Reviewed By Russell Baker

David Rockefeller has a wonderful story to tell: a family saga, and the family is not just another run-of-the-mill saga-type family either, but one of the world's richest, a family said to be rooted in infamy—or were those evil deeds unjustly imputed to Grandfather?—a family torn by sibling jealousy, scarred by religious repression, scandalized by a dynamic son's sexual hunger and ambition for power...and so on.

For years material like this has kept journeyman novelists high on best-seller lists. David Rockefeller, alas, is not up to handling it, for the storytelling gift has not been granted him. Apparently he never learned its basic rule—"Show, don't tell." For nearly five hundred pages he persists in telling too little while showing even less. His book is all bones and no flesh, no blood, or tears, or even cheap sentimentality.

Glimpses of a fascinating tale can be caught now and then, and even a hint of passion, as near the end when he suddenly, surprisingly reveals a sense of disgust for his brother Nelson. He is too much the banker—or is it too much the Rockefeller?—to provide many such moments. As a result, the reader must constantly read between the lines, always a treacherous place to look for truths.

The heart of the tale, if told directly, would seem to be the conflicts within the Rockefeller family over a century and a half. What a cast of characters to write about! How reluctant David Rockefeller is to let them shine.

His great-grandfather, William Avery Rockefeller, for example, flits across page seven and is never heard of again after being described as "something of an absentee parent" who "had a shady past." Anyone curious about that "shady past" may turn to Ron Chernow's 1998 book Titan and learn that Great-Grandfather was a medical quack and snake-oil salesman, and that "something of an absentee parent" is David's way of saying he was a bigamist.

This typifies a stultifying diplomatic style in passages where one yearns for plain talk, passion, and humor. When the style is not State Department genteel it often lapses into the narcotic prose of the stockholder's report, leaving the reader with a sense that the most interesting piece of the story is being left out. Reticence about the customers is probably vital to success in banking, but it does not make for lively reading.

The chapters devoted to the author's banking career can be slow going for those not well versed in The Wall Street Journal. Though the lives of great international bankers are reputed to be glamorous, romantic, and filled with intrigue, nothing here supports the idea that it is much more thrilling than the loan officer's at the corner bank branch. Rockefeller travels the world tirelessly and meets a huge assortment of movers and shakers, but seems never to suspect that many may be scoundrels and swine.

He wages a ten-year struggle with George Champion for mastery of the Chase bank. Champion is eleven years older, has devoted his life to Chase, and is widely admired in the industry. Reading between the lines, we suspect he considers himself the natural and entitled successor to retiring CEO John McCloy and views young Rockefeller as a whippersnapper whose main qualification for his job is his name. Champion would not have to be paranoid to think so. There is a story going around that Nelson Rockefeller told McCloy the Rockefellers used their family influence to make him chairman and one of his jobs is to make sure David succeeds him. It is "quite possible" that Nelson, who "could be quite high-handed," did say some such thing, David concedes, but neither he nor the family ever took such a tack.

In any event, Chase's board is in a pickle when David says he will resign if Champion is made CEO with "unchecked authority." Its bizarre solution: make Champion the bank's chairman, David its president, and make the two of them co-chief executive officers, thus insuring endless conflict. Reading between the lines, we suspect Champion must have despised David for spoiling the prize of the chairmanship. Even David senses that since Champion was "never allowed to run the bank entirely on his own," he might justifiably have felt some bitterness.

With Champion's retirement, David is supreme at last, and when Champion uses his position as a director to make a nuisance of himself David persuades the board to lower its retirement age to sixty-eight, which was, "not coincidentally, George's age at the time."

Because this story is scattered piecemeal across a hundred pages of unrelated material we never hear or see what must have been a highly emotional clash of egos or feel that anything of much consequence is at stake. A drowsing reader may think longingly of the exciting novel J.P. Marquand could have extracted from this fight for power.