Hello sweetheart, get me mergers and acquisitions.

• Author: Weiss, Philip
• Position: Putting Yourself on the Line

As Philip Weiss showed, one who put himself on the line in the wrong way was Steven Rattner This piece appeared in 1986

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.

It was a good time to become an investment banker. Banking was changing, and Rattner had the personality for its competitive new environment of short-term relationships. His persuasive skills would be useful on deals, Altman told him. Working a client wasn't so different from working a source.

Altman was certainly right about its being a good time for banking. The new spirit of competition brought about by deregulation combined with the rise of a new materialist ethic, especially in Manhattan, had made investment banking glamorous in much the same way that journalism had been in the years after Watergate. Investment bankers and arbitragers were being profiled in mainstream publications like Esquire and The Atlantic. Radio stations quoted the gold price between rock songs. Zelig and Rattner

But was this the right world for Rattner? As a student at Brown, Rattner had written idealistic editorials proclaiming that the country's moral fiber was "weak" and denouncing "global. . .corruption and disdain." It would seem only natural for such a person to wonder aloud whether Lehman Brothers offered avenues for socially useful work. But Altman does not recall that Rattner raised the question of whether investment banking was meaningful work except, he in this sense. He wanted to know whether he'd be fulfilled by banking. Was it overly narrow?" Rattner asked Altman whether investment bankers ever lifted their noses from their spread sheets. He was a young man who had lived abroad and...