By Linton Weeks and John M. Berry
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 24, 1997; Page A1
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal
Reserve, and Arthur Levitt, chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission, were
playing golf early one morning at the Chevy
Chase Club.
Greenspan told this joke: Three patients at a mental institution wanted
to
be released. The head psychiatrist gave them a simple test, What is two
plus two? The first patient said, Five. The second, Wednesday. The third
got it right. Four, he said. The first two patients returned to their ward.
Patient 3 was free to go.
By the way, asked the doc as the man was leaving, how did you know the
answer?
Easy, said the patient. I just added five plus Wednesday.
It's an old gag. Simple, straightforward, somewhat politically incorrect,
but
it says a great deal about Greenspan. He understands the power of
language. He is fascinated by numbers. And perhaps he's not the drab,
dreary guy people might think he is.
Some folks, especially money managers who shovel vast amounts of cash
from one pile to another, think about Greenspan a lot. They watch his
every word, mark his every move, graph his every grin. Because second
to the president, Alan Greenspan is arguably the nation's most powerful
person. As chairman of the Fed, he guides U.S. monetary policy,
adjusting short-term interest rates to change the cost of borrowing for
almost everyone, and with a couple of choice words he can momentarily
send the stock market to heaven or hell.
Tomorrow, Greenspan will preside over the mysterious ritual that is at
the
heart of his power. The Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's top
policy-making group, will gather here to debate whether to raise
short-term interest rates for the first time in two years. Greenspan's
testimony before the Joint Economic Committee on Thursday suggested
that rates likely will go up, but even the most careful Fed watchers can't
be sure what the wizard of monetary policy will ultimately opine.
Whatever Greenspan decides, two things are certain: He will carry his Fed
colleagues with him, and the financial markets will respond.
He is a peculiar wizard, at once secretive and highly social. By night,
he
shows up at one Washington social whoop-de-do after
another—everything from Jack Kent Cooke's box at RFK Stadium to the
Gridiron Club dinner. And on April 6, this quiet, private man is marrying
NBC-TV's high-profile reporter Andrea Mitchell, 50, who has been his
companion for more than 12 years.
The Fed chairman is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He is as
omnipresent as sand but as forthcoming as a sea sponge. And that may
the secret of his success. Greenspan is as close as Washington comes to
pure mind. Cool and controlled, he takes in the world as data bits, sifting
through what he needs and sorting out what he doesn't. Society flows past
him, washes over him. He's there at the party, but he's not. He's engaged
at the hearing, but he's aloof.
He is, perhaps more than any other public figure, off in his own world.
An enigmatic chairman
Trying to write about the World of Alan Greenspan is a tricky business.
In
many ways he can be helpful. He allows his friends to talk to
reporters—sometimes. He will set the record straight. But he has never
called a news conference while at the Fed, and he refuses to be
interviewed on the record.
Trying to read the 71-year-old chairman is even more difficult. Decoding
what he says about the economy is like untangling a fishing line or
untossing a salad.
His hair is thin. He has a bemused grin when he talks. He usually wears
tassel loafers, high black socks, a dark suit, a forgettable small-knotted
tie
and one of his pale, almost colorless shirts with a little AG monogrammed
on the chest.
He sometimes keeps one hand in his pocket, jingling a fraction of the
$133,500 he makes every year. He seems gentle, thoughtful and quick to
smile. In his woodwind voice, he rattles on about not wanting the Fed to
"mislead the market."
You can't always be sure of what he is saying.
For one thing, his syntax is strange. As an example, here is an
undiagrammable sentence from the speech he gave last December to the
American Enterprise Institute, which included the passing mention of
"irrational exuberance" on Wall Street that sent the Dow down 166 points.
"The debates . . . over the issue of our money standard have mirrored the
deliberations on the manner in which we have chosen to govern ourselves,
and, perhaps more fundamentally, debates on the basic values that should
govern our society." Pretty incendiary stuff.
Nobel laureate economist Robert M. So\low of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology says Greenspan is not the first Fed chairman to
employ circumlocution. "If you go back and read speeches of William
McChesney Martin, or even Paul Volcker, who was a little more
forthcoming, you'll find they talked pretty much the same way. They've
all
mastered the art of meaningless verbiage.
"That's part of the normal manner of a chairman, to appear to be saying
something while you're saying nothing at all," Solow said. "Alan is the
past
master of this. It's what central bankers do. They're like squid, they
emit a
cloud of ink and move away."
Tales from a jazz age
He is an only child.
Greenspan's father, Herbert Greenspan, was a stockbroker; his mother,
Rose Goldsmith Greenspan, worked in retailing.
He was born on March 6, 1926. When he was 4 years old, his parents
divorced. He was raised by his mother and grandparents in the
Washington Heights neighborhood of New York. Though his mother had
little money, Greenspan has told people that she was a "benevolent soul"
and forever cheerful, even under trying circumstances.
Young Alan was a shy guy from the get-go, but his mother was the
opposite. She loved to dance and sing. When she walked into a party, he
has said, she would sit down at a piano and steal the show.
Rose Greenspan was a strong, smart woman—the first of many in
Greenspan's life. Son and mother remained close, even after he had
moved to Washington. He called almost daily and often took a train up to
her home on weekends. She died in 1995.
As a child, he gloried in large numbers. His mother would parade him out
when he was 5 or so and get him to tally two three-digit numbers in his
head.
He loved baseball. A left-hander, he easily took to first
base. His mother taught him to play tennis. And, like
his mother, he developed a deep and everlasting
appreciation for music. As a student at George
Washington High School, just a few years ahead of
Henry Kissinger, Greenspan played the clarinet and
tenor saxophone.
Determined to become a professional musician,
Greenspan attended the Juilliard School in New York,
then for a year played with the Henry Jerome swing
band.
"I think I hired Alan in the early '40s," said Leonard
Garment, who was the manager of Jerome's swing band for a while and
went on to become Richard Nixon's law partner. "Alan played baritone
sax and doubled on clarinet, flute, I believe, and bass clarinet."
Those were the days of jazz and jitterbug. The band traveled throughout
the country. In New York they played at Child's Paramount Restaurant on
Times Square."
Today in his office here on K Street, Garment recalls Greenspan as a
good musician and crackerjack bookkeeper. At a time when some
orchestras were forced to disband because of money troubles, Garment
said, Greenspan tended the books "with great, great care." He also helped
his hepcat friends file their taxes.
After a year with the band, Greenspan entered New York University's
School of Commerce and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in
economics. He got a master's degree from NYU in 1949, then shifted to
Columbia University to work on his doctorate.
When Greenspan's money ran low, he withdrew from graduate school and
went to work for the National Industrial Conference Board, a cheerleader
for big business. He eventually earned a PhD from NYU in 1977.
In 1952 he married Joan Mitchell, a painter. They stayed together less
than a year, but Mitchell introduced Greenspan to another strong, smart
woman—Ayn Rand. He was swept away by the Russian emigre's novels
of ideas, such as "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," and her
intriguing philosophy of "objectivism," or enlightened selfishness.
Herbert G. Stein, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and
longtime friend, said Greenspan has developed his own economic
philosophy and is beholden to no one. Pigeonholing Greenspan as an Ayn
Rand objectivist is too simple, Stein said. "I think he's a much more
pragmatic, moderate, feel-your-way-along person."
"I don't know that deep down he believes any of that," MIT's Solow said.
"I have never in all the times I've spoken to Alan or read something he
has
written thought to myself, 'Uh oh, there's Atlas shrugging.'‚"
In the mid-1950s, Greenspan and bond trader William Townsend opened
an economic consulting company. The firm worked quietly, offering
forecasts and research to large businesses and financial institutions.
Today, his work at the Fed is much the same as the work he did on Wall
Street: trying to understand how the economy is working and what drives
it; offering suggestions here and there for improvement.
He is, however, making less money.
"I think he's very comfortable in this power environment," golfing pal
Levitt
said. "Yes. I think he loves this. His political instincts are superb."
"Alan has done an excellent job as Fed chairman,' Solow said. "But he's
also been lucky. The economy has been well behaved in part for reasons
that have nothing to do with the Fed. In the last two years . . . the Fed
has
been very skillful. A substantial part of that skillfulness is his canniness.
"And his flexibility," Solow said. "Two years ago, most economists,
including Greenspan, believed that when the unemployment rate got down
to 6 or 6¾ percent, you've got to slow the economy down. We have
learned that we can run the economy at 5 percent [unemployment]. That's
because of Alan's flexibility."
However, one reason interest rates are likely to rise tomorrow is that
Greenspan fears such a low unemployment rate eventually may lede to
higher inflation.
Welcome to Washington
For Greenspan, the yellow brick road to the Fed began one afternoon in
1966 when he bumped into Garment, his old friend from the jazz-band
days. Garment was by then an adviser to Nixon's presidential campaign.
Garment introduced Greenspan to Nixon, and they hit it off. Greenspan
became candidate Nixon's director of policy research.
Nixon tapped Greenspan in 1974 to be chairman of the Council of
Economic Advisers, but, ironically, Nixon resigned about two weeks
before Greenspan's position was confirmed. President Gerald Ford could
have withdrawn Greenspan's nomination, but he didn't, and they became
very close.
Ford says today he thinks Greenspan's sensitivity to the public mood
"comes from his exposure to people all over the country though his band's
one-night stands."
While chairman of the council, Greenspan began dating television reporter
Barbara Walters. "We saw each other until I got married," Walters said.
"We have continued to be friends.
"He actually is a very sweet and kind man," she said. "I never heard him
raise his voice. He is enormously patient." Other friends agreed that he
may, on rare occasions, get peeved, but that he never outwardly loses his
temper.
Walters searches for words to describe him: "He is slightly
absented-minded . . . he's not exuberant, but he's totally trustworthy
. . .
he's not formidable in person. He's a lovely soft-spoken, quiet man. .
. .
He laughs at himself. I've never heard him sharply cut anyone off. I don't
think he has such as a thing as a personal enemy."
During Jimmy Carter's administration, Greenspan returned to the
private-sector world of Townsend-Greenspan. But when Ronald Reagan
was elected president, Greenspan also took on the task of chairing the
Commission on Social Security Reform, whose mission was to find a way
to make the retirement system solid.
When Fed Chairman Paul Volcker was shown the door in 1987 by
President Reagan, Greenspan was waiting in the wings. In many ways
Greenspan stayed Volcker's course; the prime objective of both was to
make the economy more stable by reducing inflation.
Only a few months into his term he was faced with a rolling disaster. On
Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, the Dow plunged a record 508 points.
Greenspan and the Fed helped stanch the bleeding. The Fed announced
to the world that it was ready to make available whatever cash the nation's
financial's markets needed to weather the storm and it persuaded various
financial institutions to go about business as usual.
As it turned out, the market crash did not damage the economy as
Greenspan had feared it would and six months later he turned his attention
back to fighting inflation. To the dismay of Vice President George Bush,
then a presidential candidate, the Fed began to raise interest rates. That
tightening, along with the Persian Gulf War, helped produce the recession
of 1990-91, which many credit for Bush's loss to Bill Clinton in the 1992
election.
Greenspan, a man for all seasons, stayed on at the Fed and quickly
developed a surprisingly close working relationship with the Clinton
administration.
From the very beginning, Clinton and his advisers understood that
criticizing or praising the Fed could backfire. Most Thursday mornings,
Greenspan has breakfast with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and
Deputy Secretary Lawrence H. Summers. They're relaxed occasions with
wide-ranging conversations and some humor, said Rubin, who holds
Greenspan in high regard. For his part, Greenspan has said he has had a
very good relationship with the administration. Surprises have been few
and far between.
He even sat in the president's box, next to the Hillary Clinton, for Clinton's
first State of the Union address. That frightened Wall Street, which feared
Greenspan was being co-opted.
Glimpses of a private life
One day in the early 1980s, Greenspan, then chairman of the Social
Security Commission, received a call from NBC's young White House
correspondent. He and Andrea Mitchell had a pleasant chat.
A master of the incremental move, he asked her out two years later.
The two had a "terrific time" on their first date in
December 1984—dinner at Le Perigord in New
York—but it took a while for the romance to
blossom. They began to date seriously two years
later. In October 1987 they showed up together
at a White House dinner. Since then they've
become omnipresent on the Washington social
circuit.
The only time there was ever professional
tension, Mitchell said, was the night before
Greenspan was renominated for the second time. They were giving a
dinner party and Clinton called. Mitchell told her bureau chief later about
the conflict of interest and she was absolved. Since then she has avoided
covering any overlapping issues.
Friends say the two seem completely committed to each other. "Alan
obviously enjoys women," Levitt said. "He values them in their totality."
On the phone, Mitchell tries to put her feelings for him into words.
"One thing that's so refreshing about Alan is that he is upfront with
people," she said. "He doesn't do things behind people's backs."
"He is so supportive of me intellectually and emotionally," she said. "He's
so interested in what I do, what I think. He shares ideas with me. . .
. He
is the least patronizing, least condescending person I know."
She enjoys his wry sense of humor. "He loves puns. You have to have a
taste for puns." And, she said, he knows how to make a good strong cup
of coffee in the morning: Starbucks espresso, decaffeinated.
Her parents, she said, are very fond of him. "They know he's been so
wonderful to me." As a wedding present, they're giving Mitchell and
Greenspan a Steinway.
"It's very lonely when we have to travel and we're not together," she said,
adding that neither of them likes to travel. So they rarely go on vacation.
The one exception is an annual excursion to John Gardiner's week-long
tennis camp in Carmel, Calif. Mitchell has taken up tennis to play with
Greenspan.
"I like playing against him," she said, "when he's not hitting his sneaky
left-handed slices."
The two do have their differences.
Mitchell was brought up in a religious environment. Greenspan is not a
religious man, but he believes in a strong moral code. And then there's
the
food question. "I think Alan's disinterested in food," Levitt said.
Greenspan is a gourmand, not a gourmet. He prefers mashed potatoes to
nouvelle cuisine.
Mitchell, on the other hand, enjoys fine dining. At her home in Palisades
in
Northwest, where they will live, she does the cooking. "I've forgotten
how
to cook the good stuff," she said. "He's not a fancy eater."
Greenspan is concerned about his weight. During the first part of last
year
he decided to lose weight and did so, shedding about 20 pounds. One
day he was standing with E. Gerald Corrigan, chairman of Goldman Sachs
International, when the subject of weight came up. Corrigan had lost a
considerable amount not long before. Greenspan grasped the slack in his
suit jacket at his waist and said he had lost 20 pounds.
Someone asked if he wanted the name of a good tailor to have it taken in.
"What! And lose bragging rights?" he responded.
Sometimes Greenspan goes to parties strictly as Mitchell's escort, but
he
also takes quiet advantage of social gatherings to speak to people he
doesn't normally see.
"He always drifts off into the corner," former president Ford said. "He
never projects himself onto other people."
When he does speak, everyone listens, watching for some slip.
Levitt remembers bumping into him at a Kennedy Center affair.
"How are you?" Levitt said.
"I'm not allowed to say," Greenspan replied.
The wedding itself, Mitchell said, will be small—a few family members
and close friends. Then the two will settle back into the domestic life
they've known for several years.
Two or three times a week, they attend a reception or party. Occasionally
they gather with good friends like journalists Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff
and World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn and his wife, Elaine.
Otherwise Greenspan and Mitchell stay at home and work or read or
watch baseball or listen to music. Greenspan likes the early Clive Cussler
mysteries. His favorite music is classical—Handel, Mozart, Schubert,
Brahms, Rachmaninoff. Every once in a while he will sit down at the piano
and play a little improvised jazz.
Asked if they have favorite chairs or areas in which to work, Mitchell
said
no, not really. "We're not very well organized."
The truth is, Greenspan does most of his work, including the writing of
speeches and testimonies, in the bathtub.
The ritual began in the early 1970s when his back began to give him
trouble. He discovered that long, hot morning baths were not only
soothing, but idea-inducing. In the water he is able to indulge his obsession
with the economy's statistical minutia. He has told friends that his
intelligence quotient is 20 points higher at 6 a.m. than at 6 p.m.
Once the bath is drawn, he slips in, placing his in-box from the day before
nearby. For the next hour and a half he sits and reads, adding hot water
when necessary.
Meanwhile, Mitchell goes for a run or to workout in a gym.
Living with him, she said, is fascinating. "The strangest thing is to be
with
someone who you think you know really well and who is weighing a
monumental decision," Mitchell said.
"I've never been able to guess," she said, "which way he's going."
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company