Kurt Andersen

This morning I happened to be looking through the May issue of Portfolio, which is a magazine that turns out to be a lot more compelling eight months after publication. A little info-graphic subtitled “How Investment-Bank Executives have split their donations to presidential campaigns” is especially interesting in hindsight, because two of those banks no longer exist and we now know how the election turned out.

Merrill Lynch was the ideological outlier — 86% of its top executives’ campaign donations as of last spring had gone to Republicans. Citigroup’s management group was the most bipartisan: 62% Democratic. And Barack Obama did best, relatively speaking, among the people who ran Lehman Brothers.

But what’s most interesting — bizarre, actually — is that the three most Democratic banks were Democratic to precisely the same degree: 93% of the campaign contributions from the top executives at each of J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley went to Obama, Hillary Clinton, et alia. As if we needed another data point to confirm the astonishingly sheep-like behavior of people on Wall Street.

How extremely curious it is that Bernard Madoff — uncannily successful investor and manager of billions for the rich and famous, Wall Street bigwig, generous philanthropist, important civic personage, New Yorker of consequence and stature for decades — was a virtual nobody until the second Thursday of December, according to the paper of record. Before he announced his crookedness, Madoff’s name seems to have been mentioned in The New York Times all of six times, and in each of those instances only very passingly: as a best man at a wedding in 1960, and then in five brief news articles about technical stock-trading issues between 1992 and 2000.

Which tells us something about his shrewdness, I suppose — if you’re engaged in a massive criminal enterprise, it makes sense to stay out of the spotlight. But just how and why on earth did the Times‘ business staff, for all those decades, neglect to run a longer piece about him and his remarkable firm and his enormous reputation?