Volume 23, Number 4 · March 18, 1976
Into the Sunset
By John Kenneth Galbraith
The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty
by Peter Collier, by David Horowitz
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 746 pp., $15.00
The Rockefeller Syndrome
by Ferdinand Lundberg
Lyle Stuart, 416 pp., $12.50
Thorstein Veblen once warned of the unwisdom of yielding to any idea that was ahead of its time and advised against associating with those so disposed. His point is accepted and practiced even by people who are not quite capable of understanding it. But there is a counterpart strategy for personal preservation that is equally important. It consists in avoiding determined adherence to past truth. Ideas that work beautifully in one period of a person's life are assumed to work forever. Then the world changes, issues and attitudes alter, and what was once right becomes disastrously obsolete. The letdown comes with a highly audible clunk, made worse because the individual almost invariably rails against the changes in the world instead of blaming himself for his own obsolescence.
Review, 2693 words
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