warmly, reminding him of my name, courting the possibility of his friendship...

...The way the resentment and the fascination combine says a lot about the people in whom those feelings well up...

...And for this group the security rationale just isn’t convincing...

...But he would probably be a better and more creative banker if he let his practical needs take precedence over his social ones...

...People who haven’t visited a mill town recently may tend to forget that there is still a class of people in places like Pittsburgh whose security is dependent on the whims of the business cycle...

...Unfortunately, he proved a better figurehead than a banker, and an over-extended, illmanaged Chase entered the 1970s as the weak sister among New York’s big banks-far less aggressive and efficient than its major rival, Citibank...

...This struggle, so absent in their parents’ generation, says something important about their class...

...The “A” students are already our new ruling class...

...Even the questionable personal attributes of the rich have added to their aura...

...Economists, for example, are not “variable costs” at all-they would be offended at the very idea...

...They were the object of wide admiration...

...They became fascists, communists, patrons of the avantgarde, promiscuous libertines-the specific variety of revolt was unimportant...

...On his frequent trips to Pittsburgh he uses the bank’s membership to stay at the Duquesne Club...

...The Duchess of Windsor put the matter of glamour and attraction bluntly: “There is no such thing,” she said, “as being too thin or too rich...

...That, after all, is the traditional dream of the underlings when their ruling elite shows signs of giving way...

...a quiet academic career (Steven Rockefeller, son of Nelson...

...He is capable enough to make his way on his own terms...

...Similarly, while the rest of us have to start hustling in our late teens if we want to end up on top, young Rockefellers are described in Collier’s and Horowitz’s book as spending their twenties luxuriating in indecision, testing out various options, making their life plans with no urgency or sense of lost possibilities...