Unlike Marcos, Mobutu, or the Shah of Iran, the troubled President of Indonesia has no bolthole. This modernising autocrat once said in his ghost-written autobiography: "A beansprout never strays far from the beanpole."
But Indonesia's economic success is in ribbons. If he really means what he agreed with the IMF this week, he has finally turned on his own. Under the deal, Suharto's system will have to be dismantled. There are many who think that, politically, he is already dead.
As for the children and cronies, who do have rainy-day assets across the Pacific, a brave Jakarta economist, Rizal Ramli, has said: "The party's over and those who enjoyed themselves most don't want to join in washing the dishes."
For more than three decades this son of a landed Javanese peasant has run south-east Asia's most populous country with an opaqueness and a brutal authoritarianism that reflects a political culture with one foot in the past.
Until recently his main achievement was that he was a Third World leader who had managed to ensure Indonesia's 200 million people had enough to eat, with the economy clocking up recurrent record economic growth rates.
A sly master of divide and rule (an "upmarket Pol Pot" as Dr Peter Carey, the Oxford historian, describes him), Suharto has survived among world leaders longer than most, seeing five US presidents come and go. He is "through and through a Javanese who would die like an ageing elephant outside his natural habitat", says Dr Carey.
His song sheet has been the quasi-fascist doctrine of "Asian values", according to which democracy, human rights, trade union rights and rights to free expression will have to await until another day, when there is "stability".
It has been his six children and their interests in banks, petrochemicals, broadcasting, plastics, aviation, toll roads, property that he has found it hardest to control.
Maybe his care of them is a compensation for his own "humiliated" feelings as a constantly fostered-out child of a broken village family in central Java.
Compared to Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, the Suharto family, now worth about $30 billion or what has been about half of his country's GNP, is "small fry", according to Prof Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University, Illinois.
A believer in the Javanese spirit world, lover of wayang shadow puppetry - when it is not satirising him - he meditates in caves, and cherishes the memory of Javanese royalty, legitimised by the Dutch colonists as part of their divide-and-rule strategy. Suharto likes to appear as a latter-day sultan. A sultan usually has a dynasty. But Suharto is following Javanese tradition in apparently not having thought of life after him.
He is said to have a fondness for classic Harley Davisons and golf. But he is an infrequent traveller and uncomfortable with foreigners.
This smiling Sphinx-like former general lacks the cosmopolitan touch of Sukarno, the nation's founder, whom Suharto supplanted after a CIA-assisted putsch in 1965 in which up to one million Indonesians are believed to have been massacred and another 1.2 million imprisoned.
A still unexplained "communist coup attempt" was the pretext for acting against the "guided democracy" of the benign but disordered Sukarno.
Suharto gave Indonesia "New Order". Joining the Dutch colonial army in 1940, he became a sergeant before the 1942 Japanese invasion and went on to play a crucial role in the 1947-49 war of independence against the country's European masters.
Suharto is steeped in the values of military hierarchy. In 1962 he commanded the Man- dala campaign to take the stupendously mineral-rich West Irian, today known as Irian Jaya (or West Papua to its still-fighting Melanesian separatist rebels).
In 1957 Suharto's rise in the military was halted suddenly when he was dismissed as a divisional commander for smuggling and corruption.
Posted to the staff college in Bandung he became involved in developing the army's doctrine of "dual function", which gave it a fearsome political role.
A staunch enemy of communism and firm US ally in the Cold War, Suharto managed also to sell himself in the NonAligned Movement, which his more dashing left-wing predecessor helped found in 1954.
As the Cold War ended he was elected chairman of the movement.
In that period he granted the PLO representation in Jakarta, donated $10 million to the ANC and established diplomatic links with China and Libya.
Also, apparently to further his non-aligned image, he agreed to UN-mediated negotiations with Portugal over Indonesia's illegal occupation of Portugal's former colony of East Timor, even if they were to be disingenuously conducted.
But as the Cold War waned so did Suharto's golden era of influence. The process began in 1988, when his trusted army chief, Gen Benny Murdani, criticised the rapaciousness of the Suharto children. He was smartly demoted.
In 1996 Suharto infiltrated the only opposition party that could offer a challenge and had its leader, Sukarno's daughter, sacked.
Street riots followed. To 11 Suharto contemporaries still vindictively jailed since 1965 have been added trade union, student and other pro-democracy leaders.
Indonesia's climate has not yet recovered from last year's smog alert, which resulted from profit-hungry "slash and burn" forest-clearing techniques. And since last July Indonesia's currency, the rupiah, has lost 75 per cent of its value in Asia's economic crisis.
Suharto will find it difficult to cede power. And it might be over-hasty to predict his political demise before rubber stamp elections due in March. After all, the last time a Javanese sultan stepped down was in 1921.
The reason for this reluctance, Dr Carey says, is more psychological than monetary. Suharto believes in "Javanese deference, respect for age, and that he is the architect of Indonesia's economic success".