Quote of the Day (John Gutfreund, on Careers Made and Destroyed)

“Your f-----g book destroyed my career, and it made yours.”—Former Salomon Brothers. CEO John Gutfreund to Michael Lewis at lunch, quoted by Lewis in “The End,” Conde Nast Portfolio, December 2008/January 2009

(Lewis’ article begins as a droll piece on how his tell-all memoir of his time at Salomon Brothers, Liar’s Poker, became a how-to manual for those entering Wall Street rather than a signal for “The Great Reckoning” with the market’s greed, as he expected. Along the way, it includes a great quote from Gutfreund that describes the current state of the Street and the economy—“It’s laissez-faire until you get into deep shit.”

Then it takes a final surprising turn when, at the lunch to which Lewis has invited him, Gutfreund—forced to leave under pressure from Salomon Brothers a couple of years after Lewis’ book appeared—asks the rationale for the invitation. When the author tells him he thought it “might be worth revisiting the world I’d described in Liar’s Poker, now that it was dying,” perhaps for a 20th-anniversary edition, the former “King of Wall Street” answers, “That’s nauseating.”

If you’re like me, you’re torn--between annoyance at Gutfreund at being part of an era of reckless greed, and horror at Lewis for, in effect, turning over the corpse of this man’s career. A fascinating piece—and, if you’re a writer thinking about your responsibility for the way the lives of others turns out, a disquieting one.)