The Unwinding Read online

  Connaughton returned to Tuscaloosa without a Republican to debate SALT II. It didn’t matter. Biden arrived that September wearing one of his tailored suits and power ties, trim and flashing his white-toothed smile, and he charmed the hell out of the lovely coeds over dinner at Phi Mu on Sorority Row (Connaughton’s girlfriend was a member), with Jeff attached to the senator’s elbow as his adjutant for the evening and now seriously considering a political career. Two hundred people filled the student center for Biden’s speech. Connaughton made the introduction, then took his seat in the front row as Biden came to the lectern.

  “I know you’re all here tonight because you’ve heard what a great man I am,” Biden began. “Yep, I’m widely known as what they call ‘presidential timber.’” The crowd laughed nervously, thrown by his sense of humor. “Why, just earlier tonight I spoke to a group of students who had put up a great big sign, ‘Welcome Senator Biden.’ And then when I walked under the sign I heard someone say, ‘That must be Senator Bidden.’” The laughter rose. Now Biden had the crowd, and he turned to his subject and spent ninety minutes arguing lucidly and without notes for the importance of reducing the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, while he dismantled the arguments of SALT II’s opponents in the Senate. The day before, the treaty had suffered a blow with the supposed revelation of a brigade of Soviet troops in Cuba. “Folks, I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Biden whispered, and he took the microphone and walked toward his audience, gesturing for the crowd to lean in and listen. “Those troops have been in Cuba all along!” he shouted. “And everyone knows it!” At the end of the lecture, the applause was loud and long. When Connaughton got up to approach Biden and thank him, he accidentally started a standing ovation.

  A campus security guard drove Biden back to the Birmingham airport, and Connaughton went along. Biden looked tired from his speech, but he answered every beginner’s question from the guard (“What’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?”) as thoughtfully as if it had come from David Brinkley. When Connaughton asked Biden why he rode the train from Wilmington to Washington every day, the senator calmly told the story of the car accident that had nearly wiped out his young family in December 1972, just a month after his election to the Senate. “My wife and baby girl were killed,” Biden said, “and my sons were badly injured. So I stayed with my sons at the hospital. I really didn’t want to be a senator. But eventually I was sworn in at my son’s bedside. And I served, but I went home every night to be with my sons. And over the years, Delaware just got used to having me home every day. And so I really can’t ever move to Washington.”

  That was the moment Jeff Connaughton was hooked by Joe Biden. Here was tragedy, here was energy, here was oratory—just like the Kennedys. Biden turned his charisma on everyone who crossed his path and didn’t move on until he had made a connection—the sorority girls, the audience at the speech (many of the students attending for course credit), the security guard, the junior business major who had invited him to Tuscaloosa in the first place. This was the need and drive of a man who wanted to be president, and as they got out at the airport, Connaughton produced a spiral notebook that Biden signed, “To Jeff and the APU, Please stay involved in politics. We need you all,” and he knew that he would end up following this man to the White House. What he would do once he got there wasn’t clear, and didn’t really matter. The point was to be in the room, at the summit of American life.

  Before graduating from Alabama, Connaughton brought Biden (along with dozens of other elected officials) down twice more on paid speaking gigs, and Biden told the same jokes each time before giving his speech, which, by the third visit, was worth a thousand dollars. The last time he dropped Biden off at the Birmingham airport, Connaughton told the senator, “If you ever run for president, I’m going to be there.”

  * * *

  He didn’t immediately head to Washington. First he went to the University of Chicago Business School, with a letter of recommendation from Biden himself. It was 1981, and Time ran a cover story called “The Money Chase,” about the vogue for MBAs; the cover image showed a graduating student whose mortarboard had a tassel made of dollars. Connaughton had never had any money, and Wall Street’s magnetic pull was almost as strong as the allure of the White House. The whole point of an MBA was Wall Street. Just as it would be absurd to go to Washington and end up at the Interior Department, there was no appeal in getting a prestigious business degree only to work for a company like Procter & Gamble or IBM. Among his classmates, a job with a company that actually made things meant you were being left behind. Toward the end of his second year, Connaughton flew to Miami to interview with Ryder Truck, and the whole time he was thinking that if it weren’t Miami and a day at the beach he wouldn’t know why he was bothering. He’d had a summer job at Conoco Oil in Houston between his first and second years, and they wanted him to come back and make a career there, but the thought of starting out at thirty-two grand and moving laterally every six months from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Ponca City, Oklahoma, was at least as dismal as working for a trucking company. Connaughton came from flyover country—he didn’t want to work there. If he didn’t get a position at an investment bank like Salomon Brothers or Goldman Sachs, or else a management consulting firm like McKinsey, he would feel like a failure.

  Connaughton didn’t forget about Joe Biden. Working till midnight in the university library, he would put aside his finance books and dig up old issues of Time from the sixties and read again about the assassinations, Jack’s presidency, Bobby’s rise. He still wanted to find himself in those black-and-white photos. Even as he applied to Wall Street, he followed Biden’s career closely and wrote several letters asking for a job—not to the senator’s office, or to the staff guy there whom he’d gotten to know a little, who might have actually written back, but to Biden himself: “Dear Senator Biden, I’m coming up on graduating from Chicago and…” He didn’t understand that the office answered mail only from Delaware—that his letters went straight into a wastebasket.

  Connaughton was hired by Smith Barney’s public finance department, beginning at forty-eight thousand dollars, and he moved to New York in the summer of 1983. It was just the right moment to start out on Wall Street, and if Connaughton had stayed, like some of his Chicago classmates, he might have made a small fortune. Public finance meant tax-exempt bonds for state and local governments, which was not the place to make a pile, but it suited Connaughton, who had written in his business school application that he wanted to understand the intersection between business and government and have a career in which he moved back and forth between them. Smith Barney was underwriting water and sewer bonds in Florida, where the cities and towns were doubling their populations every few years and needed help raising fifty or a hundred million dollars for infrastructure projects.

  The firm would throw lavish thirty-thousand-dollar closing dinners at Lutèce in Manhattan, with limos provided, and assure clients that it wouldn’t cost their home state a thing: they could recoup the underwriting fees (including the dinner) by investing funds that they’d raised in the tax-exempt market and make 3 percent more on interest rates than they were paying on their public bonds. Connaughton would tell officials, “I can give you front-row seats to Cats, just let me know, it won’t cost your taxpayers a dime.” They would hesitate, but almost every time he’d have a message on his answering machine the next morning: “We changed our mind—we would like to go to Cats.” Once, another banker went down to Jackson County, Tennessee, and explained to the board of commissioners that the higher the bank’s fees, the more money the county would eventually save. From the back of the room a man drawled out a reply: “Bullll-shit…” As a southerner, Connaughton believed that whenever an investment banker from New York came down saying “We can save you money,” there needed to be someone in the room saying “Bullll-shit.”

  Connaughton shared an apartment (rented by the firm) on the Upper East Side. He would roll into Smit
h Barney’s midtown headquarters around 9:30 in the morning, work all day, step out with colleagues for dinner, and go back to the office till midnight. He wasn’t as smart as some of the geeks running numbers on bond scenarios at the computers around him, but as a southerner he was more fun, and he had connections to Alabama women in Manhattan. He never did drugs, not once (years later, when he was hired to work at the Clinton White House and was asked about drug use as part of his security clearance, Connaughton said, “I’ve been waiting my entire life to answer that question”). But he drank plenty of bourbon and once danced all night at Studio 54. From November on, the only topic among his coworkers was the size of their year-end bonus.

  After a year, he was transferred to Chicago. Hating the cold and missing the South, he passed up a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus and, at the start of 1985, jumped over to E. F. Hutton’s office in Atlanta. Several months after his arrival, the firm pleaded guilty to two thousand counts of wire and mail fraud in a massive check-kiting scandal. Throughout the eighties E. F. Hutton had been writing checks for sums it couldn’t cover and transferring the money between accounts, using the funds for a day or two as interest-free loans and making millions of dollars on the float. Up in Washington, Joe Biden of the Senate Judiciary Committee was on the case. He began going on TV talking about the growing epidemic of white-collar crime on Wall Street and the failure of the Reagan Justice Department to police it. In a speech at NYU he said, “People believe that our system of law and those who manage it have failed, and may not even have tried, to deal effectively with unethical and possibly illegal misconduct in high places.” Reagan was in his senescent second term, his administration riddled with corruption, and Biden was setting himself up to go after the big prize.

  The guilty plea cost E. F. Hutton clients and began to hollow out the firm, but Connaughton survived. As he learned the business, he would fly down to Florida by himself and meet with city treasurers. He even came up with a marketable idea: The towns and counties had huge pension liabilities—why not arbitrage them? Issue a hundred-million-dollar pension bond tax-free at 4 percent, then invest the money for a few years at 6 or 7 percent? It was a kind of scam on the U.S. taxpayer. But a bond firm gave a favorable opinion (it was legal if you could get a law firm to tell you it was legal—lawyers were becoming more creative as the action got exponentially more profitable), and his boss, a former bond lawyer himself, was pleased. Connaughton was figuring out how to do investment banking in the 1980s. Playing the tax rules was a racket.

  He was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant vice president making more than a hundred grand, and yet he went home in the evenings thinking this was not what he wanted to do with his life. By the end of 1986 it was clear that Biden would run for president. Connaughton had never forgotten him. He pulled a string with an E. F. Hutton lobbyist who had connections to the campaign. It worked.

  “Biden was like a cult figure to me,” Connaughton said much later. “He was the guy I was going to follow because he was my horse. I was going to ride that horse into the White House. That was going to be my next stop in life. I had done Wall Street, and I was going to do the White House next.”

  1984

  On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.… BANK SECURITIES UNITS MAY UNDERWRITE BONDS … It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?… I had a job, I had a girl / I had something going mister in this world / I got laid off down at the lumberyard / Our love went bad, times got hard … TAMPA SEES GAINS FOR ITS HARD WORK “But those kinds of things can’t do for us, long-term, what a Super Bowl can do. This is a real opportunity for us to show people what a great place this is, that they can come here and not expect to get taken advantage of.” … MISS AMERICA IS ORDERED TO QUIT FOR POSING NUDE … You’re judged by performance. Why drive a car that lives by a lesser code?… At Bank of New England, Vice President David E. Hersee, Jr., went apartment hunting for the daughter of a California customer who was moving to Boston. Of course, apartment hunting is reserved for the very best clients.… LINDA GRAY’S SECRET LOVE Just Like “Dallas” Role—She Falls for Younger Man … In the four years before we took office, country after country fell under the Soviet yoke. Since January 20, 1981, not one inch of soil has fallen to the Communists.… U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!… BEEPERS SAID TO LINK LEGIONS OF AREA’S WORKAHOLICS Devices Now Perceived As Lifelines; No Longer a High-Tech Oddity … The housing finance industry needs a national mortgage exchange that does for mortgages and mortgage-backed securities trading “what the New York Stock Exchange does for corporate stock trading,” Fannie Mae Chairman David O. Maxwell told … NEW U.S. REPORT NAMES VIRUS THAT MAY CAUSE AIDS … There are times in everyone’s life when something constructive is born out of adversity. There are times when things seem so bad that you’ve got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it. I’m convinced it was that morning at the warehouse that pushed me to take on the presidency of Chrysler.… REAGAN WINS RE-ELECTION IN LANDSLIDE Victory Shows Broad Appeal of President … And I feel like I’m a rider on a downbound train.

  TAMMY THOMAS

  Tammy Thomas grew up on the east side of Youngstown, Ohio. Years after she left when things got bad there and moved down to the south side, and after she left the south side when things got bad there and moved up to the north side, in certain moods she would drive her metal-gray 2002 Pontiac Sunfire over the expressway, which broke up the city when it came through in the late sixties, and return to look around her old neighborhood.

  When Tammy was coming up in the sixties and seventies, the east side was still a mixed area. Next door to her house on Charlotte Avenue there had been an Italian family. Hungarians lived across the street, the blue house was Puerto Rican, and there were a few black homeowners, too. The wide-open field at the corner of Charlotte and Bruce had once been her elementary school. Down Bruce Street there had been a church that was later hit by a storm and torn down. A few streets away on Shehy, where three wooden crosses now rose from the earth and the sidewalk was spray-painted BLOOD and FROM PHILLY TO YOUNGSTOWN NIGGA, there had been a neighborhood store, next to the house where Tammy’s mother lived before it was firebombed. A depression that cut through the grass of two lots had been an alley lined with peach and apple trees. Back then, everyone raised flowers and vegetables in their yard—around her house on Charlotte there had been rose of Sharon, forsythia, tulips, hyacinth. As a girl she used to sit on her front porch and look down the street and see the tops of the smokestacks, and if the wind blew right she could smell the sulfur. The men on the east side had good jobs, most of them in the mills. Families kept up their property and were proud to own three-story houses with gable roofs and front porches and yards, all of them big compared to a working-class home in the Northeast (the first time Tammy saw row houses in Philly she thought, “Where are their yards, where are their driveways?”). Back then the mob kept things in order, so there weren’t a whole lot of shenanigans going on.

  Tammy had a friend, Sybil West, whom she called Miss Sybil because she was Tammy’s mother’s age. Miss Sybil once wrote down in a little spiral memo book all the things that she could remember from when she was coming up on the east side in the fifties and sixties.

  pool halls

  confectionery w/music for teens

  Isaly dairy

  first mall

  buses that hook up to live wires

  Lincoln Park w/pool

  knife sharpeners w/monkeys to entertain kids

  farmers selling fruits + vegetables in neighborhood trucks

  City at that time was so safe people slept w/doors unlocked. People very neighborly + much interaction occurred in schools as well as neighborhoods.

  As Tammy drove over the crumbling asphalt of the streets, she was still amazed by the gaps and silence where there had once been so much life.
It was as if she still expected to see the old families, and the east side had just disappeared. Where had it all gone? The things that had made it a community—stores, schools, churches, playgrounds, fruit trees—were gone, along with half the houses and two-thirds of the people, and if you didn’t know the history, you wouldn’t know what was missing. The east side had never been the best part of Youngstown, but it had the most black homeowners, and to Tammy it had always been the greenest, the least dense, the most beautiful—you could pick peaches around Lincoln Park—and now parts of it were almost returning to nature, with deer wandering across overgrown lots where people came to dump their garbage.

  It made her damn mad to see how McGuffey Plaza was abandoned—a model shopping mall that was built in the fifties by the Cafaro family, with a bowling alley, an A&P, a bunch of other stores, and a huge parking lot in front—now just a concrete desert, with nothing but one black hair-care shop left open. It frustrated her that everyone had forgotten about the east side. Not sad, not sentimental, she was frustrated, because she hadn’t given up and wouldn’t slip into the resignation that had settled over Youngstown, because this city was where she had lived her whole life, and her past was still real to her, and there was still something to be done.