These were not communities defined by suspicion. They were communities defined by the expectation that the people one moved among had been, in some sense, already vetted — by their address, by their social connections, by their institutional affiliations, by the markers of class and education and cultural participation that served as informal credentialing.
When you live in Beacon Hill and your partner is a McKinsey senior partner and your dinner guests include academics and artists and financiers, you are operating in an environment that already filters out many forms of imposture. The social circle is not randomly assembled. Entry into it requires some combination of professional achievement, financial standing, educational background, or personal connection to someone already inside it. The assumption is that by the time someone is at your table, the informal vetting has already occurred.
Gerhartsreiter understood how to exploit this assumption. He did not force his way into these environments — he slipped through the edges, presenting himself as someone whose credentials were already established and whose standing was self-evident. He was the kind of person who belonged in this room, and if you questioned that, you were questioning your own judgment in having invited him or your host’s judgment in having included him.
The Rockefeller name was the sharpest version of this strategy. A Rockefeller does not need to establish his credentials. The name is the credential. Asking a Rockefeller to prove he’s a Rockefeller is a social solecism — it implies that you are the kind of person who asks that kind of question. He deployed the name in environments where not asking was the social norm, and in those environments, not asking was functionally equivalent to accepting.