World War II

"What took my father from his San Francisco–based construction-supply business to Los Angeles was the postwar housing boom in Southern California, where servicemen coming back from World War II were starting families and looking to use their government loans to buy homes in that sunny land of plenty. Back then, the great valley basin was mostly endless citrus orchards and thousands of acres of undeveloped land. My father, his brother, and three entrepreneurial colleagues essentially bought and built entire sections of Southern California—the San Fernando Valley, Palos Verdes, West Covina—replacing vast orange orchards with hundreds of thousands of tract homes, sometimes in ten-thousand-unit parcels divided into four basic models, mostly indistinguishable from each other. Men like my father made fortunes delivering the American dream to young couples in cookie-cutter houses in made-from-scratch communities. My father was far from the dominating force, that was his brilliant elder brother, and he always felt in his shadow."

"Despite the public image he cultivated during World War II, Kaiser certainly did not fit the Progressive model of businessmen fighting against government. Nor was Kaiser out to "capture" government agencies with which he dealt, as New Left history might suggest. Instead, Kaiser learned to compromise with the desires of executive branch officials at the same time he was attempting to influence them through skilled use of the media. The Kaiser story was of neither battle nor capture, but rather a process of continuous negotiation."

"Another sceptic was the biggest cigarette manufacturer in Europe, the German Philipp Reemtsma, who had met Jan Rupert in Hamburg in 1950 and was impressed with everything he saw and heard about Rembrandt. When he eventually met Rupert, the two men became firm friends despite initial language difficulties. A World War I pilot himself, Reemtsma had lost three of his sons during World War II. While he suspected that the enterprising young South African would become his main competitor, he asked himself: ‘What would you do for your own son?’ He decided to take Rupert under his wing and helped him in crucial ways."