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Mr. RON CHERNOW (Author, "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller,
Sr."): Rockefeller, I think, was described by William James as the
most strongly bad and strongly good human being he had ever met. I
think that probably expresses it as well as anyone has ever expressed
it. He was a man of such profound and baffling contradictions, a man
who is simultaneously the most ferocious of the robber barons and the
most farsighted of the philanthropists. And these two seemingly
disparate human beings were rolled up inside one body and one mind.
And that was really my task, as the biographer, to try to make sense
of the two halves of this whole.

LAMB: What relationship is John D. Rockefeller Sr. to Senator Jay
Rockefeller of West Virginia?

Mr. CHERNOW: Great-grandfather. OK. John D. Sr. was the father
of John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose sons were David, Nelson, et al, and
then John D. Rockefeller III, who is the oldest grandson of John D.
Rockefeller, is the father of Jay Rockefeller.

LAMB: And what, in our society, would not be here without the
Rockefellers?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, I think the significant thing about the
Rockefellers is that they were great institution builders. The--John
D. Rockefeller not only created Standard Oil, which was the largest
business empire on Earth, but he created the most-extensive
philanthropic empire that includes what is today the University of
Chicago, Spelman College, Rockefeller Universit--University,
Rockefeller Foundation. And I think that he has cast such a long
shadow because he created these permanent corporate forms, both in the
business world and the philanthropic world.

And I should say, Brian, that in terms of the business empire,
although the Standard Oil trust was broken up by the Supreme Court in
1911, to give you some idea of the size of that trust, when it was
dismantled in 1911, the heirs include what are today Exxon, Mobil,
Amoco, Chevron, Conoco, ARCO, BP America, Chesebrough-Pond's and two
dozen other companies. So I don't know that the business world has
ever seen an agglomeration of wealth and power on the scale of
Standard Oil.

LAMB: This is the last picture you have in the book.

Mr. CHERNOW: People are fascinated by Rockefeller's face. You can
see there how seamed and lined and--and--and leathery it--it was, and
you can also see in that photo that he was a--a m--a more thoughtful
man than people realized, a more philosophic man. This was one of the
real surprises for me, doing the book, that he was the most mysterious
and reclusive of the--the robber barons.

But I found, in going through his papers, that he had spent an
enormous amount of time analyzing what he was doing, squaring his
behavior--often his bad behavior, which he, of course, didn't see as
bad behavior--squaring it with his conscience and his Creator and
elaborating a theory of monopoly that enabled him to do what he did,
filled with a messianic and self-righteous sense of--of certitude.

LAMB: There's a photo here with the former governor of New York,
Nelson Rockefeller. Who else is in that photo?

Mr. CHERNOW: OK. Nelson is holding his eldest son, Rodman. In the
middle, you have John D. Rockefeller Sr., to the left, John D.
Rockefeller Jr. Nelson--Nelson was the first of the grandchildren to
have a--a son. And Nelson very much identified with his grandfather.
He revered his grandfather, and so he felt that he was very much the
standard bearer in that generation of the family, even though he was
the--the second son. He had a way of kind of nudging his older
brother out of the limelight.

I--incidentally, Nelson and JDR Sr. were born on the same day, which
Nelson took as a very important sign of the fact that he was destined
to carry on the family tradition.

LAMB: How old was Rockefeller Sr.--John D. Rockefeller--when he
died?

Mr. CHERNOW: He was nearly 98. And, in fact, in the early 1900s, he
announced that he planned to live to the age of 100. And one thing
about John D. Rockefeller, when he set his mind to doing something,
he had an extraordinary ability to focus his mind on goals and he
almost always achieved them. So that--he was nearly 98 when he died,
so he very nearly made good on his boast that he would live to 100.
And he became something of a New Age health fanatic, and he had all
sorts of theories, in terms of how he could prolong his life.

For instance, this was the bane of his luncheon companions, but he
used to chew food 10 times before swallowing. And guests who observed
him closely said that even when he ha--had liquid in his mouth, he
would swirl or sift it 10 times before swallowing. And what it meant
was that people who were absolutely thrilled to be invited to the
luncheon table of the world's richest man found themselves, after 20
minutes, finished with their own food and for the next hour watching
John D. finish his. Well, maybe there was something to this
masticating of the--of the food because he very nearly lived to 100.

LAMB: You know, in the--one of the earlier books we did with Linda
Simon on William James, who you mentioned early in your remarks, he
fashioned something that William Gladstone had done, chewing food 32
times every time he ate. What is this business of counting the number
of times you chew in that time of the world?

Mr. CHERNOW: Actually, I think that there was kind of an old wives'
tale at the time; that th--that the more you masticated the--the food
and soaked it with saliva, that the easier it would be to--to digest.
Rockefeller, when he was in his early 50s, after he had created this
global oil monopoly, had a kind of breakdown. It was both a physical
and a nervous breakdown of sorts, and he had terrible digestive
problems.

It's very, very interesting because the source of that breakdown, when
he was in his early 50s was not, as one might imagine, the stress and
strain of creating Standard Oil. It was the strain of his charitable
commitments, particularly--he was creating the University of Chicago
at the time. So he began a diet of bread and crackers in order to
cure these digestive problems. What happened was that there was a
whole very pernicious mythology for the rest of his life that he could
only survive on mother's milk. I mean, this was part of this
vampirish image of Rockefeller that he was such a ghoulish character
that he needed mother's milk in order to survive.

Rockefeller, who had very little concern for public opinion, really
never bothered to disabuse the public or the--the press of the fact
that he ate normally and he ate whatever he wanted. But throughout
his life, he ate very sparingly, which is one reason that people
remember him not as this rather rangy young man who created Standard
Oil, but this spindly, wizened little guy hopping around on the golf
course or mugging in front of the--the newsreel cameras. He finally
weighed around 90 pounds by the time he died.

LAMB: What got you interested in this subject?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, actually, Random House asked me to write about
John D. Rockefeller after I finished my book on the--"The Warburgs."
And I must confess, to my embarrassment, I thought it was an
absolutely ghastly idea because I had done these family sagas and I
was very eager to do a pure biography, which I thought would be more
com--compact and cohesive. And I told my editor at Random House, Ann
Godoff, that I thought that Rockefeller was the worst subject
imaginable. I th--that he just seemed to me, cold, wooden,
mechanical, ruthless, a man without any interior life that I could
see. And she suggested that I visit a place called the Rockefeller
Archive Center that was set up by the family, which is run by a team
of independent archivists.

And it was a strange day that I spent there because I was almost
trying to wriggle out of the--the project. And I told the archive
director that I really was not interested in Rockefeller because he
had no voice. He didn't seem to have an inner life. And I said to
him, `I don't hear the music of his mind, so how can I write a
biography about him?' And with that, he produced an interview that had
been privately conducted with Rockefeller between 1917 and 1920. It
was part of what was supposed to be an official biography that was
never finally published.

So, suddenly, here was this man who had no voice, who was--who was so
reclusive and secretive, and I have a 1,700-page transcript where he
is giving a blow-by-blow account of every major twist and turn of his
career. And I suddenly, at that point, encountered a personality that
I hadn't encountered in any of the previous Rockefeller biographies.
Rather than this cold, mute, reserved figure, here was someone who was
fiery, he was often funny, he was amazingly analytical. In fact, he
was quite brilliant.

Now it--I hasten to say he was often sanctimonious. I can see that
there was a lot of self-delusion and rationalization. He evaded a lot
of questions about the most controversial aspects of his life. But I
saw just how much time he had privately invested into analyzing what
he had done. And having written, for instance, about J.P. Morgan,
who, at most, could concentrate on something for five minutes, here
was somebody who had spent decades analyzing what he was doing, who
had a brilliant strategic sense of the--of the oil industry. And I
said to myself, `Here is the fiery titan whom I had suspected must be
s--lurking somewhere inside Rockefeller, but whom I did not know for a
certainty existed,' because I had never seen any evidence of it in the
biographies that had been written about him.

LAMB: Now the transcript you talk about and the interview was William
Inglis?

Mr. CHERNOW: William Inglis, right, from---and every morning, before
Rockefeller golfed--Rockefeller was someone who did the exact same
things at the exact same times every day. So right before they went
out on the golf course every day, Inglis would interview Rockefeller
for half an hour to an hour. Rockefeller would recline on a couch
with his eyes closed. Very often, as Inglis was reading the question
to him, Rockefeller appeared to be dozing and then Rockefeller would
suddenly snap his eyes open and give a very precise answer.

The structure to that interview must be unique in American economic
history, if not history as general, because what Inglis did, he took
the writings of Rockefeller's two most famous muckraking critics,
Henry Demarest Lloyd and, most notably, Ida Tarbell, and actually read
paragraph by paragraph to--to Rockefeller the most scathing charges
against him. So this was a fascinating document, having him actually
confront his most severe critics. And it--it was an extraordinary
document.

As soon as I saw that, I knew that I wanted to write the book, and I
knew that this was a rare historical opportunity of taking someone who
was seemingly so familiar to the public and saying to them, `He's
completely unfamiliar. You really don't know what he was like at all
because he didn't want to share it with anybody.'

LAMB: And go back to the wh--why did--we'll go back--we'll--what I
want you to do is go back to the--the Tarbell articles that she
wrote--Was it in McClure's Magazine?

Mr. CHERNOW: McClure's Magazine, from 1902 to 1905, right.

LAMB: Because in your book, you basically suggest that those
magazines--the articles led to the breakup of Standard Oil or to the
Sherman Antitrust Act.

Mr. CHERNOW: They had a powerful impact. The m--the articles were
coming out in--in serial form, which meant that each issue of
McClure's had a larger circulation. It kept jumping from issue to
issue; also, because it extended over such a long period of time.
With each new installment, more Rockefeller critics, more Rockefeller
haters, would come out of the woodwork, you know, so that the circle
of sources kept growing with each issue.

And by an extraordinary historical coincidence, Ida Tarbell was
publishing this series, just as the man in the White House, Teddy
Roosevelt, was looking to single out a single notorious trust for an
antitrust case in order to make an example of it. And it was really
Ida Tarbell who turned John D. Rockefeller into the most-hated man at
the c--of--in the country and really brought all of the evils of the
Standard Oil trust to public attention, just at the moment when Teddy
Roosevelt was not only looking for, you know, a big, brutal, rich,
unrepentant trust, but one that the public felt strongly about.

LAMB: We have a picture from the book, and I'd ask you, 'cause you've
got a lot of pictures in here, where this comes from. But this is Ida
Tarbell...

Mr. CHERNOW: Sure.

LAMB: ...in your book. How old was she? Do you know when--when this
picture was taken?

Mr. CHERNOW: Yeah, this picture she was--she would have been about
40 years old. She's sitting in the offices of McClure's Magazine.
You can see that she was not only a rather attractive person, but that
she had a tremendous dignity. You could actually see the--the
self-possession of the woman there. And it took tremendous courage to
take on Standard Oil. In fact, her father, who had been an
independent oilman crushed by Standard Oil, warned her that she
would--that her life would be in danger if she took on Standard Oil.

The strange thing was, Brian, that, you know, far from being crushed
by Standard Oil, as she was researching it, this lady kept taking
shots at Standard Oil over a three-year period and didn't take any
fire in return. What Rockefeller missed was really the two major
things that were going on in American life. One was the power of the
press because Ida Tarbell was able to take on a subject much more
complicated--slice open Standard Oil, dissect it, give an accurate
chronology of it. No previous generation of reporters had been able
to tackle such complicated issues.

And Rockefeller also did not realize that with Teddy Roosevelt, power
was migrating from the legislative to the executive branch and that,
for the first time, the federal government felt that it had the--both
the right and the power to take on the largest corporations in the--in
the country, and--so that there was a very powerful dialectic at work
between Teddy Roosevelt and the muckraking journalists like Ida
Tarbell. And the combination overwhelmed Rockefeller, who felt that
he didn't need to dignify the series with any response, and it was a
fatal mistake.

He did not hire--that is, Standard Oil did not hire--its first
publicist until 1906, the year after the Ida Tarbell series ended.
Today, a corporate executive in a similar situation would probably
have a team of 30 or 40 public-relations people working around the
clock.

LAMB: Ida Tarbell--the name comes up all through the Lincoln books.
I mean, she wrote a Lincoln book that's often quoted in all the books
we've done here. Who was she, and how did she get interested in
Standard Oil and John Rockefeller?

Mr. CHERNOW: She grew up in--in western Pennsylvania in the 1860s
and 1870s, at exactly the moment when Standard Oil was taking over,
first the refining industry, then the pipelines, then the marketing.
And so John D. Rockefeller, in her childhood, was a legendary figure,
was really a bogeyman. All of her--her neighbors, she felt, had been
ruined by Standard Oil, particularly her father, so that this was
a--a--a woman who had a score to settle with--with Standard Oil.

She went to work for McClure's in the 1890s. As you said, she did
the--a--a biographical series on Lincoln that was very good and one on
Napoleon. That was significant because when she came to do the
Standard Oil series, which she started working on in 1901, she was
already accustomed to a kind of great-man approach to history, which
meant that although her series was nominally entitled The History of
the Standard Oil Company, Standard Oil in the series, is synonymous
with John D. Rockefeller.

Now Rockefeller, there's no question, was the mastermind, so he was
the right one to focus on, but Rockefeller operated by consensus. He
had very, very powerful lieutenants, like Henry Flagler and John D.
Archibald; you know, men who were quite tough and--and--and corrupt,
who got off, really, scot-free in the Tarbell series because, having
done Lincoln and--and Napoleon, she realized that it had a very
powerful psychological effect on readers to focus on one figure.

And particularly, when you're dealing with this gigantic, amorphous
cartel called Standard Oil, it makes the whole story so much more
compelling and dramatic to focus on one man, so that there's
remarkably little about Rockefeller's very powerful colleagues in
the--in the series, so that all of the public animosity that was
aroused by Ida Tarbell was directed at one man and that was John D.
Rockefeller Sr.

LAMB: How long did it take you to write this?

Mr. CHERNOW: It took about four or five years to--to do it, which is
longer than I had worked on the--the previous books. You know, in my
naivete, since I was doing a biography--my previous books had been
family sagas--I thought that this would be more compact and quicker.
What I quickly discovered is that when you're writing about John D.
Rockefeller, you don't feel like you're writing about a--a human
being; you feel like you're writing about a sovereign state. I mean,
I had millions of documents to use.

LAMB: Where do you live?

Mr. CHERNOW: Live in Brooklyn Heights, which is just across the East
River from the lower Manhattan skyline, within view of the--the Morgan
bank, which was the subject of my first book. And we live in a--a
historic brownstone from the 1840s, which had actually been a rooming
house during the Civil War; has a long and rich history, and we occupy
the upper duplex of the brownstone.

LAMB: Were you able to interview any living Rockefellers?

Mr. CHERNOW: I did. I had a couple of very nice conversations
with--with David Rockefeller. The--the--the family was guarded but
cordial.

LAMB: What's his relationship to John D. Sr.?

Mr. CHERNOW: Grandson. In fact, really an adored grandson. And
because John D. Sr. lived so long, David, Nelson, Laurance and all
the rest were--had graduated from college. They had married. They
had started in their business careers. And--but David Rockefeller
said to me--he said, `Gee, there are so many things I wish that I had
asked Grandpa.' I think what he didn't realize is that Grandpa
studiously avoided certain topics. In fact, when Nelson was a senior
at Dartmouth, Nelson wanted to do his senior thesis on Standard Oil
and--and vindicate Grandpa against his critics. He wrote to his
father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., saying, `I so admire Grandfather.
Do you think you c--you could arrange for me to speak to him?'

Now most grandfathers would leap at the opportunity to tell war
stories about their business career. A few weeks later, a letter
comes back from his father saying that `Grandfather has no desire to
talk about Standard Oil.' And I make much of this in the book because
in most families, there's a very rich oral history, whereas the
Rockefeller family is a family that's riddled by strange silences and
taboos.

And I speculate in the book--and I'm almost certain I'm right about
this--that John D. Rockefeller Jr. stimulated this three-year
interview that William O. Inglis did with his father, I think,
because William O. Inglis, reading aloud Henry Demarest Lloyd,
reading aloud Ida Tarbell, was able to ask his father, that is John D.
Sr., all the questions that John D. Jr. had never been able to ask
because the whole subject was too touchy.

And you could see John D. Rockefeller Jr. actually monitoring and
secretly reading the transcripts from this interview. 'Cause when
Tar--Tarbell was exposing John D. Rockefeller, he didn't sit down
with his family and say, `Let me give you my version of events so that
you know what happened or what I want you to think happened.' He just
left this family in a very uncomfortable silence, where they were
supposed to believe in Father's integrity, really, as an article of
faith.

LAMB: What is a trust?

Mr. CHERNOW: A trust actually--a--a t--a trust became synonymous
with a monopoly and--and is almost used as a shorthand for it today.
What happened during the era of John D. Rockefeller Sr. was that a
corporation that was located in one state was not able to buy the
stock in the corporation--in a corporation located in another state.
So it was very difficult to conduct an interstate business, which is
why there was a Standard Oil of New York and there was a Standard Oil
of New Jersey, etc., etc.

The way that Standard Oil was able to operate nationally was that the
individual shareholders would pass on their stock to a group of
trustees, who would then return to them trust certificates. So the
trust was a way for them to circumvent these legal restrictions on
operating interstate. It was a way of consolidating all the companies
in an industry and, hence, became synonymous with monopoly itself,
which is why it's called the Sherman Antitrust Act. We
still--the--the term still survives, and the term `antitrust.'

LAMB: So if we were to find John D. Rockefeller Sr. at his worst
moment, or as defined by somebody like Ida Tarbell, where was
he--where was he located and when--what was he doing that made
everybody so mad?

Mr. CHERNOW: OK, Rockefeller was notorious from the time that he was
a--a--a young man. I mean, we have to remember that the oil industry,
like the computer industry today, was created by young men, which is
often the case of new industries. And after Colonel Edwin Drake
struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, there was a wild,
rip-roaring gold-rush atmosphere. It wasn't the kind of thing that,
you know, old, settled people rushed off to west--western
Pennsylvania. It was all of these young guys who had just been
demobilized after the--the Civil War.

Rockefeller created Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870. He quickly
realized that the most significant factor in the competitive rush to
dominate oil was going to be transportation because, basically, one
company's oil product didn't differ that much from another. And so
Rockefeller created a conspiracy with the railroads called the South
Improvement Company that not only gave preferential rates to Standard
Oil, but at the same time, gave punitive rates to Rockefeller's
rivals.

When news of this leaked out in western Pennsylvania, Rockefeller
was--was burned in--in--in effigy. There were huge torchlight parades
in towns like Titusville and Oil City and Franklin and the other
centers of the--of the oil region. And there was so much protest that
this conspiracy was disbanded.

What happened, though, was that during that time where the conspiracy
still seemed to be very much alive, Rockefeller took over 22 of the 26
other refineries in--in--in Cleveland because his competitors felt
that they could not possibly compete with Standard Oil, which was in
cahoots with the--the railroad. So it was a very significant moment.
It was the first time that his name appeared in the newspaper.

But then, even though he was controversial in the oil industry, it was
many, many years before the general public realized that one of the 10
richest and most powerful men in the United States was this John D.
Rockefeller, who controlled the oil-refining industry. He was a very,
very shadowy and secretive figure.

LAMB: At what age did he find himself with lots of money?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, by the late 1870s, even before he had reached age
40, he controlled about 90 percent of all the oil refining in the
United States.

LAMB: How old is he there?

Mr. CHERNOW: Actually, there, he's in his 40s. That's a wonderful
photo, and one of the reasons I reproduced it in the book is that when
you look in those eyes, you see this very keen, enterprising,
determined spirit. I felt that I almost had to erase, Brian, the
image of the old man with the newsreel cameras because this was
someone who had been, I mean, just physically tall and powerful and
i--i--imposing, not this, you know, shrunken little man. And
people...

LAMB: Where is this, by the way?

Mr. CHERNOW: That was a studio portrait from the 1880s, so
Rockefeller would have been in his 40s. Now...

LAMB: You can see in the photo that he's a lot taller than he looks.

Mr. CHERNOW: Quite tall. You know, it's interesting, he ha--he's
standing there with a top hat and cane. This was a self-made man who
had grown up in rustic areas of upstate New York. Look at how
dignified and polished he looks there. And--and you could also see
the tremendously imposing presence.

You know, people who dealt with him in a business situation talked
about these eyes, these piercing eyes that would just drill holes
through you. Hen--William James said that he was the most suggestive
and formidable personality that he had ever met. This was someone who
was a very imposing presence. Later on, he--he becomes this sort of
laughing geezer handing out dimes. And I write about that. And he
became a rather colorful, eccentric old man, and th--and that's fun.
But...

LAMB: What's this--I didn't mean to interrupt, but I wanted to...

Mr. CHERNOW: Sure.

LAMB: ...the--on the eyes--you've got this on the photo--this photo
on the cover. What--how old was he here?

Mr. CHERNOW: He was in his 60s. And I love that photo, because I
think you see in the--in the eyes what a shrewd, canny and rather
enigmatic character he--he was. And he's got some sort...

LAMB: Does he have a wig on here?

Mr. CHERNOW: He has a wig on. He had lost all of his hair. He
suffered from something called alopecia. In 1901, he lost not only
all the hair on his head; he lost all body hair. And this was a great
tragedy in his life because then Ida Tarbell came along a year later,
did this series portraying him as a monster. And since he was
hairless and suddenly looked old and--and ghoulish, his appearance
seemed to ratify what she was saying in the series, so that the timing
was particularly unfortunate for Rockefeller.

LAMB: We've got some ph--a lot of photos that we want to show the
audience, but before we do that, how hard was it to get these?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, the Rockefeller Archive Center--there are about
3,000 or 4,000 photos there--the difficulty was that when he, later in
life, learned to--to love the camera, they have hundreds and hundreds
of pictures to choose from. During the earlier years, where he was so
publicity-shy--I mean, during his active business career, he never
granted interviews, never allowed himself to be photographed, so that,
for instance, I couldn't find a single photo of him when he was in his
30s. I had two or three when he was in his 40s. So in the earlier
part of the book, we had to make do with the photos there were.

LAMB: Did you pick all these yourself?

Mr. CHERNOW: Yeah, I went through all the photos. I picked them. I
a--arranged them. I consider that part of my job as--as--as the
author because it's part of the image of this man that I'm projecting
to the reader.

LAMB: Before I show the photos, are y--is this a full-time job for
you, writing these books?

Mr. CHERNOW: Yes, it is.

LAMB: How long have you done it?

Mr. CHERNOW: I've been doing it now f--since the end of 1986.

LAMB: What were you doing before that?

Mr. CHERNOW: I had a long phase--from the time that I left school in
1973, I worked as a--a free-lance magazine and newspaper writer for
about 10 years. I worked for a think tank called the Twentieth
Century Fund for about three and a half years, and then I started work
on "The House of Morgan."

LAMB: Where'd you go to school?

Mr. CHERNOW: I did a BA in English at Yale college, and then I did
an MA in English at Cambridge University in England.

LAMB: Now what is it about writing that you like?

Mr. CHERNOW: For me, writing--it's--it's--it's a--it's a sensual
pleasure, really. I--I--I think that with any writer worth his or her
salt, there's a kind of almost sublimated sexuality about it, if I can
use Freudian language. There's nothing that gives me greater pleasure
than actually stringing words together, and I--and I think that I'm
actually--and I think this is true of most writers--that we're writing
all the time, not just when we're sitting in front of the computer
screen or the typewriter or whatever.

LAMB: What's your daily pattern?

Mr. CHERNOW: My daily pattern is really--I'm really kind of a dull
boy. I wake up, I have breakfast, I exercise to music or National
Public Radio, pour a cup of coffee, get--get a jolt of caffeine, flip
on the word processor and usually work until around 4:30. And if the
phone doesn't ring, I'm in absolute heaven, but it usually rings many
times during the day.

LAMB: Do you get block at all?

Mr. CHERNOW: No, you know, I've never suffered from--from writer's
block. It--it--it's really not in--in my lexicon, because I figured
out early on my own trick for getting out of it, which is as follows:
I--if I can't write something, I suddenly imagine myself explaining it
to a reasonably intelligent friend. If that doesn't work, I imagine
arguing the point with a passionate adversary. That usually gets the
juices flowing, so I start pacing my office and carrying on this
imaginary debate with someone whom I picture is very hostile and
skeptical about what I'm saying, and then the words, with that anger,
begin to flow.

LAMB: What does it say about both John D. Rockefeller and Henry
Flagler that they paid $300 to substitutes so they didn't have to
fight in the Civil War?

Mr. CHERNOW: This is an interesting story. It wasn't unusual
for--you know, for well-to-do men--and John D. was well-to-do in his
20s. It was--it wasn't unusual for people to pay a substitute. J.P.
Morgan did it and Teddy Roosevelt's father did it. I think Grover
Cleveland did. There are a lot of different cases. Rockefeller
claimed--and I think that he was right--that he had, you know, paid
and outfitted 20 or 30 different people to--to fight.

What's interesting is that, given the fact that, you know, he was so
money-mad, he marries into a family called the Spelmans, who--a
wonderful family. They were a--not only ardent temperance activists,
but they were ardent abolitionists who had been conductors on the
Underground Railroad. They'd had Sojourner Truth in the house. And
then Rockefeller goes on to found Spelman College to educate freed
female slaves. And so there's no question that he felt deeply about
abolitionism. It may well have been that he couldn't restrain these
moneymaking impulses.

But another important thing that I explain in the book is that when he
was in his 20s, his father, who was a--a bigamist and had abandoned
the family, that John D. has to single-handedly support his brothers
and sisters and his mother. There you can see the parents; on the--on
the left, William Avery Rockefeller, colorful, raffish mountebank, who
even in John's childhood would disappear for weeks or months at a
time, out on the road selling snake oil. John's--John D.'s cunning
side, the rascality, clearly c--comes from his father. On the right,
his mother, Eliza, s--a very strict, very pious, and all the thrift,
discipline, industry, religiosity come from the mother. So here you
have the product of these crazily mismatched parents, who then
produce, quite logically, a crazily contradictory son.

LAMB: The father, you say, had two different names, two different
wives, two different families?

Mr. CHERNOW: That's right. Around 1855, he abandons the family. He
will reappear throughout their lives every year out of the blue, but
he marries a much younger woman who knows him as Dr. William
Livingston. They're married for approximately 50 years, Brian, and
only during the last two years of that 50-year marriage does Margaret
Allen Livingston learn that for decades, she has been married to the
father of the richest man in the world. I keep telling people if a
novelist had invented this, people would say it was too preposterous a
plot twist and get rid of it. Nobody will believe it. I was able to
completely reconstruct this whole implausible story in terms of not
only what happened to the father with this second marriage, but also
what his relationship was with John.

LAMB: We also have the--I--I guess a sister an--and a brother here of
John D.

Mr. CHERNOW: Right. Here he's with hi--with his elder--with his
y--younger brother and sister.

LAMB: He's on the right?

Mr. CHERNOW: He's on the right, and then brother William, who became
a Standard Oil executive, is on the--o--on--on the left. What's
interesting about this photo is that the children look very, very grim
and--and somber in a way that I think can't be completely explained by
the photographic methods of the day.

LAMB: When was this taken?

Mr. CHERNOW: This was taken in--it would have been around 1852,
because John was--on the right there--was 13 years old. What's
interesting is that, from the photos, we can see that he had this
rather grim and somber childhood, but in later years, when he
reminisced, it was this golden, idyllic time. The value of
photographs--because very often, people tend to sentimentalize or
idealize their--their childhood, and so the--the ph--the photographic
record speaks often with a kind of objectivity that the subjects
don't.

LAMB: Who's this lady?

Mr. CHERNOW: This lady is Laura Celestia Spelman at the time that
she married John D. Rockefeller. Her nickname was Cetti. This was
1864 when they got married. She was about 25 years old. She was a
very bright, lively, intelligent young woman, a kind of bluestocking.
She was a schoolteacher. She went to college at a time when that was
extremely rare. She believed strongly in abolitionism and a--an--and
temperance.

She then--later on, as the years went by, she became an almost
suffocatingly pious young lady. She loses a lot of this intellectual
vitality that you see early on. And one thing that many people have
speculated--and I tend to--to suspect that it's true--is that, as the
drumbeat of criticism against Standard Oil grew louder, that she took
refuge in the church, so that she becomes a kind of unreal and
otherworldly person who talks in a very high-flown religious rhetoric.
And it's strange that John D., who is accused of being the greatest
corporate criminal of the age, goes home to this household that is
drenched in Baptist piety and feels no discontinuity whatsoever
between what he's doing at the office and the home atmosphere that he
returns to.

LAMB: What would you say that--did--well, let me ask you this way:
Did he do anything illegal in his life?

Mr. CHERNOW: He did. A lot of the things that he did were certainly
unfair. I uncovered a lot of correspondence where he was directly
paying off different politicians, and at the time, to directly pay off
a politician to kill a piece of legislation was illegal. Sometimes
they used different subterfuges and would hire somebody as a--as legal
counsel.

What's interesting is that Rockefeller often pointed out that
his--most of his business career was played out before the Interstate
Commerce Commission was created in 1887, outlawing railroad rebates,
and before the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, outlawing combinations
in restraint of trade.

But what you see with Standard Oil is that even when those two
landmark pieces of legislation are enacted, the behavior of the trust
really doesn't--doesn't change at all. And you can in see the papers,
they're just trying to figure out different ways to circumvent
the--th--the law, so that basically, John D. and his colleagues
regarded government regulators as nuisances to be bypassed wherever
possible.

LAMB: You say that he gave $250,000 in 1896 to the William McKinley
campaign for president.

Mr. CHERNOW: Right.

LAMB: How much money would that be today?

Mr. CHERNOW: Oh, that would be several million dollars today. He
didn't like politicians. He felt that politicians were basically
parasites who would shake down businessmen. I mean, all of this
bribery he saw as extortion; that is, the politicians shaking him
down, rather than his paying off the--the politicians, so that he had
very little interest in conventional politics. I think that he
regarded these payments as a--really as a business expense. He was
never somebody, aside from writing a check, who would ever get
involved in a political campaign.

You know, and it's interesting, I think, Brian, that in--if you look
at the late 19th century, the people who were really building up the
country were the--the businessmen and--and not the--the politicians.
You know, if someone were to ask you whether you would rather read a
biography of John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, let's say,
rather than Rutherford B. Hayes or Benjamin Harrison, or, you know,
which two were--were more important, I think we would all say
Rockefeller and--and Carnegie rather than Harrison and--and Hayes.

So you go through a period in the late 19th century that is one of
tremendous political squalor, partly caused by the business interests
themselves. So there's also not an atmosphere that was likely to
generate a tremendous amount of respect in the--in the business
community, to the extent that the business community was not directly
responsible for a lot of the squalor.

LAMB: Now I remember tripping across his grave one day when I was at
the James Garfield grave in Cleveland...

Mr. CHERNOW: That's right.

LAMB: ...and he's right across the street there from him. What's he
doing being buried in Cleveland when most of the other family's in New
York?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, it's interesting--you know, it's interesting that
a lot of people in Cleveland are not aware that John D. moved there
as a teen-ager, started in business as a teen-age clerk in Cleveland
in the 1850s, started Standard Oil there in 1870, and not only--even
after he moved to New York in the early 1880s, retained an estate in
Cleveland until the late 1900s--I'm sorry, late 19--teens.

He transferred a lot of his affection to New York. He felt that he
was treated better by politicians and the press in New York.
Cleveland really mishandled Rockefeller because today, New York City
has The Cloisters, the Museum of Modern Art, Riverside Church,
Rockefeller University, all of these Rockefeller institutions that
might have gone to Cleveland if he felt that he had been treated
better by politicians and press in his own home--hometown.

And so the family grave site was in--in Cleveland, but, certainly, his
son was--John D. Rockefeller Jr. was born in 1874. And so when he's
five or six years old, the family moved to New York. So it's not
surprising that by that generation, they feel themselves New Yorkers.
But for John D., Cleveland was always like an unrequited love affair
with this city.

LAMB: What did he do about giving his money away?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, you know, th--the image of John D. is that
he--that he made a pile during his career and then gave away a pile
afterwards. If that had been the case--you know, that's a cliche; the
businessman, you know, makes a--a bundle and then sanitizes the
fortune by giving it to good works. What makes John D. so much more
fascinating and enigmatic and compelling a character is that he was
making money as fast as he could from the time he was a teen-ager and
giving it away as fast as he could. He was a Baptist. He was tithing
as a teen-ager.

By the time he's in his early 40s, Brian, he's creating Spelman
College in Atlanta, then Spelman Seminary to educate emancipated
female slaves. By the time he's in his early 50s, he's
single-handedly creating the University of Chicago. By the time he's
in his early 60s, he is single-handedly creating the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research, today Rockefeller University, first
major medical research institute in the United States. He's creating
General Education, world's largest educational foundation in the
country. He's creating huge, philanthropic institutions throughout
his career, not publicizing them. And it's clear from his papers
that, if anything, he found it very distasteful, the idea of
publicizing what he was doing.

An--and, frankly, for selfish reasons he didn't want to publicize it
because when there would be in the newspaper an article about one of
his large bequests, he would receive, on average, 50,000 letters
soliciting money within the 30-day period after the appearance of such
articles. His philanthropic adviser, Frederick T. Gates, said, `Mr.
Rockefeller was stalked and hounded like a wild animal.' Everywhere he
went, everybody, from the most noble to the most ignoble, were
soliciting him for money.

LAMB: How about his children? How did he deal with money with the
kids?

Mr. CHERNOW: Well, you know, it's interesting, he--being a very
puritanical sort, he was haunted by the corrupting influence of
wealth, so that even though the children grew up on these estates, in
certain cases of several thousand acres, he had them on very strict
allowances. One of the most interesting details that I discovered
during the research was that John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was the
only son, the youngest of four children, said that until the age of
eight, he wore only female clothes.

And in the interview--this was a private interview--the interviewer
said to him, `Oh, you only wore female clothes? Was that just because
the style of the time was that little boys, you know, wore dresses?'
He said, `Oh, no, no, you don't understand. We all wore
hand-me-downs, and the three older siblings were all girls, and so the
hand-me-downs that were coming down to me were all, you know, dresses
and--and skirts.'

This is how frugally they were brought up, so that John D. tried to
re-create his own threadbare childhood with the children, even though
he was en route to becoming the richest man in the world, because he
wanted them to learn the value of a dollar, you know? And he looked
at all these other children of the--the ga--grandees of the gilded
age, and he saw them, you know, becoming philanderers and alcoholics
and everything else. And he was determined that these children were
going to be thrifty and responsible. And to a remarkable extent, he
succeeded because you see a lot of famous families burn out after a
generation or two. The Rockefellers have managed to--to go on being a
significant force in business, politics and philanthropy in this
country.

LAMB: What's the story of the Widow Backus?

Mr. CHERNOW: The Widow Backus--this was a story that was given
currency by Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell, the great muckraking
critics, who claimed that back in the late 1870s in Cleveland--that
Rockefeller had taken over a lubricant plant owned by the Widow Backus
and had cheated her. When Ida Tarbell repeated this, this was a very
trivial episode in the history of Standard Oil, which had a global oil
monopoly, but it had a very potent appeal to the public imagination.
Imagine, Mr. Rockefeller was so sadistic and so ruthless that he was
cheating this poor widow. In fact, he had offered her a very, very
fair--fair price, and it was later documented that, in fact, he had
not cheated her.

When the time came for Rockefeller to publish his own random
reminiscences in 1908, he devoted probably more space to the Widow
Backus story than any other because this incident had had such a hold
on the popular imagination that he himself said, `If I crushed a poor,
defenseless widow, then I really must be a very terrible human being.'
And so he spent--on what was really an almost microscopic transaction
in Standard Oil history, s--spent several pages in his book defending
his behavior. And it was one of the few things that Ida Tarbell
really got wrong. It was amazing how much she got right, but that
one, she did the disservice.

LAMB: Which one of the residence of the Rockefellers is this?

Mr. CHERNOW: This is John D. Sr.'s house called Kaiket. He had
four estates. This was on his estate in the Pocantico Hills of
Westchester, north of New York City. And that house is today open to
the public. Now it's about 40 or 50 rooms, which sounds fairly
impressive. But if one thinks of the Newport cottages of the--the
day, and these--these very, you know, pretentious and rather
elephantine places, this was a surprisingly modest place for the
world's richest man to--to live, and it shows that he was generally an
unostentatious person. I--I think--and I should point out it was
surrounded by 3,500 acres and several dozen miles of carriage trails
that he had personally laid out, so that the grounds are beautiful.
But he was much more interested in the--in the grounds than the
interior of the--the--the house.

He was--he was a very austere, evangelical Christian. And for him, I
think it was rather pagan and idolatrous to have a lot of expensive
paintings and a big fancy house and ballroom. That was not his style
at all. He did have a nine-hole golf course. He had his own private
golf course at each of his houses. That was arguably his greatest
indulgence.

LAMB: If you were to total up everything that he was worth today,
what would that figure be?

Mr. CHERNOW: OK. Hi--hi--his net worth peaked in 1913 at $900
million, which if you translate into contemporary dollars is $13
billion, which does not sound like very much, but it doesn't begin to
tell the whole story, for a number of reasons. He had $900 million in
1913. The entire federal budget in 1913 was $715 million, so he could
have personally paid for every federal employee and expense and had
money left to spare. The total accumulated national debt that year
was $1.2 billion, so he could have retired three-quarters of the total
national debt.

Rockefeller made the statement in 1917--he had given away so much
money, he said that if he had kept the money, by 1917, he would have
been worth $3 billion, which would be more than $30 billion today, and
would put him in second place behind Bill Gates. But Bill Gates'
wealth only represents 1/2 of 1 percent of the gross national product.
Rockefeller's wealth represented 2 1/2 percent of the gross national
product, which is why people claim with some justice that John D.
Rockefeller was the richest man in American history.

LAMB: His grandson, Winthrop, went on to be governor of Arkansas.
His grandson--am I--Is there a grandson?

Mr. CHERNOW: That's right. Right. Right.

LAMB: Nelson went on to be governor of New York and vice president of
the United States. His great-grandson went on to be a United States
senator. You said he didn't like politicians. Would any of those men
been in those positions if they didn't have his money?

Mr. CHERNOW: I don't know. It's a fair question. One--one of the
interesting things is how the Rockefeller attitude towards politics
changes because when the federal government brings a big antitrust
suit against Standard Oil at the time of Teddy Roosevelt, Rockefeller
has a very, very defiant and rather contemptuous attitude toward
government. His son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., is very much inspired,
I think, by the atmosphere of Woodrow Wilson, is interested in
public-private partnerships. He--he buys up the Grand Tetons Valley
and gives it to the federal government for what is today, you know,
arguably, the most glorious national park in the United States; ditto
for Acadia National Park up in Maine.

And then you actually have Nelson running for office and becoming
governor of Arkansas, Winthrop becoming a governor of--I'm
sorry--Nelson became governor of New York, Winthrop became the
governor of--of Arkansas. When Nelson first entertained the notion of
becoming governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey said he couldn't be
elected dogcatcher in New York, the Rockefeller name was considered
that much of a liability. So that while the wealth was enormously
advantageous, the--the name itself was both a help and a hindrance,
because the Rockefeller name, historically, had inspired a lot of
hostility.

LAMB: What of this book is new? You mentioned the Inglis interview
before. What else did you find that--that hadn't been done before?

Mr. CHERNOW: One of the things that I did is that all sorts of
things that happened at Standard Oil, which John D. Rockefeller
claimed had never been--had never happened, or if they had happened,
they had been carried out by overly zealous underlings--I was able to
directly connect him to all of these various nefarious activities that
went on at Standard Oil. To his credit, I was able to
correct--connect him much more directly with all of his great
philanthropic enterprises, 'cause a lot of people felt that he was
detached from them, whereas, in fact, he was very actively shaping
and--and monitoring them.

I think perhaps the single most important thing that I did in this
book was that I took somebody who was considered inhuman and turned
him into a human being. He was a deeply flawed human being, but I
think that I bring him--at least I hope I bring him to--to life on
the--o--on the page, because he had been seen as almost a kind of
malevolent automaton throughout his--his life.

And he was a very--and if you read the earlier biographies, he's
almost missing from his own biographies. He's so ghostly, he's so
elusive. So I have--in addition to a lot of analysis and information,
I introduce hundreds of anecdotes in the book just to try to bring him
alive as a person, because in his time--and people don't know this--in
his day, he was considered not only the richest American, he was
considered one of the greatest and most original and most eccentric
personalities that the United States had ever produced, and that
fascinated me, and I hope that I catch that.

LAMB: You have a picture here of him sitting with a couple little
girls.

Mr. CHERNOW: Yeah. Those are great-grand--granddaughters. He--he
loved children. You know, one of the reasons I have so many--we have
105 photos in--in the book, and one reason is that you see all the
different expressions, all the different faces, of John D.
Rockefeller. People tend to see him in a very one-dimensional fashion
when, in fact, he was a very, very complicated man. There are no two
decades of his life where he--consecutive decades--where he looks the
same. He's changing...

LAMB: This is Will Rogers here?

Mr. CHERNOW: Yeah. He was great friends with--with Will Rogers, and
Will Rogers came up with a lot of funny lines. They used to golf
together, and Will Rogers, one day, said to--to Rockefeller--I mean,
after Rockefeller beat him at golf, Will Rogers said to him,
`Gee--gee, John, I'm--I'm glad I lost you in golf. The last time I
beat you the price of gasoline went up a dime,' which--not bad.

Another time, Will Rogers got--t--turned the tables on John
D.--there's a famous picture of Will Rogers giving John D. a dime
rather than taking one, and Rockefeller's sort of sitting there with
this comical shocked expression on his--his face. He loved Will
Rogers' humor. Will Rogers' humor--very kind of dry, Midwestern sort
of humor--it was exactly Rockefeller's own humor, and he used to every
day in the newspapers avidly look for Will Rogers' jokes.

LAMB: Didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't swear?

Mr. CHERNOW: No. Didn't go to the theater, didn't go to the--to--to
the opera. This was the last Puritan. And on that...

LAMB: But you did have, though, a little s--little--well--well, it
seems out of context with everything else--that--and here's the
picture; I showed it earlier--that when he was running around in the
countryside in the car, he liked to--well, you explain it.

Mr. CHERNOW: This is very, very interesting. Rockefeller's wife,
who had been a sort of professional invalid for the last 10 or 20
years of her life--after she dies in 1915, John D. lives another 22
years. There's no evidence, during all the years that his wife was an
invalid, that he ever cheated on her.

He seems to have been a model husband, one of many contradictions
of--of the man--a model husband. The second she dies--he never has
shown interest in women--he's suddenly surrounded by women. Oh, yeah,
there's his--his wife in a--in--in a wheelchair. She was confined to
a wheelchair during the--the last few years of her--of--of her life.
As soon as she dies, he develops a real roving eye.

And he has this afternoon ritual where he goes out with a party of
people in this large touring car. He always sits tightly wedged
between two buxom women on either side. He has a blanket that he
draws over their laps and up to their necks, and his hot, itchy
fingers would stray under the--the blanket. And so Rockefeller lived
his adolescence in his last years, whereas when he's a young man he
looks very old and serious, and when he's an old man he looks rather
jaunty and--and--and young. So he seems to keep getting younger and
even slightly silly as he gets older.

LAMB: How--how did you learn that last little episode?

Mr. CHERNOW: There's a terrible--actually, there was a rather
gossipy memoir that was written by his chief gardener, because when
they would go out on these afternoon drives, the gardener would often
be driving the second car. And he said one day, they pulled up at a
stop sign, and this young woman who was sitting next to Rockefeller
leapt out of the--the back seat and came running back to this car.
And she s--got in the car and she said, `That old rooster! I'll never
sit next to him again.' And apparently Ro--Rockefeller had been trying
to--to feel her up during the--the ride.

LAMB: One last little connecting point here that James Thomas
Flexner's father, who was on this show, is right here. Who is he?

Mr. CHERNOW: Right. That's Simon Flexner. He was the first
director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, today the
Rockefeller University. And when that was started in 1901, it was a
very, very novel concept. Rockefeller himself suggested it. It was
novel because there was no institute devoted purely to medical
research, and at the time, the idea of paying scientists to sit around
and just daydream and come up with discoveries was considered
something not only brand-new but rather quixotic and even doomed to
failure. But--but Simon Flexner very quickly developed a--a
treatment--a serum for--for meningitis, and it's been one of the great
success stories, not only of the Rockefeller family but of American
medicine.

LAMB: Any plans for another book already for you?

Mr. CHERNOW: I think the next one will have to be shorter. I'm a
bit exhausted. I've done--I've published three monsters in a 10-year
period, plus one collection...

LAMB: Are they available, by the way, in paperback?

Mr. CHERNOW: "The Warburgs" and "The House of Morgan" are still very
much in--in paperback, and then I did a short collection of essays
last year called "The"--"The Death of the Banker." So I think the next
project will be something shorter and more in the area of instant
gratification.

LAMB: What was the most fun about doing this book?

Mr. CHERNOW: The most fun about doing it, I think, was just
penetrating all of his disguises. You know, there--there--there are
certain biographical subjects who seem to live for their biographers.
They record all their thoughts. And then there are other maddening
people who live in order to torment and frustrate their biographers,
and John D. was the supreme example of this type of secretive person.
And I don't know that I penetrated all of his disguises or his
mysteries, but enough so that I felt that I really created a--a fresh
portrait of the man.

LAMB: Where'd you get the title?

Mr. CHERNOW: The title--"Titan"--well, you know, there was a Dreiser
novel called "The Titan." I like the sort of novelistic ring of it. I
also wanted a title that would suggest business that's--or suggest the
gigantic scope but would not tell you whether it was a flattering or
unflattering vision of the man, so I was looking for something that
was deliberately ambiguous. And then also I liked, from a design
standpoint, a--a--a five-letter title; I pictured it the way it
was--it--with these sort of bold letters leaping off the page like
that.

LAMB: And this is the cover of the book, "Titan: The Life of John D.
Rockefeller, Sr." Our guest has been Ron Chernow. Thank you very
much.

Mr. CHERNOW: Pleasure, Brian.

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Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.