Just off the corner of Connecticut and N Streets in Washington, DC is a reasonably imposing red-brick urban mini-mansion, which, a small plaque informs you, once belonged to General Henry Robert, who, you probably don’t know, wrote Robert’s Rules of Order. But back in 1975 when I worked there as a file clerk, we called it “the Carriage House,” because of the large room in the basement which indeed had once been a carriage house.
Like everyone else in the Carriage House, I worked on the “White & Case Case” for the law firm of Arnold & Porter, started in the late forties by two New Deal alumni, Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas, who were then joined by another New Dealer, Paul Porter. Fortas was appointed to the Supreme Court by his very good friend Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately but inadvertently all but ruined Fortas’ life by seeking to elevate him to Chief Justice, leading to a number of scandals that both prevented Fortas from getting the job and, later, forced him to resign from the Court altogether, which might not have happened if Fortas hadn’t been Jewish, and would have been the nation’s first Jewish Chief Justice.
This was all ancient history by the time my association with the firm—mute, inglorious, and brief—began. Thurman and Abe’s original idea, it seems, was to found an early version of a “boutique” law firm, handling just a few “interesting” cases. Unsurprisingly, that strategy fell by the wayside as Washington boomed. The firm was originally housed in a number of the row houses on N Street, most spectacularly by an impressive mansion on the corner of N and 19th that had been owned by Teddy Roosevelt when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the McKinley Administration. However, by the time I arrived at the Carriage House, most of the senior staff were housed in the I.A.M Building, a Washington, DC sized “skyscraper” on the corner of N and Connecticut, owned by the International Association of Machinists, whose president, William “Wimpy” Wimpisinger, was regarded by some as the most “dangerous” labor leader in America, though if Wimpy ever did anything dangerous, I never heard about it.
Most of the people in the Carriage House were young women, either paralegals or secretaries, which left me doubly the odd man out, or even trebly so, because I was quite possibly the oldest person there—of the regulars, at least—though a fortunately youthful appearance kept my presence and position there from looking as dubious as in fact it was.
I spent most of my time copying and collating documents. The enormous Xerox machines of the time could only copy a single page at a time—no automatic feeds and, of course, no automatic collating. I once spent three days assembling 50 copies of a 300-page document. Occasionally, I would read through transcripts of depositions and circle the names of "important" people whenever they appeared. One of the attorneys at many of these depositions would introduce himself at the start of each session in the following manner: "My name is Bobby Lawyer and I am an attorney."
I lived on Q Street, just a few blocks away from the Carriage House, in an efficiency I rented for $175 a month, furnished largely from what I scavenged from the street. I slept on a $50 mattress and listened to a $1200 stereo, both spread out on the floor. I sat in a worn wicker chair and ate from a worn card table, kept my books in a worn bookcase and my 100-odd jazz albums in a cardboard box.
The young women in the Carriage House who were single would often go to a bar they called “the Airplane”, located nearby on 19th St., but I was far too shy to do that. I would not have wanted to go to a “pick up” bar of any sort, and most certainly would not have wanted to go to a pick up bar frequented by women I knew at work.
However, there was a jazz club located in the basement of the town house right next to the Carriage House, “Harold’s Rogue and Jar”. I never found out what the name meant. I would go there occasionally and sit at the bar without talking to anyone. I would order a bacon cheeseburger with steak fries and a diet Coke. I can’t remember any of the names who appeared at the club, but it was serious jazz—nothing like the terrible “cool jazz” of today. The house drummer was a woman named Dottie Dodgione, who I think was the club manager as well. She was in her fifties, I would guess, with a stiff bouffant hairdo who wore pant suits, and ended each number with a furious solo. Sometimes, despite the jazz, the stress of being around so many people would get to me, and I would take my meal home, wrapped in heavy aluminum foil, and I would sit in my wicker chair and eat my rich bar food in peace and quiet and solitude.
After eight months at Arnold & Porter, I was fired, something anyone with the slightest percipience could have foreseen. Somewhere in Moby Dick Herman Melville warns sea captains not to hire “Platonists”—those with their eyes fixed only on invisible horizons—and he could have offered the same advice to law firms. But my time at the A&P was far from a complete loss. A month before I was fired, I was feeling so flush that I shopped for furniture, at Woodward & Lothrop, then DC’s largest department store. I chose a $400 sleeper sofa, blue and white plaid, a $150 butcher block table, and two Breuer chairs, which I had first seen in an optometrist’s shop and had thought were very classy. I didn’t have a credit card and didn’t know if Woodie’s would take a check, so I paid with $800 in cash, in the form of 16 fifties I had withdrawn from the bank the previous day. It was an investment that, though it might have seemed ill-timed, was in fact very much the reverse. Shortly after being fired, I started dating a young woman who would change my life significantly, a young woman who, I think, would not have dated a man who slept on a mattress on the floor and ate from a card table and a worn wicker chair.
Afterwords
The rear windows of the Carriage House faced on the alley behind N Street. A “celebrity” hair dresser, whose name I never learned, parked one of three classic cars that he drove to work each day in that alley—a funereal-looking green and black pre-war Rolls Royce, a post-war Rolls that was cream with red pinstriping, and, surely the pièce de résistance, a midnight-blue coffin-nosed Cord convertible with a tan roof, its chrome supercharger exhaust pipes gleaming in the sun. I wonder how many people would drive such cars in rush-hour traffic today.
The top floor of the IAM building had both offices for Arnold & Porter and the Machinists’ Union. The A&P had lots of attractive, stylish young women who worked as secretaries and receptionists. One of them who sat at the front desk of the top floor told me how difficult it was to keep a straight face when the Machinists’ big shots came swanking in in their horrible 70s-era polyester leisure suits—mint green with white piping and matching white shoes, or what smirky journalists liked to call a “full Cleveland”, white suit, white shirt, and white shoes.
Shortly after I left the A&P, the Carriage House was commandeered by Carolyn Agger, a senior partner and Abe Fortas’ wife. Carolyn, who had been housed in the IAM building, was afraid of elevators, and wanted an office in a building with a nice staircase.
A year or so after I left, Arnold & Porter deserted N Street entirely, building the “Thurmond Arnold Building” at the corner of New Hampshire and M, but they didn’t stay there long. The firm has now merged with a New York law firm, Kaye Scholer, becoming Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, with offices all around the world. The DC office is on Massachusetts Avenue, just southeast of Mt. Vernon Square, a stretch of road that constitutes one of several “lobbyist lanes” radiating from the Capitol.
During the McCarthy years, Arnold, Fortas, & Porter defended many people accused of communism. Fortas in particular was a frequent opponent of Joe McCarthy, but the opposition to his appointment as chief justice seemed to come mostly from southern Democrats, who often saw integration as a Jewish/communist plot. When Jesse Helms (R-NC) was elected to the Senate in 1972, one of his goals was to “get” the Jews. He was a furious opponent of Israel until the Reagan years, when it was finally explained to him that you couldn’t make it to the very top in DC unless you learned to play ball with AIPAC.
The White & Case Case involved another law firm, in New York. One of its senior partners, a Mr. Eply, was facing criminal charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing him of criminal behavior based on the advice he gave to a White & Case client, Cortez Randell, a sixties wheeler and dealer who ended up doing time, though, I’m pretty sure, Eply did not. The SEC’s case against Eply was one of first impression, and naturally White & Case was willing to move heaven and earth to protect both Eply and other attorneys who might find themselves in legal peril merely for trying to turn an honest buck or two.
The story of Cortez Randell and his company, National Student Marketing, had been spectacular enough to be the subject of a book, out in paperback while the White & Case Case was still gaining momentum, called The Funny Money Game, by Andrew Tobias, perhaps not the first and certainly not the last up and coming Harvard graduate to make a name for himself by writing a book about his experiences on Wall Street under the tutelage of Mammon.
The way National Student Marketing “worked”—the reason why Cortez Randell got so rich so quickly and then imploded—was that Randell had either discovered or invented “synergy”. This meant buying out firms that provided goods or services complementary to whatever it was NSM was already selling—“better together”, one might say. But the “real” secret was that NSM didn’t buy other companies with money; it used NSM stock instead, which was better than money, because it increased in value every year.
There are lots of things wrong with this model—NSM was going to run out of “complementary” firms to buy, NSM stock was going up because the economy was expanding and all stocks were going up, not because NSM was so fabulous—but the biggest and simplest reason of all is that any financial instrument that can be better than money can also be worse than money, setting a pattern that has repeated itself a number of times since, on a scale far more spectacular than NSM’s. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, a better mousetrap, and makes a lot of money, and creates a financial instrument based on that idea—be it a simple share of stock, a mortgage-backed security, a collateralized debt obligation, or whatever—that is “better” than money, and a lot of people get rich on that financial instrument. Eventually, however, the better mousetrap, whatever it is, stops being better, and becomes the new normal. It’s lost its edge. But the people who have gotten rich off their “better than money” gimmick can’t believe that, or won’t believe that. The line that went around among the Wall Street geniuses who almost sank the world’s economy back in 2008 was that you don’t stop playing “Musical Chairs” until the music stops, even if you see the chairs disappearing. However, when the music had stopped, they started singing—and telling lies—until there were no chairs left, leaving the government to pay for all the furniture they’d destroyed.
