Overhaul Read Free

legendary columnist James "Scotty" Reston. Arriving in the capital two months before Richard Nixon's resignation was a dizzying experience for a twenty-one-year-old college graduate. A few years later I was a full-fledged Washington correspondent, responsible for covering what in the face of OPEC and stagflation were the two most important domestic issues facing the Carter administration: energy and the economy.
    Then came the election of Ronald Reagan. Some of the stories I wrote were deeply skeptical of supply-side economics, to the point where I found myself attacked on the
Wall Street Journal
editorial page. My superiors decided that this would be an excellent moment for me to move to London to cover European economics.
    Neither London nor journalism outside Washington was particularly satisfying, however. I grew restless. Although I had leaped at the opportunity to work with Scotty Reston, I had never set out to be a journalist. I'd been raised in the New York suburbs in a nonpolitical, business-oriented family. My father, who had seen his family's fur business go bankrupt during the Depression and now ran our family's paint-manufacturing company in Queens, had urged me toward a professional education. I'd even applied and been accepted to business school and law school, both of which I'd deferred to stay at the
Times.
Now I felt the journalistic frustration of peering through the glass instead of running something or building something in the real world.
    I could have tried returning to Washington as a public servant. But the private sector was a more realistic option in those days of Republican ascendance. Several friends I'd known in Washington had shifted to investment banking. That industry had nowhere near the glitz or notoriety it would gain within a few years, but listening to those who had entered the fray, it sounded like an exciting, challenging way to marry some of the variety and competitiveness of journalism with a chance to do more than report.
    Money wasn't my main motivation—I was single and earning more than $60,000 a year, with both a cost-of-living allowance and a generous expense account—and it took me a while to realize how weird I sounded saying that on Wall Street. When asked in job interviews why I wanted to become an investment banker, I would speak somewhat airily about doing something different from journalism. My prospective employers would look at me quizzically. The more forthcoming ones told me that this was too tough a profession to take on unless I had a real drive to get rich. So I learned to play up a passion for moneymaking and to mention the limitations of living on only a five-figure income.
    "I understand completely," said one of my last interviewers. "I don't know how anyone can live on sixty thousand dollars a year." At that time, someone making that much ranked in the top 10 percent of all earners.
    In my early years on Wall Street, I had no time for politics or policy. I devoted my waking hours to work and tried to be a good family man. The best thing that had come out of my time in London was meeting my wife, Maureen White, another American expat. When we decided we wanted children, we somehow managed to have four in four years' time (one set of twins).
    Not until the mid-1990s, after I'd risen to a senior post at the investment bank Lazard Frères, was I able to focus again on Washington. I began to write op-eds. I became involved with several think tanks and started donating to candidates I liked.
    Maureen and I had met the Clintons on Martha's Vineyard in the early years of Bill Clinton's presidency. Our relationship was cemented in 1995 when Vernon and Ann Jordan arranged for us to stay over in the Lincoln Bedroom, on the second floor of the White House. We were so naive about fundraising that we took the Jordans at their word when they said that the Clintons wanted to "meet a few new interesting people."
    That year, we dove into Clinton's reelection