The Life and Times of Dillon Read

Robert Sobel wrote the best biography of Calvin Coolidge I have seen so far, which means best of five. Even better than Coolidge's autobiography. His contextualization of Coolidge included astute observations on the American economy, and on Wall Street in particular. So I searched out this out of print book on an online service and began to read. To Dillon Read.This is the firm which gave us George H.W. Bush's treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, whom Sobel also covers pretty thoroughly in this book, hinting that his undergrad grades were not so hot and that he may be dyslexic. But great connections.Clarence Dillon is the star of the book, which starts with the Dutchman Vermilye and his investment trading operation in New York. Dillon joins after Read joins, and Dillon is the gutsy Jewish guy (although Dillon cloaks that in an effort to run with the WASP dominators of New York at the time) who engineers brash and bold, huge deals, then makes a lot more money by taking over companies (buying them by lending them money) and hiring "management" firms secretly owned by....Clarence Dillon.The Pecora hearings are profiled, and Sobel gets into the 1933 and 1934 Securities laws and the SEC, giving us the impression that Pecora was a little extreme, and the SEC--although harshly received by the "Street" at the time--was a pretty good idea.Sobel does not stop there, though. He follows the Dillon Read firm past Clarence, and on to Douglas (who also became a Secretary of the Treasury, but who didn't have the same pizzazz of the old man, who drifted off into old age in aristocratic fashion on a huge New Jersey estate). Then on to the Bechtel and Wallenberg family connections of Dillon Read, and terminating in the mid 1980s with a glimpse of new ways-a-borning with the addition of New Court Capital and the opening of the firm to modern V.C. investment.A great companion to this book is the very recent book "The Last Partnerships" which does the same biographical analysis of our entire economy, by profiling a whole collection of investment firms, Dillon Read included. Sobel has less range, in comparison, but Sobel's mission is to drill into Dillon Read. This book does not "sing" like Sobel's Coolidge, as I said, but forms a link in Sobel's scholarship which I'm glad to have. Next will come a read of Sobel's history of the New York Stock Exchange, to lengthen the chain.