by Ron Suskind
His aunt’s flower shop, he said, “was right there, next to the Associated supermarket, right over there, where I was a delivery boy.” On the next block, a square box of concrete was “the bank where I opened my first account” with the money he’d made in tips. The shabby supermarket now has staples from the Caribbean and Middle East, and shoppers in dashikis. The bank is gone.
“All gone now,” he mumbled, making an illegal right turn near a crowded falafel stand. “A whole world is gone. My world.”
This was still called Brooklyn, but the name mattered, really mattered, only to those who gave meaning to such a place with the life they’d lived here, and still did on this spring day. It otherwise belonged to the history of America—from the Dutch settlers in 1643 to the famously noisy twentieth-century brew of Italians and Jews, mostly from Europe and Russia—and the longer history of the world, where people moved to wherever they could to get what they wanted.
If things worked out in America in a way that history tended to work out for the best, there would someday be a sixty-something man from Haiti, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, or Pakistan, driving whatever decent car was worth buying in 2040, reminiscing about eating falafel at that lunch counter and wondering who the hell all these new people were in “my fuckin’ neighborhood.”
Carmine was deeply doubtful that history would resolve in this direction.
“Look at them,” he said, gazing out at the faces, virtually all black or brown, and many born somewhere far from Brooklyn, his Brooklyn. “English here is a third language.”
It’s the nature of the new immigrant, he said, that troubled him, the way “they come here and create their own ghettos. The new immigrant doesn’t want to be an American, he wants to plug into the infrastructure and send the money back home. There’s no one giving back to America.” The immigrants of his era, who once populated this neighborhood, “were on the same time line” with their “Judeo-Christian values” and shared the “same general desire to take the next step” in America, as opposed, he groused, to this wave of newcomers: “People who worship things and deities that you’ve never heard of . . . They don’t value life the way you value life, because they come from a place where women weren’t valued, where horrible things happened to women, where you pissed and threw it out the window . . . and so here they throw the piss out the window.”
Carmine, now the major benefactor of the Bowery Mission, the venerable church and shelter serving “skid row’s” destitute since 1879, had spent more time with down-on-their-luck minorities than any ten Wall Streeters combined. He socialized regularly with the mission’s ebullient director, an African American former drug addict named James MacLynn. “The interracial stuff is child’s play,” he laughed. “You’ll see how fast blacks and whites band together in America as the world keeps arriving on our doorstep.”
No, it wasn’t race that roiled him, but rather fear that “the middle-class American dream is over,” that something unique that created the country he grew up in—an America that coincided with an extraordinary post–World War II surge in confidence and capacity—was gone. He was probably right. No period is ever like any other. But what seemed visible with each glance out his windshield was that a country that once stood atop the world was now bleeding, for better or worse, into the wider world, half of which still lived on less than a dollar a day and most of which was growing ever more impatient—with each passing, image-drenched moment—to grab what it couldn’t have, now within clear sight.
By that measure, the old neighborhood of his nostalgic reverie was positively parochial: virtually all émigrés from Europe, their children, or grandchildren, carrying whatever shared history and cultural cues they’d brought across the ocean and then unbundled on these streets.
The same thing, of course, was happening, block by block, in every direction, just with an unwieldy, cacophonous zest that smelled like confrontation to Carmine, a mocking of his identity and the place where it was shaped.
He stopped the car in front of a baseball diamond and got out to inspect a fence he’d helped build as a kid with his father and other men from the neighborhood, along with pouring the concrete and putting up the lights. Carmine painted some scenes, looking through the chain links, of how Brooklyn Dodger legend Gil Hodges dedicated the place, of summer evenings on the base paths, and of how parents—cops, firemen, bakers, bricklayers, like his dad—all knew each other, and one another’s kids, “and it was real community with real values.”
“But no one gives a shit,” he said, back in the car, as he resumed his loops by the holy sites—the place where Vince Lombardi grew up; Coney Island’s parachute jumps, the spot where the bank heist from the movie Dog Day Afternoon happened; the building where mobsters threw a guy from the fourth-story window; a wailing wall, home of the “greatest handball players in the history of the world—all Jews.” Then, the first building put up by Fred Trump, Donald’s father, not far from rows of empty condos near the beach, new and ghostly.
Carmine understands that the difference between those two structures is that there are, as he said, “two types of development—demand-driven development and capital-driven development. One is good, one is bad. Demand-driven means someone actually wants to live there, wants to rent there, wants to work there, wants to operate there. There’s a need for the space. Capital-driven development is give me capital and I’ll build it. I don’t particularly know if anyone wants it. What does it matter?! I’ll make my money by just developing it.”
Wall Street figured out how to do that on a vast scale.
But having lived long enough and—in his particular American journey, having crossed more borders than most—Visone knew that the Brooklyn he loved was built by the rigorous accountability of the former, of all the hustling “demand-driven” merchants, he so fondly recalls, filling the hard-eyed needs of those crowding these streets. If not, they went under.
And it was, more or less, the same now. He stopped at a light, as a lady in flowing African colors dragged along a trio of boys in logoed T-shirts, proudly sporting the choicest global brands. If he squinted just so, he could see his mother behind that dashiki, and which of the kids, skipping behind her, was most like him. He’d rented that truck, after all, to drive the dark streets of the city, night after night, year after year, based on the idea that we were all the same, deep down, and we all get hungry sometimes.
“I don’t know, maybe I’ve lived too long,” Carmine Visone said, quietly—but, then, a smile.
18
God’s Work
North of the city, on a hilltop fortress high above the Hudson—a setting sun splashing light across its wide expanse—tuxedoed men and gowned women drank champagne from crystal flutes as they fanned out, chatting and strolling, across an endless lawn.
This is the Rockefeller Estate, called Kykuit or, sometimes, Pocantico Hills, but unmistakable as one of the sunlit peaks over the continent’s vast firmament. It sweeps up a wide mountain and surrounding cliff inside a discreet electrified fence marking the protected realm of Robber Baron audacities: a main house just a touch smaller than the White House; stables large enough for twenty horses; a courtyard of garages for the parking and repair of a fleet of conveyances, including gas pumps and hydraulic lifts; and a nine-hole golf course.
Tonight, June 11, aging titans of the American Century, or what’s left of them, have gathered to honor one another in the quizzical presence of their moneyed, less noteworthy successors.
The event: a black-tie gala for International House, New York’s venerable cross-cultural edifice, where seven hundred residents at a time—IHouse fellows from one hundred or so countries—are graced with various enrichment programs and support services, speakers and mixers, while they go about their chosen rigors at entry-level jobs or seek graduate degrees somewhere in the great city. A stately block-wide building on Riverside Drive, built mostly with Rockefeller money in 1924, grew into something of a global networking Valhalla through the midcentury, whe
n borders still mattered, international organizations were scarcer, and the expression “global economy” had not yet been uttered. Though IHouse was early, and its mission—of bringing young people from around the world together—is now so commonplace as to seem conventional, networking never goes out of style. Among the chairmen of IHouse’s board have been Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and General George C. Marshall, and its graduates include both Citibank’s CEO Vikram Pandit (India) and Morgan Stanley’s James Morgan (Australia).
The current chairman: Paul Volcker. Tonight he was to honor past chairmen—namely Henry Kissinger and former Goldman CEO John Whitehead. He was also, as master of the evening’s ceremonies, to honor David Rockefeller, upright and sentient at ninety-five, and walking through his house with a smile and an outstretched hand, his carefully tailored tux giving him the top-heavy look of a very old bodybuilder.
As longtime head of the family bank, Chase Manhattan, and heir to America’s greatest twentieth-century bonanza, oil, David Rockefeller, or what’s left of him, is an auspicious living actor—his generation’s ringleader—of ideals about top-down command and control: the legacy of the behemoth corporations, working in deft coordination, that rose from U.S. soil eventually to span the globe and that lifted small groups of civic-minded men, graced by wealth, who’d gather to solve the world’s intractable problems.
It was far from a perfect model, the one Rockefeller helped manage. There was collusion and exclusion, old-boy networks that were all but inpenetrable for the interloper. Day to day, it wasn’t nearly as efficient or productive or flexible as the frenetic present tense. But there were rules that were generally heeded, not in spite of the more static and rigid barriers that prevailed, but because of them. If you happened to be born on third base, you generally didn’t rub it in the face of the guy who wasn’t even born in the stadium, especially after the upheavals of the Depression and World War II. It was unseemly for an office-dwelling boss to take more than ten times the pay of a sweating guy on the loading dock, though no one begrudged the inventor, or builder of corporate giants, their fortunes. They did something special—maybe aided by banker or lawyer or ad executive, who earned just fees, which seemed appropriate. The whole point of the exercise was to make everyone feel the same, like they were all in the race together, even if everyone understood the nature of born, or bred, privileges, and the advantages they bestowed. The epoxy, the way it was all glued together, was with certain agreed-upon standards of right and wrong. An infraction brought shame and ouster. A desire to do the “right thing” yielded credit, and maybe a call to help solve some large dilemma. That would be considered an honor, and self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat. Could complex problems be managed by these civic-minded actors, working in concert? Up to a point, the answer was yes.
And they’d often gather at this estate. You could almost hear the echoes of midcentury prudent men passing from one room to the next. The National Highway System, the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan—all required such meetings, as did countless sit-downs in the library, or over nine holes of golf. If some businessman was about to attempt something that would, soon enough, create disaster, the message had to be delivered: if he moved forward with it, he’d be out of the club; if he did the right thing, and subordinated his desires to the greater good, he’d curry gratitude, and that could only amount to something good.
A man who attended his share of such meetings—as an adviser to the Rockefellers and countless others across fifty years—was in fact standing on a crutch in the room, hobbled, broken, but unbowed.
John Whitehead had had his knee replaced just two weeks before, but he wasn’t going to miss this night, touted as one of the most auspicious gatherings at Kykuit in nearly twenty-five years.
Whitehead, fit and still handsome at eighty-nine, received one well-wisher after another, looking like an actor hired to play, well, a man like Whitehead: a seasoned repository of experiences and values wrapped neatly into the catchphrase “Greatest Generation.” From the time he commanded a landing craft onto Omaha Beach, Whitehead had been busy steering one ship after the next. In 1947, after getting an MBA at Wharton, he joined Goldman Sachs and learned at the knee of the legendary Sidney Weinberg, who’d started as a janitor at Goldman, worked his way to the trading desks, and, after saving the firm from bankruptcy in 1930, to the chairmanship. A few years after Weinberg died in 1969, Whitehead took the top job and, on a yellow legal pad, summarily wrote down Goldman’s “14 principles”: commonsense guideposts, often called “the commandments” inside the firm, such as the “client comes first,” “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business,” and we will be given confidential information that must be “handled with utmost care.”
“I didn’t come up with them,” Whitehead demurred, shifting his weight from crutch to foot and back. “They were principles passed down by Sidney; I just them wrote them down. They were part of our tradition.”
The pain Whitehead was feeling these days went well beyond his knee. A former Eagle Scout, he had worked his whole life to burnish and protect Goldman Sachs’ reputation, and had remained, a quarter century since he left the top job, the firm’s emeritus ambassador at large. As a director of civic and nonprofit organizations, including the chairmanship of the 9/11 Memorial Commission, and recipient of numerous honorary degrees for decades of charitable work, Whitehead had seen his value placed, increasingly, in high-profile misdirection: he was now a comforting front man to make people think this was the Wall Street they once knew. Whitehead’s ubiquitous presence seemed to keep that other, older Wall Street alive, year after year, like the light from a dead star, even as ethical standards that he, like his mentor Sid Weinberg, had placed at the core of Goldman’s franchise were steadily abandoned.
After September 2008 this sleight of hand was untenable. People came, one after another, to Whitehead to step up, to use his stature and credibility to put the financial services business back on course. He took another path—what Fleming would have called the “Colin Powell compromise.” He would continue as a key adviser to Blankfein and attempt to alter the wider landscape by guiding Goldman’s powerful chief in his words and actions.
As Blankfein whipsawed between cocky and penitent, continued to take bonuses, and effused, in late 2009, about Goldman “doing God’s work,” Whitehead stuck it out. But the nightmares of April, with the SEC investigation of Goldman and its executives, led by Blankfein, seemed to have finally broken the old man’s resolve.
On this night, in the rarified air of Kykuit, he was on dangerous turf. This, after all, was where Whitehead actually spent much of the last quarter century, trying to direct the enormous accrued wealth of America’s dynastic families to areas of needs—and especially that of the Rockefellers, with their large, signature foundation and a civic tradition dating from early in the twentieth century.
He said he was trying to be hopeful these days, and how the kids he meets are “more idealistic than we were, trying to do things of meaning rather than just seek money”; and how: often “bad periods” like this one “plant the seeds of good periods that follow. That’s what I’m hoping.”
Those seeds needed to be “watered and nourished,” he acknowledged, to take root, and he thinks every day about what he can do with the time he has left to help that along.
He paused for a moment. There was a story he wanted to tell, about what had happened when the Pennsylvania Railroad went bankrupt in 1970. He explained how Goldman had $60 million of commercial paper outstanding—and technically wasn’t obligated to pay it—“but morally I felt we had to be sure everybody got paid back,” even though the firm only had a $30 million net worth. In the end, everybody was paid back. It just took a long time. Lesson: Goldman looked beyond its legal obligations to do something larger, something that was right.
Just mentioning Goldman in the current context bore perils, so he mentioned that he remained a regular adviser to Blankfein, which meant he neede
d “to be delicate” in what he said about Goldman if he were to remain in that role “and continue to have influence over Lloyd.”
But tonight there was no stopping him.
He then tacked briskly into the wider issue of some things that need to be discarded, starting with destructive incentives. “The compensation system today is so rewarding of today’s results and doesn’t encourage anybody to take the long view. It’s got to be changed!”
He went on, now getting closer to Blankfein, describing how a CEO shouldn’t be able to sell his stock in the company until after he retires . . . long after. He should be paid after he builds the company, not every step of the way.
Sue Weinberg walked up. She is the wife of John Weinberg, Sidney’s son, who shared the chairmanship of Goldman with Whitehead. And in this place—a night when the old guard of Wall Street was making one of its last stands—the spirit of Sidney Weinberg, whom the New York Times once respectfully called Mr. Wall Street, seemed to inhabit his heir, Whitehead, emboldening him.
“He’s so talented and he’s so smart: Harvard College, Harvard Law School, top of his class,” Whitehead said, finally taking off the gloves, old guard to new, addressing Blankfein directly. “He never thought that if the public is losing their jobs and we’re in a recession, it isn’t a very good time to talk about the justification for a $60 million bonus. He doesn’t get it!”
What happened to America, from one signature generation to its successor? It was there, in Whitehead’s voice. “He doesn’t get it. He says, ‘I’m the CEO of the best financial service firm in the world. And if I’m the CEO, I’m its head man. I deserve to be paid more than anybody else. And I’m prepared to fight for it, and boast about it. Because I’m proud of it.’