The Go-Go Years by John Brooks Page B

perspectives. The first kind, obsessed with the need for money and power, are the ones who bring innovations and variations to the craft of money-making, and who usually become the richest. They treat Wall Street purely as an arena; they accept its rules and customs and exploit them, often with something close to art, but they do not seek to change its ways. The second kind—who, curiously, often have a temperamental indifference to money but nonetheless stay in Wall Street, never dreaming of turning their backs on it, simply because it is their world—are the ones who most often seek to remold it nearer to their hearts’ desire.
    Jackson, although only a shade over five feet three inches tall, and not even a millionaire most of the time, was one of the big men of the Street in 1961, and one of the second kind. He had been born into it, though hardly in the silver-spoon tradition of, say, J.P. Morgan the Younger. His father had been a hit-or-miss trader on the outdoor Curb, in the money one day and out of it the next, and he himself had been born on Henry Street during the time that the Lower East Side was still a Jewish ghetto. Jackson had gone two years to Brown and one year to St. John’s University Law School before joining his father’s business. A Curb (and later Amex) specialist since 1925, he had achieved a measure of fame, and more than a measure of honor, in 1955 when a Walter Winchell radio tip had resulted in a buying panic in Pantepec Oil, one of the stocks he specialized in (and a venture, incidentally, of the notable progenitor William F. Buckley, Sr.). Jackson, at personal risk far beyond the call of duty, had saved the deluded public from the consequence of its folly by selling short a block of more than one hundred thousand shares of Pantepec, at a price more than six points lower than he might have sold it, in order to keep the market orderly. This quixotically high-minded act had made him, for a time, a sort of Exhibit “A” of the securities industry before Congressional committees (and, it appears in retrospect, an unwitting cover for the actions of other less scrupulous specialists of the era). It had also earned him—and, subsequently, his handsome young partner Segal, a graduate lawyer who joined him on the floor the following year—some surly glances from a few of their colleagues.
    As a result partly of the Pantepec incident and partly of his predilection, so uncharacteristic of many Amex men, for moral issues, Jackson came to occupy a special position there, respected,somewhat feared, and by no means universally liked. This is not to say that he was generally unpopular. As an ex-governor, he was fond of boasting that he was the first Jew ever to have finished anywhere but last in an Amex election; he attributed his assimilation to the fact that he was “a pretty good golfer and a pretty good drinker.” Far from being an evangelist at heart, he was a liberal by instinct, and a philosopher by choice. “Every institution needs a house philosopher,” he used to say. “I’m the Amex’s.” During the ten years of McCormick’s Amex presidency the two men had become close friends, and Jackson had practiced his philosophy on McCormick. Over those years Jackson had watched McCormick gradually changing from a quiet, reflective man into a wheeler-dealer who loved to be invited by big businessmen to White Sulphur Springs for golf, and the change had worried him. “Ted,” he would say, when they were at dinner at one or the other’s house, “why don’t you read any more?”
    â€œI haven’t got time,” McCormick would reply.
    â€œBut you’ll lose your perspective,” Jackson would protest, shaking his head.
    During the later 1950s Jackson served two terms on the Amex Board of Governors, and, although he wasn’t serving at the time of the court injunction, he learned enough about the Res’