All the Devils Are Here [64]
Levy was also Bob Rubin’s mentor. Rubin started his Goldman career on the risk arbitrage desk, which he quickly found he had an affinity for. Levy soon realized it as well, and began both encouraging Rubin—in his gruff, no-nonsense way—and talking him up with the other Goldman partners. Within five years, Rubin himself was named a partner.
Rubin had the rarest of skills: he could rise through the ranks of Goldman Sachs faster than just about anyone ever had before without arousing either jealousy or animosity. He was admired equally by superiors, peers, and underlings. On the surface, he appeared to be the opposite of prideful. In meetings—even meetings filled with important partners—he made a point of soliciting the opinion of the most junior associate, and then seeming to hang on his every word. He had a way of making his bosses want to see him do well. His colleagues were drawn to his almost preternatural calm. When a problem arose and he was asked his opinion, he invariably responded, “What do you think?”
“There is no one better at the humility shtick than Bob,” says one former colleague who remains a Rubin admirer. “The line ‘just one man’s opinion’ was something he would utter a dozen times a day.” He inspired intense loyalty.
He also delivered the goods. In 1981, when Goldman Sachs bought J. Aron, a commodities firm whose executives then included Goldman’s current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, Rubin was put in charge of overseeing the new acquisition. With his help, the firm began to move its business in a direction that made it vastly more profitable. He pushed Goldman to begin trading options, which it had long shied away from, even hiring Fischer Black, the MIT professor and coinventor of the famous Black-Scholes options pricing model. Goldman’s options trading desk soon became immensely profitable as well. As co-head of the fixed-income research department in the mid-1980s, Rubin helped transform the fixed-income division from a second-tier player into a worthy competitor to such bond strongholds as Salomon Brothers and First Boston. By 1990, he was the co-head of the entire firm. (He shared the title with Steve Friedman, who had also run the fixed-income department with him.) By the time Rubin left for the Clinton administration in 1993—where he spent two years as the head of the National Economic Council before becoming Treasury secretary—Goldman had become the envy of Wall Street. Rubin departed for Washington as the most admired man at the most admired firm.
In August 1996, a year and a half after Rubin became Treasury secretary, Bill Clinton appointed a lawyer named Brooksley Born to be the new chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She was a formidable figure in Washington legal circles, a longtime partner at Arnold & Porter, with a practice that dealt with regulatory and financial services issues. She was also a player on the national legal scene, a co-founder of the National Women’s Law Center, a member of the board of governors of the American Bar Association, and an adjunct professor at the law schools of Georgetown and Catholic University. After Clinton won the presidency, she was rumored to be on the short list for attorney general.
As a female law student in the early sixties, Born had faced her share of slings and arrows. When she became the president of the Stanford Law Review—the first woman to do so—a dean told her that “the faculty stood ready to take over the law review if [she] ever faltered,” as she later recounted in the Washington Post. Although she graduated first in her class—another first for a woman at Stanford Law—the school declined to recommend her for a Supreme Court clerkship. She wangled tea with Justice Potter Stewart, who