Sebastian Mallaby - The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

T his book is based on almost unlimited access to Alan Greenspan, his papers, and his colleagues and friends, all of whom were generous in their collaboration. For a period of five years, starting in the autumn of 2010, I was a familiar visitor to Greenspans offices in Washington, D.C., and saw him in other contexts, too: at home, hosting a dinner for a former British prime minister; at his suite in the Ritz on New Yorks Central Park South, where the staff welcomed him with a model of the Federal Reserve building made out of chocolate; on the Acela train between his two home cities, where he tipped the porters generously, proclaiming a belief in redistribution. At some point in this process, after we had logged more than seventy hours of recorded conversations, I stopped counting the time. The intriguing bits seemed to come at the least expected moments, and they were not always when the recorder was running. Once, after Greenspan had mentioned his love of automobiles, and particularly their ability to lift his mood from a dark patch, I sent a note over to his office, wondering how seriously he had meant this. Later that day, Greenspan replied:

Dear Sebastian,

In 1959 I bought a Buick convertible with tail fins and red leather seats. It did cheer me up driving on highways with J.S. Bach loudly pouring out of my car radio speakers. I do not recall being depressed prior to the purchase, however.

Best,

Alan

I looked around for a photo that matched Greenspans description, and sent it over to him. Greenspans assistant relayed his answer:

AG said this is his car! But his was red interior with black exterior (not white, as in the photo). He said he had air conditioning.

In the margins of conversations about money and power, the private man would surface unpredictably. Once, rather early in the process, I asked Greenspan about his romantic life. I dated news anchors, senators, and beauty queens, he stated, a bit mischievously. I asked him what made him most happy. A sense of progress, a life trajectory angled upward at the steepest possible incline, he replied, with disarming honesty. I asked him why, despite having spent almost two decades as the worlds most powerful economist, he still persisted in describing himself as a sideman. The answers stretched back to the love and injury he had experienced as a child. His ambition, his shyness, the manner in which he navigated Washingtonall had their roots in a 1930s boyhood on the northern tip of Manhattan.

Some of the best research discoveries came almost despite him. Several assiduous reporters had tried to lay hands on Greenspans early writings, contained in his doctoral thesis; oddly, New York University, which awarded the degree, had lost it. But after several months of sitting at the round table in Greenspans office, I noticed a pattern: when he referred to his youthful thinking, his eyes would drift up to a certain shelf; and, following his gaze, I spied a fat binder. One day, when Greenspan returned to the subject of his intellectual development, I looked up at that same shelf. I would love to read that early work, I said, staring purposefully at the binder. Despite the awkward nature of the content, he gave it to me.

I knew that in the 1960s, when Greenspan had been the de facto chief economist for the claque of libertarians clustered around the novelist Ayn Rand, he had delivered a series of lectures titled the Economics of a Free Society. I wondered if there were recordings, or possibly a text, affording an insight into Greenspans worldview as he crested his late thirties. One day, as I tracked down Greenspans friends and colleagues from those times, I found myself in a secluded cabin in the woods of Virginia, talking to Lowell Wiltbank, who had managed the computers and machines at Greenspans small consulting firm. Learning that Wiltbank was himself a devotee of Rands thinking, I asked whether he had kept memorabilia from her movement. His basement was stocked with it, he said. Before very long, I had three hundred pages of transcripts: the complete map of my subjects mind, at the height of his intellectual purism.

Inevitably, research of this kind involves drilling many dry boreholes. But the gushers repaid me: the personal files of the Republican provocateur Patrick Buchanan, which contained Greenspans unapologetically conservative memos to Richard Nixon on the racial tensions and assassinations of 1968; the untold story of the Feds record on derivatives and mortgages, teased out of interviews and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act; the sensitive memories of some of the women who loved him, foremost among them his wife, Andrea Mitchell. As I write in my acknowledgments, my own discoveries were augmented by an exceptional research team at the Council on Foreign Relations. Between us, we conducted hundreds of interviews and consulted thousands of pages of documentary sources in an attempt to reconstruct a life as vividly and accurately as possible.