note toward the end that they had access to the
Rockefeller family archives (p. 636). In another book of theirs,
Destructive Generation, they write that the Rockefeller book
began when the pair were soliciting funds to keep Ramparts afloat
(p. 275). This is how they got in contact with the younger
generation of that clan. So when the magazine fell, they went to
work on the family biography with access to people and papers
that no outside, nonofficial authors had before. It is
interesting that, in 1989, the authors wrote that when they
started the Rockefeller book, they were expecting to excavate an
"executive committee of the ruling class" and thereby unlock the
key to the American power elite. But they found that they only
ended up writing about American lives (Ibid). They ended up with
that result because that seems to have been the plan all along.

Towards the end of the book, the authors strike a rather wistful
note, a sort of elegy for a once powerful family that is now
fading into the background (The Rockefellers, p. 626). This is
extraordinary. Consider some of the things the Rockefellers
accomplished in the seventies: they were part of the effort to
quadruple gasoline prices through th