Last Man Standing (50 page)

Authors: Duff Mcdonald

BOOK: Last Man Standing

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One thing Jamie Dimon learned from Sandy Weill—by watching him do just the opposite—is that you also have to let go, if gradually. Remarkably, Dimon was less hands-on with Bear Stearns than he’d ever been with any of the many deals he’s worked on over the years—because he trusted his team to do the job as he would have done it himself. “I think he’s realized that it’s OK to let people do stuff themselves, because that’s how you build a great organization,” observes Jay Mandelbaum. Dimon now goes where he’s needed, and gives his executives freedom to operate in the meantime. In the process he has turned into what the commercial banking chief Todd Maclin refers to as “the best free-safety I’ve ever met.”

If that truck doesn’t hit him, however, Dimon planned in mid-2009
to stick around for the time being. That political career—the one he says he’s not sure he even wants—will always be waiting for him when he decides it’s time to move on. “I now bleed Morgan blood,” he says. “This is what I am going to do until they don’t want me here anymore.”

It’s not as if there isn’t still work to do. JPMorgan Chase is hardly out of the woods, and in the next few years it will bear as much of the brunt of the economic crisis as any bank. What’s more, a new Wall Street is being built today, and there is surely another Jamie Dimon-in-training ready to take the mantle from the man who took not one but two companies to the top rungs of the industry.

How would he respond to a call to service if the president of the United States asked him to be secretary of the treasury? Even after watching Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner be criticized for almost every decision they made in very challenging circumstances, he would probably accept. One of his regrets in life is never having served his country in an official capacity. (He does believe that being CEO of JPMorgan Chase is a form of public service, but he also acknowledges that others might not see it that way, especially considering the paycheck that comes with it.) Patriotism is one of the stronger currents that run through him.

Wall Street has always been a venue for fly-by-night conquerors. But Jamie Dimon has proved that he is not one of them. As a result, his legend will endure better than most, and it will be that of someone with the unique skills, experience, and temperament to stand above his peers at a crucial moment in history. Some effective Wall Street CEOs have come with all the analytical skills that allow them to understand the business. Some have come with all the magnetism needed to be true leaders. Few in history have come with both. But Jamie Dimon did. “He comes in Technicolor and stereophonic sound,” says Warren Buffett. “He has a broad outlook, and he’s young, so there’s going to be action for him for a long time to come.”

The Jamie Dimon of 2009 is the same Jamie Dimon of 1982 who charmed his future wife with his unvarnished character. He hasn’t retreated behind the usual veil of legalistic corporatespeak, and this just might be the most refreshing fact about a man who has so much at stake.
And it’s impossible to deny that most people who wander into his orbit come away feeling as if they’ve just encountered a force of nature. At a time when true Wall Street leaders seem in desperately short supply, Jamie Dimon has emerged as a moral and managerial compass for both his industry and the country itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bookstaber, Richard M.
A Demon of Our Own Design
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Brooks, John.
The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street’s Bullish 60s
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Burrough, Bryan, and Helyar, John.
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Chernow, Ron.
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
. New York: Grove Press, 1990.

Cohan, William D.
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

Friedman, Jon, and Meehan, John.
House of Cards: Inside the Troubled Empire of American Express
. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992.

Geisst, Charles R.
Wall Street: A History: From Its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Khurana, Rakesh.
Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Langley, Monica.
Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World … and Then Nearly Lost It All
. New York: Free Press, 2003.

Lewis, Michael.
Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

Lowenstein, Roger.
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
. New York: Random House, 2000.

Morris, Charles R.
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009.

Stewart, James B.
Den of Thieves
. New York: Touchstone, 1991.

Stone, Amey, and Brewster, Mike.
King of Capital: Sandy Weill and the Making of Citigroup
. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Tett, Gillian.
Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Weill, Sandy, and Kraushaar, Judah.
The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy
. New York: Warner Business Books, 2006

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are so many people to thank for helping with this book that it baffles the mind wondering just where I should start. So I’ll do the obvious: Thank you Jamie Dimon, for your openness and your time.

I am deeply indebted to David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster for taking on this project. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Colin Fox, was a superb partner, as was the rest of the S&S team, including Priscilla Painton, Victoria Meyer, Tracey Guest, Jackie Seow, and Michele Bové. My agent David Kuhn also deserves my gratitude for putting the idea for this project in my head.

A few people outside Simon & Schuster helped on the front line of
Last Man Standing
. Hugo Lindgren of
New York
magazine performed his usual magic on my raw copy, and for that I am extremely grateful. My two researchers, Brian Burnsed and Miriam Datskovsky, performed yeoman’s work with no complaint. Chris Wahl, you also take a pretty fine snapshot.

In recent years, a number of magazine editors have combined to give me work on the journey that ultimately led to this book. When
Red Herring
went bust in 2003, Graydon Carter generously asked me to write a few pieces for
Vanity Fair
. A few years later, Joanne Lipman at
Conde Nast Portfolio
gave me a job. Others warranting mention are Jason Pontin of
Red Herring
, Tony Keller of Canada’s
National Post
magazine, and Michael Hogan of
Vanity Fair
. Former
Portfolio
deputy editor Blaise Zerega also knows that I will forever owe him one or two.

But it was
New York
editor Adam Moss who truly kickstarted this project. In a meeting in his office in January 2008 he asked me which prominent Wall Street people we should write about that year. I had just one idea for him: Jamie Dimon. A March cover story in
New York
followed, and the rest is history. Thank you, Adam.

I want to thank all the people who took time out of busy schedules to speak to me during my reporting. To the Dimon family—Judy, Ted, and Themis—thanks for your inti red memories, including Steve Burke, James Long, Laurie and Peter Maglathlin, Jeremy Paul, and Brian Rogers. To Dimon’s high school English teacher, Mike Ingrisani, thanks for having a memory that stretched back that far.

Also, thanks to much of the senior management of JPMorgan Chase—Frank Bisignano, Steve Black, Bill Campbell, Mike Cavanagh, Jimmy Lee, Kristin Lemkau, Todd Maclin, Jay Mandelbaum, Charlie Scharf, Gordon Smith, Jes Staley, and Bill Winters. Deserving particular gratitude: Joe Evangelisti, head of communications
for JPMorgan Chase. I’m sure that you and your assistant, Loretta Russo, are glad you’re done with my phone calls. I will miss harassing you two.

A number of others offered valuable insight, including Ken Bialkin, Dick Bove, Joe Califano, James Calvano, Rodgin Cohen, Marty Haase, John Hsu, Judah Kraushaar, Marc Lasry, Bob Lessin, Bob Lipp, Marge Magner, Mike Mayo, Mary McDermott, Alison Falls McElvery, Joseph Plumeri, Theresa Sweeney, Bob Volland, Sandy Weill, Meredith Whitney, Bob Willumstad, Joe Wright, and Frank Zarb.

Thank you, too, Warren Buffett, for finally taking a call from me after nearly fifteen years of trying.

A number of journalists and authors are owed gratitude for informing parts of this book, starting with Monica Langley, who wrote
Tearing Down the Walls
, a singular feat of reportage. More than a few conversations in
Last Man Standing
are drawn from Langley, who had the good sense to ask people to recollect them before they were lost in history’s winds. While there is much discussion of Sandy Weill in this book, it is almost exclusively focused on Weill’s influence on the life and career of Jamie Dimon. If you want to read the Sandy Weill story, go buy Langley’s book.

To be informed on the subject like this is also to know the work of remarkable writers and reporters like Suzanna Andrews, Bryan Burrough, Richard Bookstaber, John Brooks, William Cohan, Ron Chernow, Suzanne Craig, Eric Dash, Steve Fish-man, Charles Geisst, John Helyar, Kate Kelly, Michael Lewis, Heidi Moore, Charles Morris, Floyd Norris, Andrew Ross Sorkin, James Stewart, Gillian Tett, and Shawn Tully. And thank you both, Ken Auletta and Roger Lowenstein, for taking the time to explain to me just how one writes a book such as this.

I need to thank my sounding boards—Joe Burke, David Foster, Carney Hawks, Mike Humphries, Peter Keating, Chris Kerr, Dick Nearing, Bill Stromsem, and my siblings, Scott and Steve McDonald and Julie Carter. Also providing valuable counsel and support: Will Arnett, Shaun Assael, Ira Boudway, Michael Cader, Malcolm Fitch, Karen Keating, Rob Meder, Oliver Prichard, Liam Scott, and Hilary Stout. To the rest of my family and friends, thanks for the overwhelming support.

The encouragement of my parents in this somewhat randomly chosen career gave me the courage to continue it even as my decision to leave Wall Street seemed pretty ridiculous around 1995. So thanks for that, Mom. I love you. I know Dad is reading this book while drinking a beer on the dock of the great cottage of heaven.

Finally, to my wife Caroline: Thank you for your glorious patience during this project, especially as we grappled with the arrival of baby Marguerite. You two are the lights of my life.

To all who helped, I hope the results prove worth the time spent.

New York, July 2009

Index

Ackermann, Josef,
184

Adage Capital,
244

Adams, Austin,
200

AIG,
ix
,
58
,
138
,
211
,
273
,
284
,
287
,
288
,
309