The Michael of Godfather III is a man far removed than anyone Vito Corleone could relate to. He knew of such types - the uncaring cold 'white' businessmen who viewed themselves as morally superior to him, but he probably looked at them in disdain. These were corporate men who put their accountants before their blood.

Michael, like any good white American corporate man, shed any sense of an Italian-American, much less Sicilian or ethnic identity. He looks down on gangsters. He goes out of his way to say he's NOT a gangster, even though the man runs the goddamn Commission. He views the men on the streets - the kind of men his father depended on and trusted - as street thuggery, enforcers. He runs his legal enterprises through foundations, which he says in the film his father hated.

He sold the Olive Oil business which Vito and Genco built, and carelessly allowed the neighborhood to fall to crime, dirt and drugs. He's pretty apathetic when Connie appeals to him about just how badly the neighborhood has fallen since the days of Frank Pentangelli just 20 short years prior.

Even though by 1945 Vito had moved the administrative functions of the Family to Long Island, there's no implication that he let the 'old neighborhood' fall to the wayside. Genco was still family run and operated as of his death.

Vito seemed to be about the Family. Michael said he was, but I feel like Michael's conception of "The Family" was not so much the community, the underlings, the blood family, but that HE, himself, was the Family personified, and that his interests were the interests of The Family. Those things which lay outside his personal interest, even as of III, were of no value.

Whereas Vito, for example, although he saw no personal interest in the affair, took care of the widow Colombo because his wife asked him to. Vito is clearly a beloved neighborhood figure within a few years of murdering Fanucci. A lot of the upper class gents we see visit at Connie's wedding asking for favors - the ones whom respect him - seem to me to be those who probably knew Vito and his family and Family when they were local to the old neighborhood.

For Vito, The Family - both his blood family and his organization - is what defined him, not the opposite. For Michael, he was The Family, and his interests and his interests alone were what mattered to the Family.

As such, if Vito had lived to see his son as of 1979, would he have ben ashamed of the man he became? Forget the issue of Fredo, I am specifically speaking of thes.