Hello sweetheart, get me mergers and acquisitions: the rise of Steven Rattner.
Washington Monthly › Nbr. 18, February 1986
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Hello sweetheart, get me mergers and acquisitions: the rise of Steven Rattner.
HELLO SWEETHEART, GET ME MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
On a night in August 1982, in a loud New York restaurant off Union Square, Steven Rattner, a London correspondent for The New York Times, and Roger Altman, an investment banker at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, met for dinner to discuss Rattner's future. The two had become good friends a couple of years earlier when Altman was an assistant secretary of the treasury and Rattner was covering Jimmy Carter's economic policy for the Times. Now Rattner, at the age of 30, had decided he wanted to leave journalism. Rattner was one of the Times's ablest writers. His rise in the organization had been rapid: at 22, clerk to James Reston, at 23, covering energy, one of the most important stories in the country, at 24, a full member of the Washington bureau, at 29, a foreign correspondent in a prestige bureau. But by the summer of 1982, Rattner felt he needed a change. Coming home on vacation, he had considered several options. He'd stopped in on G. William Miller, the former secretary of the treasury, whom Rattner had covered two years before. Miller now ran a merchant banking firm in Washington. He thought Rattner was a "brilliant guy' and was eager to take him on. There were other ideas: venture capital, for example, and management consulting, though Rattner worried that consulting was like being a business reporter for the Times "without 950,000 daily readers.' Most attractive was investment banking. The field had lured a stream of former Carter officials: Altman and Peter Solomon from Treasury, Josh Gotbaum and Ralph L. Schlosstein from Stuart Eizenstat's domestic policy office, David Aaron from the National Security Council. Most of them were at Lehman Brothers, which, in contrast to the more hidebound, blue-blooded banks, frequently hired people on the basis of experience (and connections) in government. Peter G. Peterson, the man at the top, had been Richard Nixon's commerce secretary. Over dinner, Altman lobbied his young friend on behalf of Lehman. It was a good time to become an investment banker. Banking was changing, and Rattner had the personality for its competitive new encironment of short-term relationships. His persuasive skills would be useful for selling clients on deals, Altman told him. Working a client wasn't so different from working a source. Rattner also knew how to handle himself in the presence of important people like Paul Volcker. Finally, Rattner's skill in reporting on complex economic matters would help him on Wall Street. "He could understand the interplay of legal, tax, regulatory, and finance questions, very complex stuff,' Altman says now, "to look at things like a three-dimensional ches...See the full content of this document
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