Fixers (40 page)
Authors: Michael M. Thomas
But if amends were due from me or anyone, what form might they take? That’s when I thought of making my diary public. It could change things. Change them big-time.
That’s a great and probably completely unrealistic expectation, I told myself even as I probed the notion. What, realistically, are the chances of firing up an electorate self-disenfranchised by selfishness and greed and by an appalling ignorance of history and civics? How does one undo a political system totally corrupted by the wealth of plutocrats and the venality of legislators? Ask any rational observer and the answer has to be that the odds stink.
Still, you have to go with what you’ve got, and what I have still seems pretty potent, I thought as I entered the Faculty Club.
For the next hour I carried out the duties that go with being the designated boyfriend of the decedent’s daughter: making sure elderly guests got seats and drinks and well-chosen plates from the buffet, rescuing So-and-So from You-Know-Who, trying to remember names and salutations. I did, briefly, get to shake hands with FLOTUS; the way she looked at me suggested she knew in a general way of my role in the Longstreth scheme of things and was
inclined, at first sight, to tolerate me. How she might have felt had she known my role in putting her in the life she now led wasn’t a matter I cared to conjecture.
She left after about an hour. B saw her out a side door and they chatted briefly before FLOTUS’s limo took her to Soldier Field where her chopper awaited. When B came back, she led me off into a side parlor.
“You’re going to kill me,” she said.
“Really? Why, pray tell? At the moment I lack both means and motive.”
“You know how I’m planning to get Daddy settled at Boca Grande and then come up to spend New Year’s and most of the next week with you?”
I nodded. Boca Grande is an island off Florida’s west coast, a sort of Leeward Harbor with palm trees. A lot of old Wilmington-Philadelphia-Baltimore money winters there, along with a sprinkling of Boston and Hartford. Marjorie and Thayer have been going there ever since the Brookline nest emptied and the big empty house became too much to deal with at Christmas. Boca’s like most places of its kind: grown today to about three times the size that suited it best, everything bigger, fancier, faster, and more costly, but still shot through with agreeable reminders of the way upper-class Florida resort life used to be.
I thoroughly approved of the twins’ plan to park their father in Boca for the winter: he’ll be among solicitous friends, and there may even be an alluring widow or two to hold his hand. (In my view, men who’ve had blissful marriages tend to find new love pretty quickly. No scars to get in the way.) Just to make certain he’s well taken care of, B and Claudio will do ten days on, ten days off through the winter. A week or two before Easter, whichever one of them is on duty will bring him back north and reinstall him in Brookline.
“Well,” she said, sounding genuinely unhappy, “it seems I’m going to have to leave you the day after New Year’s. Orders from on high.” She went on to explain. FLOTUS has asked B to join her and the First Daughters at Camp David for New Year’s and a few days afterward. “I think she’s lonely, she wants company. Mother dying has hit her hard.”
“It’s hit all of us hard.” I remarked, perhaps a little harshly. I’d been looking forward to our time together. “Where’s the Great Man?” I added. “Off playing golf? Screwing up foreign policy?”
B ignored that. She remains a true believer, and OG’s presidency is a matter she and I never discuss. “It’s just not the sort of invitation I can refuse,” she said. “You see that, don’t you?”
Of course I had to. Being bid to hang out at Camp David is akin to an invitation from royalty or the pope. There was no point in arguing. Might as well surrender gracefully.
B nodded. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I have to go to L.A. after Camp David to sign up this new production deal with Carousel, but I’m heading back to Boca for Martin Luther King weekend with Daddy. Why don’t you join me then?”
The idea was appealing. Second-best but plenty good enough, so I assented. “But you
will
come up for New Year’s Eve, even if it’s only for the night?”
“Of course,” she replied. “I’m really sorry about this, but …”
I could tell she had a lot on her mind. “Look, what will be will be,” I said and made a small production of looking at my watch. “You know,” I said, “I really need to get going if I’m going to make the 3:10 Acela. You and Claudio have a lot to do—and frankly so do I. The last thing you need underfoot is me.”
She hugged me. I could sense her relief at getting rid of me. Even between couples who love each other desperately there are moments like these.
“Thanks for everything, darling. You’ve been a huge help. I’ll
see you on the thirty-first. I’ll get to you by noon even if I have to charter something.” We kissed and I rushed off to catch the train.
Which is where I am now, rattling south in an Amtrak “quiet car.” I have with me the bound galleys of a book I’ve naturally been anxious to read:
Hope and Change: A Political Pilgrimage
. It’s a memoir by Homer Orteig, to be published next March. I’ve skimmed the book rapidly, looking for names and dates that might jump out at me. So far I’ve only found this:
I was livid when I found out that Holloway and Harley Winters had quietly lobbied against an amendment to the stimulus that would have restricted the payment of bonuses at firms that received bailout funds. Those bonuses had become a huge political sore point for the administration, but the finance guys argued that retroactive steps to claw back the money would have violated existing contracts.
“This will be the end of capitalism as we know it,” Holloway told me, to which I responded: “I hate to break the news, Mr. Secretary, but capitalism isn’t trading very high right now.”
He goes on to relate that the president’s chief economic advisers often went directly against the expressed wishes of their boss.
My first, cynical reaction was: so this is what $75 million worth of “livid” looks like. Here was Orteig pretending to have been the victim of ideological forces he himself had conspired with me to unleash. Then an amusing thought struck me: how great my diary would look reposing next to Orteig’s on a front table at Barnes & Noble. Possibly even packaged together at an attractive discount.
A bit later on, Orteig’s memoir relates something that explains much. He admits that by late 2010, he had ceased to be considered a White House insider. He doesn’t point the finger at Winters and
Holloway as principal agents in his fall from grace, but I can well imagine those two had a hand in it. What an irony! That November, OG took a bad hit in the midterm elections; not quite as bad as what befell him a month ago, but definitely a portent of bad political weather on the horizon. Would he have done better with Orteig still calling signals? Hard to say.
In this connection, let it be noted that Winters has definitively moved from Wall Street to Main Street and declared himself a man of the people. He’s posted his notice of change of address, as it were, in a series of op-eds beginning two years ago that advocated more money for the common folk and heavier costs to the Street. As there’s no more definitive and accurate a weathervane than Winters when it comes to charting shifts in direction of the winds of influence and opinion, this confirms my own sense that populism isn’t dead—it’s merely lying doggo, awaiting its day.
The train is now passing through New London. A while back, I put Orteig’s book aside and did some serious thinking about how Marina might take my diary public. Not surprisingly, my thoughts keep returning to Watergate and the revelations that transfixed the nation back in 1973, toward the end of my first year at Groton. A bunch of us watched the hearings on a TV that belonged to my favorite American history teacher, and afterward we discussed them with the fervor of boys that age, before reality has frosted the rose. Our teacher would remark that he’d felt the same intensity twenty years earlier as a sophomore at Haverford watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.
It also occurred to me that I better look out for #1: no point in making a grand civic gesture that would land me in the hoosegow or get me assassinated by some raging OG voter. I ought to check with a lawyer about my legal exposure. Artie Han fits that bill—and he and Marina know each other through their mutual friendship with B. This could even be a three-way collaboration.
Before I do anything, of course, I’ll want to reread the diary. Reread and maybe redact. It’s been a couple of years since I looked at it, but I know there’s stuff in there of no conceivable public interest, and that is not mine to disclose. Certain aspects of my relationship with Lucia, for example, and with B. There are other things that there’d be no purpose in making public. So on Monday, I’ll go to the bank and get the flash drives I stashed there four years ago.
I’ve organized my immediate future. I’ll spend Sunday at home clearing up my backlog. First thing Monday, I have a breakfast meeting in the Waldorf Towers, after which I’ll fetch the diary from the bank. I have so much on my plate this coming week—office party, client conferences, and so on—that I probably won’t get to it much before Christmas Eve. At that point I’ll reread it, and decide whether to go ahead with this plan. I can tell you now that I’m 99 percent certain that I’m going to. If nothing else, I owe it to Marjorie.
Now I’m going to put my head back, close my eyes, and catch a nap. We’ll be in Penn Station in a couple of hours.
A bad, bad day—especially for a Sunday.
My doorbell rang a little after 8:00 a.m. Pedro was standing there with a FedEx envelope.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Suydam,” he said. “I was at my niece’s birthday party yesterday, and we had a new kid covering the desk. He didn’t know to put this inside your apartment.”
I took the envelope, thanked him, wished his niece a happy life, and gave him $50 to add to her birthday haul. It’s Christmas, after all.
I looked at the waybill. It was from Portland, Oregon, from someone named E. Morton. The name wasn’t familiar to me, not right off, but I have a number of connections in Portland and usually have something going on out there.
Inside was an envelope with an engraved street address on the flap. It was paper-clipped to an ordinary 8-by-11 manila envelope.
The first envelope contained a handwritten covering letter dated December 19.
It read:
Dear Chauncey Suydam:
I am Clement Spear’s daughter, and although this is a terrible first encounter between two people who’ve never met, I’m afraid I have very sad news. My father died this morning. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just about the time he saw you in New York last spring, and the end came swiftly. He told no one, and we were sworn not to. He just retreated into the bosom of his family, reread and then had read to him some things that had meant a lot to him, and we took good care of him right up to his
last breath. As you may be aware, Oregon law provides for physician-assisted termination of life for patients suffering from an incurable disease with a prognosis of less than six months remaining. Father considered that option but decided to let life and death take their course. In the end, he died without pain, almost as if he had willed his moment of departure. I was at his bedside when he left us.
Some weeks ago, not long before his condition obliged him to enter hospice care, he wrote you the attached letter, and instructed me to send it to you on his death. Do not take it badly that he never told you about his illness; he wanted to keep it secret from everyone except his immediate family.
He spoke of you often; I think he thought of you as the sort of son he had always wished for and you were certainly someone whose values he respected because they were the same as his.
“Antediluvian” was his favorite word when it came to the code of conduct he liked to think he lived by—and generally did.
I do hope we meet someday. It was Father’s wish that there be no service marking his death and obviously we have honored his intentions. His ashes have been scattered (surreptitiously) at a park down by the Columbia River where he liked to go in the mornings to drink coffee, read the papers, and contemplate the dismal state of the world. I dare say there may be a fair amount about the latter in his letter to you.
Again, I repeat how unhappy I am that this should have to be the first communication between you and me, but as Father liked to say, death waits for no man.
With every good wish,
Emily Spear Morton
I read it again, then just sat there for a minute or so, trying to cope with this ugly news.
First Mankoff, then Marjorie, now Scaramouche! Is death some kind of sniper who has it in for me? Those were three of the fixed stars by which I’ve navigated. Now they’re extinguished, all three.
When I had last seen Scaramouche back in the late spring, he seemed in decent fettle, and he sounded OK when I last spoke to him on the phone at the beginning of November. A bit short of breath, but that happens with men his age.
His letter was dated October 17, 2014, typed on plain computer paper. Written before he and I last spoke. So he knew. It’s a long and eloquent letter, and I can’t not include it here.
My dear Chauncey:
When you read this, you’ll have had my bad news.
You’ve often heard me quote the great baseball executive Branch Rickey to the effect that “luck is the residue of design.” Certainly in my case this has proven to be so. I moved here to be near my daughter Emily and her family and see more of them—as I recall we discussed this in New York when I saw you back in March—but I had no plans to die this soon. As it is, she and her husband and their children have been an ineffable source of comfort and care and this is a fine and caring little city in which to fall terminally ill.
I don’t want you to be upset at being left out of the loop, as they say, but our last meeting in New York went so well, and was so happy an occasion for me, that I wanted to leave matters that way. It so happened that the very next morning a virtual sentence of death was pronounced on me by one of the “top men” (actually, in this case, a woman) at Sloan Kettering whom I had come east to consult. By then I was pretty sure what the verdict would be—I had already been
checked out by a slew of doctors at the Fred Hutchinson Center in Seattle—but you ain’t cooked until you’re right and properly done. Cancer seems to be a dish for which there can never be too many cooks.
I shall depart this mortal coil with few regrets. The accidents of history worked matters out so that my generation has to be about the most blessed in American history. We were born during the Depression; we just missed World War II; and we came of age in an era of unprecedented but—as it appears to have turned out—unlasting prosperity. Of course, I doubt if you’d say that had you been born black in the South in 1934, but if in that same year, as was my case, the stork handed you to well-off, white, well-connected Episcopal parents in Lake Forest, you couldn’t have asked for better! The problem with being raised in such circumstances is that you are ill-equipped to deal with what I’ve concluded is the most vexing business in life: coming to terms with one’s own insignificance.
Of course, back then we lived in fear of our parents, while today, parents seem to live in fear of their children, just another way the world of my boyhood seems to been turned inside out. That it has seems in no small part attributable to a gross dereliction on my generation’s part with respect to the obligation to attend to the future, and to keep certain standards bright and polished the way a vintage car buff will tend to a 1940s Oldsmobile. If you want people to behave, you need to materially alter their perception of what they can get away with. In that, Wall Street’s so-called “self-governance” has failed miserably.
Which brings me to the business in which I prospered for close to fifty years, since I went down to Wall Street at the invitation of Lembert Struthers, a fellow trustee at
Princeton with my father. That was in 1959, a world and time apart. The Street did what it did at the pleasure of the Federal Reserve, which behaved like a stern but fond parent. The Fed’s job, its then-chairman William McChesney Martin liked to say, was to take away the punch bowl just as the party was getting going. By contrast, that pompous, bootlicking ass Greenspan’s response was to keep pouring in more booze, with the result that Wall Street has behaved rather like a drunken rock band trashing a hotel room. My old friend Tom Hoenig, former president of the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve, once proposed that every four years we hold a sale in which we auction off the office of Secretary of the Treasury to Wall Street. It would appear that, of late, Struthers Strauss has always been winning the auctions.
Today’s money people, whether in Wall Street, real estate, or any other rent-extracting, commission-driven business, will stick with you only so long as you are of use to them. When they decide you no longer are, they discard you with the same uncaring indifference with which they chuck away a used tissue. It was not always so. Messrs. Struthers and Strauss cared for and about their people. When I came to work there, there were older men kept on the payroll who were functionally useless except in terms of what they stood for and the honorable past they represented.
I must say that I was never as big a fan of Leon Mankoff as you were—Boola Boola, Skull & Bones, and all that—but it may be that when I finally cross that bourne from which no traveler returns I’ll run into Mankoff and we can get to know each other better.
I don’t know if there’s decent champagne to be had in the hereafter, but I will drink a toast to that sly fox Merlin
Gerrett and the way he recently renegotiated his position in STST stock so as to end up with a bigger chunk at zero incremental outlay. When he and Leon made their deal back in 2008, it struck me as pretty pricey, although I have no doubt it had to be done for reasons of opportunity if not survival. Whether Mankoff would have gone for the recent revision of terms I can’t say; when Gerrett found himself sitting across the table from Rosenweis, the sort of person who thinks “loud” means the same as “smart,” he must have thought he’d died and gone to Trader Heaven.
Wall Street is the least of my worries, however. It is what it is, and 99.9 percent of the people who work there are honest folk like thee and me. Not above cutting a corner now and then, but who hasn’t? What I fear for is the country.
It may be that I am just an Oxycodone-besotted Miniver Cheevy (look him up: poem of that name by Edward Arlington Robinson, America’s great unrecognized poet) seeing chimeras in his old age, but I am not alone. I don’t think I’m being paranoid when I agree with the opinion in some quarters that the present deplorable state of the union is the consequence of a multitentacled right-wing conspiracy to deliver the governance of the United States into the hands of a massive and collusive complex of the sort Eisenhower warned about—except that this version might better be described as “financial-corporate” instead of “military-industrial.” One of the surest ways to achieve this is exactly what has been done: the wages of the mass of the population have been kept flat, thanks to such enabling forces as globalization and automation, while the difference between what people want and what they think they are entitled to has been puffed up and had to be filled in with debt.
The present occupant of the White House represents the
final piece of the puzzle. I wonder if his failures to deliver really aren’t the result of an intransigent opposition party, as we have been told, but have been part of a larger scheme from the outset. He certainly came on as if sent by central casting: charismatic, articulate, just black enough, with a smart attractive wife and charming children: just the type the money men would have been looking for to bring their oligarchic scheme to final fruition.
I voted for him once, as I know you did, but in 2012—as we discussed at the time—I like you was unable to summon up so much as a grain of political conviction and stayed home on Election Day. I wonder now (and perhaps you do) whether the two GOP candidates he defeated in ’08 and ’12 were chosen because they were politically ridiculous and easily beaten. In the event, people voted for him in the expectation of a Grand Bargain; what we’ve gotten instead is a Grand Betrayal. This president’s policies have delivered infinitely greater benefits to the 1 percent than to the rest; even his much-trumpeted health-care bill may drown the disadvantaged in a tsunami of paperwork, complexity being the preferred style of the white-collar fraudster and mega-swindler. And all the while the wicked and the reckless bankers who brought this mess down on the country’s head not only go unpunished but have emerged as influential and well-rewarded as ever. Sadly, what this means is that I shall go to my grave without seeing one of my fondest dreams come to pass, which is to have seen at least one of the scoundrels, fools, and miscreants whose greed has led to the greatest depredations on the public purse in history led off in manacles.
You and I are, I suppose, in the so-called “1 percent.” Could we—should we—have done more to arrest the way things have gone? I think we should have; but I doubt we
could have. Seeing what the rest of the country is going through, I feel a bit ashamed, both for the advantages I enjoy, many of which were already mine in the cradle, and for not standing up for my fellow citizens. I fear I have done what my caste has always done: looked the other way and called for another martini.
Anyway, America is where it is, and how it all will end, God knows. If I had my health, and were confident of the financial future of Emily and her family, I would pledge my fortune and my sacred honor to this “Rediscovery Initiative” the Gerretts are rumored to be organizing. The Gerretts versus the Drecks. Billions versus billions. Good people versus bad people. That’s a set-to I’d happily pay good money to see!
Well, now the end approaches. I flatter myself that I’ve fought the good fight, although perhaps with not enough determination, and lived a decent-enough life. Do I hear the sound of distant trumpets?
They say that Heaven and Hell consist in knowing through all eternity exactly what your children thought of you. I trust your father is content—and that I shall be, too. Neither of us subscribed to what has become Holy Writ among so many of my generation: that it is infinitely more important that the government get none of the family fortune than that the children get any. Of course, that now seems to be changing, as the nation is delivered with all deliberate speed by its legislators and judges to its inheritors.
That brings me to the subject of “class war,” a phrase on many lips these days, but usually the lips of those who would have us believe they and their wealth are being targeted by the envious and impoverished. I find these claims of victimhood cowardly and unbecoming. I rather doubt
that someone struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over his family’s head has the energy or the inclination, let alone the resources, to bemoan that some plutocrat’s yacht is a bit smaller than he’d prefer. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit of the real thing—an anticapitalist jihad, if you will, a few heads cut off and castles burned to the ground—if only for the amusement value.
Have you read that silly fool Holloway’s self-serving memoir? I had Emily get me the audiobook. Absolute tosh. I was delighted to see how terribly it sold on Amazon and elsewhere. I’ve either read or listened to a dozen of these things, and in none has the author admitted that he was asleep at the cash register.
Did you note how neatly he glides over that business a couple of years ago when he testified before Congress that as early as 2008 he suspected that LIBOR was being fixed by the big banks, notwithstanding that he and his fellow regulators and bailers-out used LIBOR to set the giveaway interest rates on the bailout loans? How you can commit the people’s money using a pricing benchmark you believe to be a swindle confected by the very people to whom you’re lending beats me. You can range far and wide before you’ll find a better example of “crony capitalism”!
And so it goes, my dear friend. For me, it would seem that the
commedia
, as the clown sings, is almost
finita
. Let me just conclude with this thought. If one has to go, and it seems one must, this strikes me as about as good a time to take my leave as one could ask for. It seems to me that we have evolved a technocratic
nomenklatura
not so different from the old Soviet system in its effects. A massive tectonic shift has taken place, much more profound and devastating than even the gloomiest among us expected.
It’s been brought on by technology, by the ascendancy of the money men, by the moral laziness of people of my age and background, by the decline of religion and the rise of fanaticism and many many other causes. Perhaps this is the stream Fitzgerald is speaking of at the conclusion of
Gatsby
, although as you and I have often discussed, he got it backward, and it is pell-mell into the dangerous future, not back into the ungrudging past, that our frail boats are ceaselessly swept.
Go well then, Chauncey, my dear friend. Godspeed and keep the faith. And as our old pal the Warrior would say: keep ’em flyin’.
As ever your chum,
Clem
PS: I trust you saw the article in the
WSJ
about how CDOs have risen like zombies from the grave and are back in vogue, being written to order by the big banks. How can this be allowed to happen?
PPS: Like most men of my generation, when young I was very taken by Spengler’s
Decline of the West
. Does anyone read Spengler these days? I seem to recall Spengler saying that money will bring down Western democracy and that the power of money will then be conquered by force. Looking around the world, from Ukraine to Latin America to the Middle East to Bangkok, it’s hard to disagree. Will it happen in America? It might.