Let's step back a bit. Brooks mentions the Astors, Rockefellers, and Whitneys. The founder of the Astor fortunes was a butcher's son, and apparently John D. Roc

Let's step back a bit. Brooks mentions the Astors, Rockefellers, and Whitneys. The founder of the Astor fortunes was a butcher's son, and apparently John D. Rockefeller's father was nothing special. To quote Mrs. Archer in The Age of Innocence (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/541/pg541.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/541/pg541.txt) """ "Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word." """ And was Leonard Bernstein admired for his taste? I should have said it was his conducting and composing. Was Barbara Walters admired for her taste, or for ability to interview people of some interest? In general, I reached a point where I really could resist Wolfe's effects, where I was tired of the habitual elbow in my ribs. I would remark also that according to something posted now and then on HN, he got Yeager's crash in The Right Stuff wrong, and apparently also the fiasco with Grissom's capsule. On the other hand, Ken Kesey did speak well of him. [edit: added "also" to the second-last sentence]