This book could not have been written without the support of the Council on Foreign Relations, where I have worked since 2007. Thanks to the patience of the Council’s leadership—in particular, that of Richard N. Haass, the president, and James M. Lindsay, the director of studies—I have been able to devote five years to the chronicling of Alan Greenspan’s life, and have benefited from the help of researchers whose combined efforts make this the equivalent of a fourteen-year undertaking. My family points out that each of my four books has taken longer than the previous one, and that this is not obviously a good thing. But it has been a privilege to indulge my most perfectionist instincts: to immerse myself in a project of this scope with no thought other than to write the best book possible. Whenever I encountered archives that might yield fresh material, or interview subjects who might fill in missing pieces, I was in the fortunate position of having the time and resources to go after them.
Among the researchers who joined me, Jon Hill stands out for his sheer stamina. When I hired Jon in 2011, I had read his graceful writing and could see that he was smart: he came to the Council from Columbia University, where he double-majored in economics and political science and edited The Blue & White, the undergraduate magazine. But there was no way I could have anticipated his tenacity as an investigator. Jon dug up the census records from 1940 to establish how much Greenspan’s mother earned. He wrote the code needed to download and search the otherwise unmanageable tape logs from the Nixon library, then documented Greenspan’s involvement in the Nixon administration’s plot against the Fed by deciphering the cracked voices of the president and his henchmen. Combining George Washington University’s National Security Archive and the State Department’s Office of the Historian, he reconstructed Greenspan’s epic battle with Henry Kissinger in 1975 over the Iranian oil question. On the crucial matter of how far the Fed tried to tamp down irresponsible mortgage lending in the early 2000s, Jon filed the requests under the Freedom of Information Act that helped me to relate the real story, which is not the story told in most accounts of the period. Jon stuck with the project for more than four years. He was an exceptional collaborator.
I was also fortunate to have the assistance of Matthew C. Klein and Jeremy Cohen, each of whom spent two years at the Council. Matt, who now writes for the Financial Times section Alphaville, devoted one year of his time with me to reading the twelve thousand pages of FOMC transcripts spanning 1987 through 2006—I doubt that any other researcher has completed this monetary Iron Man. Jeremy, who has gone on to a doctorate at Princeton, pieced together Greenspan’s strange role at the 1980 Republican convention; his fights with supply-siders in the 1970s and early 1980s; and his intellectual evolution on the question of bailouts during Paul Volcker’s Fed chairmanship. When it came to statistical questions, I sought help repeatedly from Dinah Walker, who was working at the Council between stints at the New York Fed; Dinah’s masterful spreadsheets, displaying decades of data on interest rates, inflation measures, asset prices, and much else, were always an Alt-Tab flip away while I was writing. A succession of wonderful interns—Sahana Kumar, Michael Ng, Sebastian Beckmann, Shannon Prier, Alex Lloyd George, Lauren Waugh, and Asha Banerjee—provided additional feedback and much faithful fact-checking. The Council’s library team tolerated endless requests for obscure books, journal articles, and microfilm news clips from predigital archives. Laura Puls spearheaded the effort to pull together the best possible collection of photographs. David De La Fleur, Gabriel Lafuente, Simon Lee, and their colleagues in IT were patient when my computers stalled, which is sadly more than I can claim.
Writing this book at the Council also allowed me to draw on the experience of its members. Toward the end of my writing, I benefited from feedback from three circles of readers: Daniel Yergin, a Council board member and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, chaired a study group of experts in Washington, D.C.; Michael Levi, the director of the Council’s Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, did the same in New York; and Stacey LaFollette and Kate Dinota of the Council’s meetings team convened a group of younger members to provide additional reactions. Liaquat Ahamed, Lewis Alexander, Theresa Barger, Douglas Elmendorf, Stephen Freidheim, Karen Johnson, Jonathan Kirshner, Donald Kohn, Peter Osnos, Michael Prell, Jonathan Rauch, Kim Schoenholtz, Brad Setser, David Wessel, and Robert Zoellick were among those who read parts of the manuscript and provided extensive challenge and counsel; many others, too numerous to mention, provoked me to reexamine my analysis or storytelling. I should also like to thank Adam Posen for arranging a study group for me at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, of which he is president. Several friends at Peterson, including Joseph Gagnon, David Stockton, Ted Truman, and Steve Weisman, read chapters and helped me with extensive comments. Finally, and most cryptically, the Council on Foreign Relations appointed two anonymous reviewers, who wrote trenchantly about the manuscript’s strengths and gaps. I have done my best to reflect this collective wisdom in revisions to the final draft. Remaining open to reader comments, even when stamina is failing and the finish line looms temptingly in sight, is an indispensable part of the book-writing process.
For the third time in my career, I have benefited from that publishing dream team: my agent, Andrew Wylie, and my editor at Penguin Press, Scott Moyers. Despite the delays that I inflicted upon them, they were unfailingly supportive. Reading the chapters as I wrote them, Scott would usually react with masterful morale-building e-mails—he is the sort of editor who refuses to meddle when meddling is not needed. But on at least one occasion, Scott bounced a chapter back to me and commanded a rewrite. He is the sort of editor who intervenes decisively when intervention is needed. In the United Kingdom, I was lucky to be taken on a second time by Michael Fishwick of Bloomsbury. Always pretending to know less than he does, Michael prompted me helpfully on matters of clarity and pace, insisting in particular that I lay out the nature of my sources in a preface.
Finally, thanks to my family: Felix, Maya, Milo, and Molly; and my beloved wife, Zanny. They are not everything, as my former colleague David Maraniss once wrote in his acknowledgments; they are the only thing.