What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

by Stephen A. Schwarzman

For me, the greatest rewards in life have come from creating something new, unexpected, and impactful. I am constantly in pursuit of excellence. When people ask me how I succeed, my basic answer is always the same: I see a unique opportunity, and I go for it with everything I have. And I never give up.

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As graduation approached, I decided that I would like another try at Wall Street, despite my poor start at DLJ and despite my math skills, which were then, and are still now, average at best.

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Finally, I was invited in to see Robert Baldwin, the president of the firm. Bob had been under secretary of the navy. A navy flag and the flag of the United States stood behind the desk in his office. Morgan Stanley would be hiring just seven associates that year, and Bob offered me the chance to be one of them. It was an enormous honor, but it came with a significant condition: I would have to change my personality. Morgan Stanley was a buttoned-down, hierarchical culture. I couldn’t be my opinionated, proactive self. Bob said I had the talent to work there; I just had to adapt.

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Since this was a company that made loans to students, I figured one place to start was with universities. Harvard had the largest university endowment, so as a recent graduate, I called and got an appointment with Harvard’s treasurer, George Putnam. Putnam was the head of Putnam Investments, a giant mutual fund company he had founded in the late 1930s. For a first-year banking associate with his little road-show book begging for an investment, meeting Putnam was like meeting one of the gods of New England. I opened my pitch book and began my windup. “Mr. Schwarzman,” said Putnam, interrupting me. “Can you please close your book?” I closed the book, nervously. “Mr. Schwarzman, have you ever heard of the UJA?” The UJA, the United Jewish Appeal, three letters it never occurred to me would be crossing George Putnam’s lips. “Yes, I’ve heard of the UJA.” “Have you ever heard of card calling?” Card calling was a common practice at the UJA’s fundraising dinners. The chairman would call out the names of all potential donors, announce what they gave last year, and everyone would listen for what they were going to give this year. It was a way to create a level of expectation and apply peer pressure. “Let’s start this meeting over, Mr. Schwarzman. You say, ‘Mr. Putnam, you’re the treasurer of Harvard University, and I’m starting the largest—what will be the largest—student loan lending business in the United States, and I’ve got you down for $20 million.’ Now, say that.” I said it. “T...

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Getting to know Jack and watching him in action reinforced my growing belief that the most important asset in business is information. The more you know, the more perspectives you have and the more connections you can make, which allow you to anticipate issues.

A classic LBO works this way: An investor decides to buy a company by putting up equity, similar to the down payment on a house, and borrowing the rest, the leverage. Once acquired, the company, if public, is delisted, and its shares are taken private, the “private” in the term “private equity.” The company pays the interest on its debt from its own cash flow while the investor improves various areas of a business’s operations in an attempt to grow the company. The investor collects a management fee and eventually a share of the profits earned whenever the investment in monetized. The operational improvements that are implemented can range from greater efficiencies in manufacturing, energy utilization, and procurement; to new product lines and expansion into new markets; to upgraded technology; and even leadership development of the company’s management team. After several years, if these efforts have proved successful and the company has grown considerably, the investor can sell it for a higher price than he or she bought it, or perhaps take the company public again, earning a profit on the original equity investment. There are a lot of variations on this basic theme.

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Back in 1979, I had studied the prospectus for KKR’s eye-popping buyout of Houdaille Industries, one of the first big LBOs. This deal was the Rosetta Stone of buyouts. KKR had put in just 5 percent of the cash to buy Houdaille, an industrial manufacturing conglomerate, and borrowed the rest. Leverage on that scale meant the company could grow at 5 percent, but the equity would grow at 20 to 30 percent. I had been keen to do a similar deal using Lehman’s resources, but I couldn’t muster the internal support. Two years

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The good news was that after the Gibson IPO, LBOs had Lehman’s attention. Pete, then CEO, was all in. Before his next trip to Chicago, he asked me to come up with a list of possible acquisitions. I settled on Stewart-Warner, a maker of dashboard instrument panels and the scoreboards at sports stadiums. Pete, of course, happened to know the chairman, Bennett Archambault. We met him at his men’s club, an old-school place with wood paneling and moose heads all over the walls. Pete suggested he take his company private. I walked Archambault through the process: how we could raise money to buy the stock, how we could pay the interest, enhance the value, make the company work better, what it would mean over time. “I think you can make a lot of money personally,” Pete said to him. “And your shareholders can do well. Everyone can profit.” Archambault got it. The existing shareholders would be paid a premium for their stake. As the head of a private company, he could improve it over the long term instead of worrying about quarterly earnings to placate the stock market. And he would end up owning a lot more of the company. “There don’t seem a lot of reasons not to do it,” he said. Back at Lehman, I rushed into action. I staffed the deal and asked Dick Beattie at the Simpson Thacher law firm to start designing a fund for Lehman to do LBOs. Dick had been counsel in the Carter administration and had since become an expert on the legal intricacies of LBOs. We were confident we could rai...

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The appeal of the private equity business model to a couple of entrepreneurs was that you could get to significant scale with far fewer people than you would need if you were running a purely service business. In service businesses, you need to keep adding people to grow, to take the calls and do the work. In the private equity business, the same small group of people could raise larger funds and manage ever bigger investments. You did not need hundreds of extra people to do it. Compared to most other businesses on Wall Street, private equity firms were simpler in structure, and the financial rewards were concentrated in fewer hands. But you needed skill and information to make this model work. I believed we had both and could acquire more.

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The day after our advertisement appeared in the New York Times, I heard a knock at the door. I opened it to find a guy in leather pants, a black motorcycle jacket, and a little peaked leather motorcycle hat. We were waiting to hear from our familiar M&A clients, but we got the gang leader from The Wild Ones. “Is there a Steve Schwarzman here?” he said. “What are you delivering?” “I’m not delivering anything. My name is Sam Zell. Leah told me I should meet you.” In 1979, we had hired Leah Zell at Lehman. She had been an English major at Harvard and had just gotten a PhD. After talking with her for a few minutes, it was obvious she had an exceptional mind. Though she knew nothing about finance, I had decided to give her a chance. She had proved to be a terrific analyst. This biker was her brother. “What’s with the outfit?” I said. “I left my motorcycle downstairs.” “Where downstairs?” “I chained it up on Park Avenue,” he said. “To a hydrant.” Our first day. This is some future, I thought. He must have thought the same thing looking at me sitting there in my suit in our bare office, the phones silent. “Look, I’m sorry. We just moved in today. We’ve hardly got any furniture yet.” “That’s okay,” said Sam. He sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, against our rolled-up rug, and began to talk. He owned some real estate and wanted to buy some companies, but he didn’t know much about finance. “Why don’t you teach me?” he said. I later found out that I shouldn’t have been misled...

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To coincide with our launch, the Wall Street Journal had planned to run a major front-page article about our new firm—publicity that would have been a huge boost for our new business. The day before it was supposed to run, the reporter called to tell me his editors were yanking it. He apologized. “The Shearson people heard we were doing it,” he said. “They called us up and said you were fired for a variety of bad reasons. We didn’t feel we could run the piece if Shearson told us on background that you’re a bad guy.” I should have known our launch would rile Shearson. I had wanted out of Lehman because the ethics there had become so awful—the greed, the fear, the gutlessness, the hunger for power, the dishonesty. But this counterattack was a new low. I sat there in our bare office with boxes of office equipment scattered around. How could people be so vindictive? Despite

really?

“I will talk to my colleagues on our executive committee. I have only one request. Do not go to see Nomura before we make a decision.” Nomura was their main competitor, the largest of Japan’s brokerages. Nikko was a distant number two. We agreed. The next day Pete and I woke early for the rest of the meetings. Woozy from jet lag, we both fell asleep in the back seat of the car. When we stopped, I woke up and looked out the window and saw the sign on the building: Nomura. “What are we doing here?” I said to the rep. “Didn’t we tell you yesterday we can’t go to Nomura?” “It’s on the schedule,” he said. “Then tell us how we handle this situation. We promised Nikko we’re not going to meet Nomura. We can’t make a promise then break it.” “But you can’t insult Nomura. They’re the most important broker. You have an appointment with the executive vice president for international business, the same as the other guy.” “We can’t be in this position,” I said. “What are our options?” “You could cancel, but that would be bad manners. You could go and have a nonmeeting meeting, and hope that Nikko doesn’t find out, where you present nothing, like just a courtesy call. Or you can go make your presentation.” None of these options seemed great. We needed to stop floundering. “We’ve got to call the guy at Nikko and tell him what’s going on and get his advice. We don’t know the customs here, and we don’t want to offend him,” I told Pete. He agreed and made the call. We had one of those giant b...

We routinely discuss cycles as part of our investment process. Here are my simple rules for identifying market tops and bottoms: 1. Market tops are relatively easy to recognize. Buyers generally become overconfident and almost always believe “this time is different.” It’s usually not. 2. There’s always a surplus of relatively cheap debt capital to finance acquisitions and investments in a hot market. In some cases, lenders won’t even charge cash interest, and they often relax or suspend typical loan restrictions as well. Leverage levels escalate compared to historical averages, with borrowing sometimes reaching as high as ten times or more compared to equity. Buyers will start accepting overoptimistic accounting adjustments and financial forecasts to justify taking on high levels of debt. Unfortunately most of these forecasts tend not to materialize once the economy starts decelerating or declining. 3. Another indicator that a market is peaking is the number of people you know who start getting rich. The number of investors claiming outperformance grows with the market. Loose credit conditions and a rising tide can make it easy for individuals without any particular strategy or process to make money “accidentally.” But making money in strong markets can be short-lived. Smart investors perform well through a combination of self-discipline and sound risk assessment, even when market conditions reverse. All investors will tell you that markets are cyclical. Yet many behave as...

People often smile whenever they hear my number one rule for investing: Don’t. Lose. Money. I never understand the smirks, because it is just that simple. At Blackstone we have established, and over time refined, an investment process to accomplish that basic concept. We have created a framework for assessing risk that has been incredibly reliable. We train our professionals to distill every individual investment opportunity down to the two or three major variables that will define the success of our investment case and create value. At Blackstone, the decision to invest is all about disciplined, dispassionate, and robust risk assessment. It’s not only a process but a mind-set and an integral part of our culture. This is how we do it: The concept of an investment committee is commonplace across Wall Street and other industries. A handful or more senior leaders from a given firm invite deal teams to present a new opportunity that has usually already been summarized for them in the form of a memorandum. The deal team will try to sell a potential investment to the committee, listing all the reasons a deal is great and quantifying the potential for profits. If the committee members like what they hear, they bless the deal, and the presenting team is relieved to know they can proceed. If not, it feels like a loss, and the deal team usually skulks out of the room feeling defeated, memos in hand and perhaps muttering to themselves. Not at Blackstone. We structure our investment p...

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Pete and I always resolved to hire 10s. Today, Blackstone gets to choose from the very best young graduates. For our 2018 class of junior investment analysts, we received 14,906 applications for 86 spots. Our acceptance rate is 0.6 percent, much lower by far than the most selective universities in the world. If I had to apply for a job at my own firm today, I seriously doubt I’d be hired. But it took many years of trial and error to get here. Early on there were challenges to finding and keeping the people we wanted. The first was not our fault. Under the terms of my departure from Lehman, we could not hire our former colleagues. These were the people we knew best, whom we trusted, and with whom we had worked well. They would have been the ideal partners in our new venture. The second problem was that the big firms on Wall Street at that time were more like tribes than businesses. For someone to leave Goldman Sachs to join Morgan Stanley was like a Comanche leaving to join the Mohawks. And back then, Blackstone barely constituted a hunting party, let alone a tribe. The scale and systems at Lehman had largely spared me from having to fish through Wall Street’s hiring pools. But now there were no bureaucratic layers to protect me from the truth that finance is an industry that encourages self-delusion. People think they’re great and tell you they’re great, never that they failed at their last job, only that they are looking for “more opportunity.” You hire them, and they oft...

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One day in the early 1980s, Boesky had invited me for a drink at the Harvard Club on Forty-Fourth Street. He began by asking me how I liked Lehman. I told him I enjoyed the work and the size of the deals. Then he asked me, “Wouldn’t you like to earn more money?” I said I was earning plenty, and more would come. “But wouldn’t you like to get it a lot sooner?” he said. I thought he was offering me a job, so I told him I was happy where I was. But he kept on with this same weird and ill-defined proposition: “Wouldn’t you like to have more?” Finally, I asked him if he had anything else to discuss. He said no and gave me a lift home. I didn’t think much of it until Boesky was arrested in 1986 based on Levine’s testimony. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Boesky had lured another conspirator, Marty Siegel, the head of M&A at Kidder Peabody, with a meeting at the Harvard Club and that same odd language: Wouldn’t you like to have more money sooner? Boesky, Siegel, and Levine, as well as a more junior banker, Ira Sokolow, all went to jail. Though, reading the news, I realized that Levine must have been getting some of his inside information straight from my desk. He must have been coming into my office, taking it, and passing it on to Ivan Boesky. I tell our first-year associates at Blackstone this story as a warning. These men—Boesky, Levine, Sokolow, and Siegel—looked like any of us. They walked, talked, and acted like us. And they went to jail for trading on inside i...

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The other disagreement we had was around equity in the business. Under our original agreement, Blackstone owned half of Blackstone Financial Management, Larry and his team the rest. We had agreed to reduce our stakes to 40 percent each, leaving 20 percent to be distributed as stock to employees. If there was any further dilution to be had after that, it would have to come out of Larry’s side. That was the deal. But before long, they asked us to give up more stock. I refused. Larry and his team were furious, saying they did all the work. I believed that once you signed something, you stuck to it, but in retrospect, I should have put the contract aside and accommodated Larry’s request. Blackstone, Larry, and his team ended up selling its stake in Blackstone Financial Management to PNC, a medium-sized bank in Pittsburgh. The only humor in it all came from the process of renaming the firm once it was owned by PNC. It could not be called Blackstone anymore. Larry thought there might be a way of retaining some institutional connection through a new name. He suggested Black Pebble or BlackRock. Black Pebble sounded puny to me. We settled on BlackRock. Selling

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I told him he was right. Going public would give us permanent capital, stock to buy both assets and security. It would transform us into a global brand and bring us deals, new limited partners, and new opportunities. It would reinforce our “one-firm” culture even as it enabled us to develop new lines of business. Finally, because my antennas were telling me that the world was getting so crazy, we would do well to load up with cash sooner rather than later, I didn’t feel we could wait any longer. If I had to become a public piñata to make this happen, so be it. “We started this business together twenty-two years ago with almost nothing,” I said. “And this is going to mean wealth for our families. It’s a good economic event.” His math skills had always been good. On March 21, 2007, the day before we filed, we held firm-wide meetings to describe what we were doing. It was a lot to absorb. The news had not leaked and people were stunned. Once we pushed the button, the financial world began to light up. The plan for our IPO was to raise $4 billion at a valuation of $35 billion.

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Entering the crisis, Blackstone had $4 billion in cash from the IPO and a $1.5 billion revolving credit line to draw on if we needed it. As a fundamental operating tenet, Tony and I had insisted on having no net debt. It was part of our aversion to risk. We had more than $20 billion in committed funds locked up for ten years, so we could ride out a storm without worrying about a run by our clients on their money. Thanks to our strong capital position, we were open for business, but our disciplined investment process kept us out of another major deal that would eventually become a financial disaster. Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, we had begun taking a harder look at the US energy sector when we saw two forces changing the industry. The first was steady deregulation, which was driving more and more of the energy industry into the hands of smaller, private firms. The second was the collapse of Enron, which forced many companies to sell assets, from drilling rights to refineries to pipelines, at low prices under financial duress. We had started modestly and spent years building up our knowledge, experience, and relationships so that we could maximize our rewards and minimize our risks over the course of multiple turns in the cycle. In 2004, we had partnered with three other private equity firms, Hellman and Friedman, Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, and Texas Pacific Group (TPG), to buy Texas Genco, a set of power plants in Texas. A year later, we sold the company and sp...

In early 2008, I had dinner with John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley. He was miserable, having just reported a quarterly loss of $7 billion. How had he managed to lose so much money? He hadn’t, he said. It was all on paper. He had portfolios of subprime securities dating back four years. The underlying mortgages on the securities for 2004 were defaulting at a rate of around 4 percent, for 2005–2006 at 6 percent, and for 2007 around 8 percent. But the market for these securities, even with default rates below 10 percent, had evaporated. No one would buy them. Fewer than one in ten Americans were defaulting on the mortgages backing these securities, yet they were considered untouchable. Under Sarbanes-Oxley, the financial reform act introduced in 2002 to protect investors after the accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom, you couldn’t take the risk of misrepresenting the value of any assets. So John had brought in BlackRock to value its portfolio. They estimated the loss to be somewhere between $5 and $9 billion. He simply split the difference, reporting a vastly larger loss than the value of the securities that were actually defaulting. And suddenly everyone was panicking about the health of Morgan Stanley.

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Shortly afterward, on March 16, JPMorgan, under government orders, agreed to buy Bear Stearns. Now all eyes were on Lehman, wondering if it would be next. Dick was looking for a buyer as the deepening crisis in mortgages made his task ever more difficult. And despite the way he joked about his improbable ascent at Lehman, he had a strong, sentimental attachment to the firm. He struggled to accept how little it was now worth. In early August, Dick told me that out of his $675 billion of assets, around $25 billion was linked to bad real estate loans. The remaining $650 billion was healthy and making plenty of money for the firm. So why not separate the two? I suggested. Call the $650 billion “Old Lehman” and let it carry on, uncontaminated by the real estate book. Then move the $25 billion pool of assets into a new firm, Lehman Real Estate, and give it enough capital to survive the cycle. It might take five years, but real estate would come back. It always does. Shareholders would still own 100 percent of the assets in both firms, but their risks and rewards would be decoupled to take account of what was happening to real estate. The government would likely have no objection if this split lifted some of the uncertainty Lehman was inflicting on the markets. Dick liked the idea and asked if Blackstone would buy a couple of billion dollars’ worth of Old Lehman if he executed the split. With the appropriate diligence, I said yes. But our discussions were proceeding slowly. Worry...

Even with TARP now going ahead, the largest banks were still under enormous strain. JPMorgan cut our revolving line of credit by half. I could not believe it. We had worked together so successfully for so long on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions. Jimmy Lee said he knew nothing about it. So I called Jamie Dimon, the CEO. “Things are tough,” said Jamie. “We’re still leaving you with credit.” I reminded him of our long relationship. “We’re part of you guys. And we’re a terrific credit. We’ve got $4 billion in cash.” “Yeah, I know,” said Jamie. “If you weren’t a good credit, we’d pull it all.” Citi was a different story. We deposited $800 million with them shortly after TARP passed, gave them some underwriting work and let them into one of our private equity deals. In our view, there was no way Citi could fail. Governments and corporations used its Global Transactions Service to pay their employees and move money. Without Citi, money would stop moving around the world. Shortly after we made our deposit, Vikram Pandit, Citi’s CEO, came to see me. Citi was under huge pressure, and Vikram joked that perhaps we should switch jobs. Running Blackstone looked a whole lot easier than running Citi. But in seriousness, he said that he was grateful for our show of support and asked if there was anything he could do. I told him what JPMorgan had done and asked if Citi would take its place. Vikram didn’t hesitate. We had supported him in a moment of difficulty, and he was...

ranking. Our investors ultimately made over $14 billion on Hilton, making it the most profitable private equity investment in history.

as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned that finance is a simple business. When somebody asks you for something new, the odds that he or she is the only person on the planet at that point of time who would find that of interest is zero. When you get one of those inquiries, it’s potentially a huge opportunity. Those who are asking don’t know that. They are just looking at their own needs. But if those needs make sense and you create the right product to fit those needs, you can roll it out more broadly and your competitors will be left wondering how you figured it out.

Back in the early days of Blackstone, my friend Steve Fenster (with the two left wingtips) had arranged a meeting for me with an up-and-coming entrepreneur named Mike Bloomberg. Mike was looking for money for his young financial data company. I knew it was going to be a big success, but it wasn’t the right fit for us at the time. We had promised our investors we would return their money in five to seven years. Mike said he would never sell his company. He wanted a partner for life, and we were his first choice. It was a huge miss, which I never forgot. Our $100 million investment would have ultimately grown to over $8 billion. I had always hoped that one day, we would have the flexibility at Blackstone to invest in entrepreneurs like Mike and in opportunities that didn’t fit the traditional private equity model. Tactical Opportunities, as we would call our new fund, was my long-sought answer.

Building Schwarzman College, I learned that the Chinese respect power but are continually testing it. They want to know who has it and who can bring it to bear. As we realized our vision, we witnessed power descending from the president, to the vice premier, to the minister of education, to the party secretary, and to the president of the university. If you have all of that, you are China and no one can get in your way or refuse you. When our construction team failed us, I had to wield that power to get them back on track. When all was said and done, I must have made thirty trips to China, and my team double that number, to ensure we got all the details right.

Thucydides Trap

In the equity markets, being big can hurt your performance. If you want to buy $1 million of an S&P 500 stock, you can do so without moving the price. If you want to buy $1 billion worth, the market will push up the price before you can complete your purchase. In our world, we found the opposite happening: as our funds grew and our rivals struggled, our size became a major source of advantage. We found buyers and sellers eager to work with us, and us alone. We moved away from participating in many competitive auctions with other private equity firms into situations where we could focus more specifically on the value to both sides and less on rival bidders.

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Thomson Reuters was formed in 2007 when Thomson, a Canadian media conglomerate, acquired the Reuters news service. Its financial and risk division sold news, data, analytical tools, and services to help banks and other corporations trade financial products. But it struggled to compete with its rival, Bloomberg. We first looked at the possibility of buying the financial and risk business in 2013. At that time, it was intriguing but not quite right for us. It reappeared on Blackstone’s radar in 2016. Martin Brand, a partner in private equity, had traded foreign exchange derivatives early in his career. He had used products from Thomson Reuters, and the possibility of an acquisition fascinated him. He and his team saw that the markets misunderstood the business, tagging it as a poor man’s Bloomberg. In fact, it was more like a colossus hiding in plain sight, a market leader in trading government bonds and foreign exchange and providing financial data to companies, banks, and investors. But there was plenty of room for improvement. Costs were too high, the bureaucracy pervasive, and sales and marketing in need of an overhaul. There was also an opportunity to carve out certain pieces of the business, notably Tradeweb, an electronic platform for trading foreign exchange and derivatives, that we thought might be worth more on a stand-alone basis. We knew that the managers of the financial and risk division shared our belief that they could operate more successfully as a private c...

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Thomson Reuters was formed in 2007 when Thomson, a Canadian media conglomerate, acquired the Reuters news service. Its financial and risk division sold news, data, analytical tools, and services to help banks and other corporations trade financial products. But it struggled to compete with its rival, Bloomberg. We first looked at the possibility of buying the financial and risk business in 2013. At that time, it was intriguing but not quite right for us. It reappeared on Blackstone’s radar in 2016. Martin Brand, a partner in private equity, had traded foreign exchange derivatives early in his career. He had used products from Thomson Reuters, and the possibility of an acquisition fascinated him. He and his team saw that the markets misunderstood the business, tagging it as a poor man’s Bloomberg. In fact, it was more like a colossus hiding in plain sight, a market leader in trading government bonds and foreign exchange and providing financial data to companies, banks, and investors. But there was plenty of room for improvement. Costs were too high, the bureaucracy pervasive, and sales and marketing in need of an overhaul. There was also an opportunity to carve out certain pieces of the business, notably Tradeweb, an electronic platform for trading foreign exchange and derivatives, that we thought might be worth more on a stand-alone basis. We knew that the managers of the financial and risk division shared our belief that they could operate more successfully as a private c...

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Thomson Reuters was formed in 2007 when Thomson, a Canadian media conglomerate, acquired the Reuters news service. Its financial and risk division sold news, data, analytical tools, and services to help banks and other corporations trade financial products. But it struggled to compete with its rival, Bloomberg. We first looked at the possibility of buying the financial and risk business in 2013. At that time, it was intriguing but not quite right for us. It reappeared on Blackstone’s radar in 2016. Martin Brand, a partner in private equity, had traded foreign exchange derivatives early in his career. He had used products from Thomson Reuters, and the possibility of an acquisition fascinated him. He and his team saw that the markets misunderstood the business, tagging it as a poor man’s Bloomberg. In fact, it was more like a colossus hiding in plain sight, a market leader in trading government bonds and foreign exchange and providing financial data to companies, banks, and investors. But there was plenty of room for improvement. Costs were too high, the bureaucracy pervasive, and sales and marketing in need of an overhaul. There was also an opportunity to carve out certain pieces...

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I’ve been fortunate to get to know the last five Presidents of the United States while they were in office: President Donald Trump, President Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, and President George H.W. Bush. I was lucky to meet President Bush 41 in 1967 at Parents’ Day at Yale University at Davenport College where his son, George W. Bush was an undergraduate, one year ahead of me. George W. and his wife Laura were particularly welcoming when he was president. My wife and I saw them frequently at the White House and later at his Presidential Library and at his ranch. I met President Barack Obama during his 2008 Campaign and subsequently had numerous interactions with him in my position as chairman of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts where I had been appointed by President George W. Bush. During President Obama’s term in office, I also got to know Valerie Jarrett, who was always extremely responsive to my calls and helped solve a variety of important issues. President Donald Trump, whom I’ve known for over thirty years from New York, appointed me as chairman of the Strategic and Policy Forum. I’ve been privileged to have Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin as a very good friend for decades and have met Ambassador Robert Lighthizer through my friendship with the Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whom I’ve known for over thirty years as well. I’d also like to thank Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump for their public service and...