John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a conscientious man, but not a man of finance, at least not in the modern style. He was familiar with philanthropy, posterity, and the colossal weight of public obligation. He was not familiar with the subtle game of leverage and speculative investment now being played out by Ezra. His opposition to his brother-in-law had always been on questions of morals and ethics, an arena in which Ezra's hard-headed pragmatism would always overwhelm him.
When the revolt eventually came in a serious and well-planned form, it was not conceived by him. It was the work of his youngest son, David.
David Rockefeller was the anti-Junior. Where Junior was a moralist, David was a pragmatist. Where Junior was a philanthropist, David was a banker. Young, brilliant, with a brand-new Harvard doctorate in economics, David spoke the language of the balance sheet, the statement of cash flow, and the leverage risk his father never spoke. He looked out over Ezra's empire and didn't gaze upon it with the sort of moral horror his father would have. Rather, he assumed the cool, judging stare of a credit analyst. And what he saw was a giant over-stretched dangerously, and perhaps even lethally.
He arrived at his father not with explanations about the soul of Ezra but with a well-crafted financial report. They met in the calm, book-filled study of Junior's Fifth Avenue home.
"Father," David began, spreading out a series of charts and account books on the enormous desk. "All these years we've been fighting the wrong battle against Uncle Ezra. You've been arguing over the ethical content of his behavior. That's a fight we can't win, because he isn't bound by our ethical system."
He pointed to a chart of the declining cash reserves from the key family trusts alongside the surging investments in research and development from Prentice Applied Science. "This is the battlefield on which we can confront him. And on which we shall triumph. He controls the kingdom because he controls the majority of the vote in the most significant family trusts. But the newer businesses, this 'future' of his, represent a massive and untenable burden. He's vulnerable. Fiscally vulnerable."
Junior studied the numbers, his face etched with intensity. For the first time, he saw a path to winning that didn't rely on passion and emotional appeal, but on hard statistics and facts.
"What do we do?" He asked his son.
"We fight him like a modern company," said David with eyes flashing with the zeal of strategy. "We engage in a battle of proxies. We assemble the family's own voting power, our own holdings, and the holdings of our own loyal family allies who themselves increasingly fear Ezra's recklessness."
And thus the silent, disciplined Rockefeller civil war commenced. It was a struggle conducted not in news headlines but in discreet lunches in certain clubs, in telephone calls in hushed tones to out-of-town cousins, and in the offices of the most powerful trust attorneys on the Street. David headed the insurrection and his father its standard-bearer.
They approached the other branches of the family, the mighty Rockefeller network who long had been content to live on the silent, sure dividends of the empire. David didn't speak of warmongering or immorality. He spoke their language. He offered them the declining dividends on their trusts. He spoke of the game of risk, how Ezra was placing the sure, sure capital that guaranteed their inheritances on exotic enterprises like rockets to the moon and thinking machines.
"Uncle Ezra is a genius," David would reluctantly state, a master rhetorical phrase. "A genius, however, may err. And if errant, his error extends far beyond his own possibilities. Far beyond his own future. It intrudes on the future of your children. Of children yet unborn. All we're asking for is the restoration of prudent, sensible control."
The message was a powerful one. It appealed to the conservative faction of the family, who for years had resented the aggressive style of Ezra. Alliances were quietly constructed. Election votes, once inactive, were mobilized and dedicated to the Senior's crusade. The family, who for so long had presented the world outside the ideal face of unity and solidarity, was now fighting an vituperative internecine struggle for its own conscience and its own wealth.
Its ultimate target was Alta. She was the key. Her individual shares and the dowry trust Ezra controlled on her behalf added up to a significant voting bloc. If she could be persuaded to wrest legal control of her own holdings and vote her share with her brother, the setback to Ezra's control would be disastrous and potentially deadly.
She was caught between an emotional and psychological vice. Her dear nephew David sat with her in her drawing room and respectfully and patiently presented her with the financial realities. He set out in black and white the ways in which the principal of her trust was being applied to fund projects that so far had only brought disastrous losses. He was not implicating her husband as being malicious so much as arrogant.
Her brother, Junior, appealed to her conscience and her very foundation of fears. "Alta," his face marked with earnest concern, begged her, "this is not the man I used to know. This man is obsessed. He is recklessly driving this family over the cliff for his own self-centered fancies. You're the only person who can take the steering from his hands before all is lost."
Ezra, minding his own problems with physics and finance, was unaware of the enormity of the rebellion building in his own home. He interpreted Junior's maneuvering as the same old moralistic bitching. He didn't take David seriously. By the time he understood the nature of the threat, it was too late.
This battle came to a head with a planned, emergency meeting of the trustees of the principal Rockefeller family core fund. The meeting convened in the spacious boardroom at Rockefeller Center, a room as cold and grim as a tomb. All the significant branches of the family gathered.
Ezra sat at the top of the table, Alta next to him. Across from him sat Junior, David on his right hand, the young prince behind the old king.
When the preliminaries were finished, David stood up and argued his case with the chill of a prosecutor. He provided the numbers, the burn rate, the failed rocket launches, the stalled projects. He didn't attack Ezra's character. He attacked his performance.
"The question before us today," David concluded, his words with calm authority, "is not a question of vision, but of trusteeship. Are we, the trustees of this family's patrimony, fulfilling our fiduciary duty in allowing one person to jeopardize our very collective future on such speculative, high-risk ventures? I would assume the answer is no."
Junior then officially motioned. "I move a vote of no confidence in the current financial leadership of Ezra Prentice. And I further move that the board approve a new set of bylaws severely restricting his spending authority and requiring all new capital investments of more than a million dollars to be approved by the board in its entirety."
The room was silent. The proxy war had been distilled to this. An open, confrontational challenge to the authority of Ezra. The vote was cast. The allies Junior and David so diligently constructed all voted yes. The Ezran loyalists all voted no. The tally was counted. It was a deadlock just perfect.
All eyes in the room turned to the only member who hadn't yet voted, the only member whose shares would be the tiebreaker. Alta.
She sat frozen, the weight of two empires—the old one of her father and the new one of her husband—oppressing her shoulders. To vote with her brother would be to betray the husband she adored and swore to trust. To vote with her husband would be to defy her whole clan and take her own economic fate on faith in his recklessly ambitious schemes.
She looked at Junior's pleading face. Looked at David's aloof, logical eyes. Looked then at Ezra, who sat quietly, his face impassive, not even providing her with a hint of direction. He was leaving it entirely up to her.
"I..." she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "I abstain."
Its words dropped into the room's stillness with the weight of a gavel. Abstention. Paralysis. Ezra had retained his throne, but his authority was disabled. He could not be overthrown, but he could not act. The massive injection of capital that he so desperately needed for his branch of material science was frozen and taken hostage by the family uprising.
Having defied the Third Reich, having had in its hands the atomic bomb and aimed to control the cosmos, Ezra now had to encounter the most dangerous and obstinate threat thus far: an election on the values of democracy in his own household.