More than a statue: Cooper explores the Vanderbilt legacy

When Anderson Cooper was 6, his father took him to see the statue of Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt near New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The transportation magnate was America’s richest man when he died in 1877, the 19th century equivalent of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.

He was also Cooper’s great-great-great grandfather.

For much of his life, the CNN personality shunned his lineage. Now 54 and a father himself, Cooper has taken a second look and, with historian Katherine Howe, written the book “Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty” that explores the family’s complicated legacy.

The Commodore was obsessed with making money, and left behind $100 million — real coin back in those days. Yet that obsession damaged those around him, and succeeding generations of Vanderbilts, fairly and unfairly, became symbols of the “idle rich” and frittered away a fortune.

“Certainly, when I started working in news, I didn’t want to show up on stories and have people say, ‘Oh, this guy is a Vanderbilt’ or whatever,” Cooper said. “I didn’t think any good could come of it, personally or professionally.”

Researching the family “was like opening a door and discovering this whole history that I consciously avoided knowing about,” he said.

The book is short of details on Cornelius Vanderbilt’s business success. Cooper figures there are other resources for that.

It wasn’t pretty. The patriarch played favorites with his sons and largely ignored his daughters, figuring they would get married and not carry on the Vanderbilt name.

“I certainly would not have wanted to have grown up in his house,” Cooper said. “But I admire that he did create new businesses — not just one empire but two empires. What he did was extraordinary, but it came at great cost to those around him.”

He believes he and his mother inherited something of the Commodore’s work ethic.

After his mother’s death, Cooper began to explore the journals, letters, documents and photos she left behind and, he wrote, “began to hear the voices of those people I never knew.”

Harper / Via AP For much of his life, Anderson Cooper, shunned his lineage, but now, with historian Katherine Howe, he has written a book exploring his family’s complicated legacy.