Vito was a Sicilian transplanted to America. His values were Sicilian. His young life was transformed when he saw a two-bit gabellotto kill his father, his brother and his mother, and narrowly escaped being killed himself. Power was his means to an end: security and mastery of his environment. He lived modestly and wasn’t greedy. His “mall” was more a fortress (as we saw after he was shot) than a showy mansion. He knew that American law defined him as a criminal. But, he didn’t let it define him because he achieved “legitimacy” on his terms: he bought, and earned, loyalty and favors from cops, judges and politicians—the instruments of the law that defined his activities as criminal. He dispensed “justice” to fellow Sicilians who shared his values and offered friendship, loyalty and respect in return. He was secure in his place and in his self esteem.

Michael was born in America and for a good part of his life rejected (but didn’t totally excise) the Sicilian values he grew up with. His father’s shooting awakened those values, but he was never at ease with them. He wanted unlimited power for power’s sake, but never acknowledged, much less accepted, that he had chosen a life of crime. Instead, he constantly rationalized his criminality by creating the fiction that he and his father were “no different than other powerful en with responsibility toward others.” It made him obsessed with cloaking his criminality in “legitimacy,” and he never was able to reconcile the two.

It led him into a life of internal turmoil and frustration. Vito had a degree of personal modesty and warmth; Michael was cold and uncaring. Vito’s politicians seemed to reciprocate: At Connie’s wedding, Tom tells him that “Senator Cauly apologized for not coming personally -- he said you'd understand. Also, some of the judges. They've all sent gifts.” Michael got nothing but contempt from Sen. Geary: “I’ll do business with you, but the fact is, I despise you—the phony way you pose yourself—you and your whole f*****g family.” (Michael, in the only self-aware remark he ever made in the Trilogy, replies, “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator. But never think it applies to my family.”)

Even when he breaks down in tears in III and confesses to Cardinal Lamberto, he’s still dissembling and rationalizing: “I ordered my brother killed…he injured me.” It was Fredo’s fault that he committed fratricide. He couldn’t even count on the loyalty of those closest to him: When Tom asks him, after the Tahoe shooting, if he suspected Rocco and Neri, he replies: “You see -- all our people are business men, their loyalty is based on that. Now, one thing that I learned from Pop was to try to think as people around you think. Now on that basis, anything's possible.”

Both Vito and Michael were big time criminals. Vito accepted what he was, telling Michael, in his garden near the end of GF:” I work my whole life, I don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused -- to be a fool -- dancing on the string, held by all those -- bigshots. I don't apologize -- that's my life.” Michael spent his life deluding himself that he was someone other than a “common Mafia hood,” as Kay called him in III.

Vito died while playing with his grandson. Michael died, alone and embittered, in Sicily, with only a little dog to attend him.
Who succeeded in his life? Who failed? Your views?