Steven Goldstein - The Turn-On: How the Powerful Make Us Like Them - from Washington to Wall Street to Hollywood

To Loretta, for whom an entire state joins me in love

and in memory of Senator FRL and Salena

At 9:00 a.m. on Friday, September 21, 2001, nearly ten days to the minute after two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center on the orders of Osama bin Laden, his half brother Abdullah interviewed me in midtown Manhattan to see if I could save the bin Laden name.

When a family intermediary called me earlier in the week, I thought it was a sick joke. Ive spent decades working with some of the most likeable people in the world. Suddenly the bin Ladens?

Id been running a communications and political consulting firm on Wall Street in Manhattan, a short walk to Ground Zero. Although I hadnt left my apartment in Brooklyn Heights that day, the stench of fire and atrocity would waft across the East River to engulf our neighborhood for days. I couldnt open my apartment window without sobbing.

Also working near the Trade Center were my father and my cousin Maxine. They were already at the office. Soon after the first plane hit, Dad and Max joined the petrified crowd on the street that funneled into a massive bunker under the Chase Manhattan Bank complex. My relatives emerged all right, but like many other New Yorkers, I had family and friends who lost loved ones.

We were, all of us, a devastated people.

The call from Abdullah bin Ladens intermediary came a couple of hours before I headed to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, during which we Jews recite prayers highlighting our millennia-long attachment to Israel. Americas support for Israel had prompted bin Laden to declare war on the United States in 1996.

I told the intermediary to call me again after the holiday. As I sat in synagogue over the next couple of days wondering whether that first call was real, I considered what it would be like to meet a bin Laden at my office, which survived miraculously intact.

As bin Laden entered my office, he would be greeted by the watchful eyes of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, the movement that created the modern state of Israel; his eyes guarded the doorway from a portrait above my desk. On another wall hung framed copies of laws I helped to write that advanced the civil rights of women, people of color, and my own LGBTQ community.

It all begged the question: Why on earth would the bin Laden family seek advice from a gay Jewish Zionist? In its coverage of my encounter with bin Laden, the European edition of the Wall Street Journal described me as having a track record of support for Israeli causes. As if I werent improbable enough, I had begun preparation to attend rabbinical school, where I continue my studies to this day.

A friend of a friend told me he was friends with someone who was friends with Abdullah bin Laden. Only six degrees of separation lay between Osama and me.

With Rosh Hashanah over, Abdullah and I met that Friday morning not at my office but in the lobby of the InterContinental New York Barclay hotel on East Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. Abdullah, a student at Harvard Law School, had flown in from Boston. He brought two colleagues from the family conglomerate, the Saudi Binladin Group, which uses a different English spelling of the surname.

All four of us were dressed in dark suits and conservative ties, blending in among the corporate types in the heart of midtown Manhattans business district. Abdullah had large, piercing eyes, impeccable manners, and seemingly Parisian elegance. As we sat down in the hotel dining room, none of the other diners realized a bin Laden was now among them.

Abdullah said he had met Osama only five times, most recently in 1989 at the funeral of one of their older brothers.

As Abdullah continued, I believed he had nothing to do with 9/11. He was pro-America and fully Westernized, and wanted Saudi Arabia to enter more egalitarian times.

And the circumstances supported him. First, Osama was one of an estimated fifty-three siblings and half siblings including after the 1998 terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa just three years earlier.

After we had sized each other up for about a half hour, Abdullah got to the point. He had heard I was not afraid of big challenges. As a congressional staffer, I had taken on terrorists who bombed abortion clinics and helped to write a law instituting tough criminal penalties. I had taken on the National Rifle Association to stop convicted spouse and child abusers from owning guns. As a communications strategist, I had confronted Exxon by running the press operation for the fishermen and women in Alaska whose livelihoods ended with the Valdez oil spill that devastated the environment and the Alaska fishing industry.

Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof, the Torah instructs us in Hebrew. Justice, justice, you shall pursue.

The day before I met Abdullah, I contacted the FBI to send agents to meet and debrief me after the breakfast. We arranged to meet at the office of my friend, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of Manhattans Upper East Side, to which I took a cab from the InterContinental. Carolyn wound up telling the story of my adventure to the press.

[Steven] would never consider working for them for a million years, Carolyn said of me to the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill. But I can understand why the bin Ladens went to [him]. If I had a public relations debacle on my hands, Id go to him too.

Carolyn was right about whether Id work for them. True, the family didnt have anything to do with 9/11. But even if Abdullah and other bin Ladens had modern views, they were too important to Saudi Arabia, a nation where women are oppressed and where my faith and others are banned from public practice.

At my breakfast with Abdullah, I did all I could to listen for details that might be useful to the FBI. Somehow I morphed into an amalgamation of Mike Myers characters: the spy Austin Powers and Linda Richman, the host of Coffee Talk on Saturday Night Live, with an accent as thick as buttah from Brooklyn, my birthplace.

Yet Abdullah grew more intrigued. He quizzed me further about my background, wherein I revealed I was not only a communications consultant but also a lawyer. He smiled and said if you need a lawyer, hire a cousin.

My goodness, he meant hiring a cousin from among the descendants of Abraham! He considered my religion to be a plus. In other words, I could be the counterweight to balance out the publics perception of the family.

Because Carolyn quickly gave the story to the press, I never got the chance to speak with Abdullah again. Nor did he extend a formal offer to me, obviously, after the publicity. When the news hit, the bin Ladens preexisting flack said that was never the familys intention.

Two FBI agents took my information. What they didnt tell meand what news reports later revealedwas that at least thirteen other bin Ladens had chartered a jet to leave the United States with the FBIs blessing. The FBI was satisfied that none of the bin Ladens in America, including Abdullah, the one who remained a bit longer, had connections to 9/11.

Clearly Abdullah had sought the FBIs help. But why mine? For the same reason others have during my career: Abdullah wanted his family to come across as publicly likeable. Anddare I say it?I found him to be both likeable and credible.

To be sure, neither Abdullah nor I used the term likeable. And remember, likeability had not yet emerged as the universal name for interpersonal currency. It would be three years before Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook colleagues unveiled Facebook and elevated like to an emotion as popular as love. And it would be seven years before Barack Obama told Hillary Clinton during a 2008 Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire that she was likeable enough.