I've been on the boards for a couple of months now. I had never considered the whole "Why Rocco?" question, mainly because I was more interested in Vito than Michael, and so was not so interested in contemporary parts of Part II. After reading through some of the Rocco strings that have been developed, there's a couple or three things that I think:

1. I think Fredo's clear of any knowledge that there was going to be a hit or kidnapping of Michael, or of any knowledge that Rocco had turned. I think the "I'm smaht!" exchange is Fredo's confessional, and contains all he knows.

2. I think that you have to give Coppola some credit. You have to give him some credit that he (not Michael) didn't just kill people for no reason. And you have to assume that, in some way, there was going to be some echo of the end of Part I in the end of Part II.

3. So on to Rocco: the first thing is, you can't just say that his death is to show that Michael is callous to the people around him. After all, he's already killing his own brother. That would seem to settle that issue.

I think the best way to figure out Rocco's role is to work backwards from the endings. Who gets killed at the end of Part I: Barzini, Tataglia, Stracci, Cuneo, Moe Green, Tessio, Carlo. All proven opponents of the Corleones.

End of Part II: Roth, Fredo, Frankie and Rocco. The first three are all proven betrayers of Michael or the family, but what'd Rocco do?

Well, we have this attempted hit that Michael thinks (or says he thinks) was an inside job. It would seem to go completely unexplained unless Rocco was being punished.

4. As I said, I never really considered the Rocco question until the last few weeks. Even before that, though, it always seemed to me that the officer who shot Rocco looked just a little too neat and clean, a little too unhurried in what he was doing.

Bottom line: I think that at some point there was probably a Rocco storyline that mirrored the Carlo storyline of Godfather I, but that it got swamped under everything that was happening in Washington and Havana, and in the 1920's.

All subject to change of mind....