A Colossal Failure of Common Sense - Lehman brothers

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A Rocky Road to Wall Street
Right here, in a haze of tobacco smoke and cheap hamburger fumes, I was on the
skid row of finance … places like this specialize in the walking dead of failing
corporations.
AT THE AGE of ten, I resided in some kind of a marital no-man’s-land, a
beautiful but loveless gabled house in the leafy little township of
Bolton, Massachusetts, some twenty miles west of downtown
Boston. My father, Lawrence G. McDonald, had accepted the end of
his marriage and had left my stunning fashion-model mother to
bring up their five children all on her own. I was the oldest.
The general drift of the breakup was rooted in my dad’s hard-

driving business career. Owner and chief executive of a chemical
engineering company, he might have stepped straight out of a
suburban cocktail party staged on the set of The Graduate: “Plastics,
son. That’s the future.”
And I guess in a way it was the future. At least it was his future,
because plastics made him a stack of money, enough to start his
own brokerage firm, and it only took him about twenty-nine hours a
day, seven days a week, to do it. He was obsessed with business.
So far as my mom was concerned, that was the upside. The
downside was his devotion to the game of golf, which took care of
his entire quota of spare time. For all of my formative years he
played to scratch or better. As the club champion of Woods Hole
Golf Club, down on the shores of Nantucket Sound, he had a swing
that was pure poetry, relaxed, precise, and elegant, the clubhead

describing a perfect arc through the soft sea air as it approached the
ball. Also, he could hit the son of a bitch a country mile.
Mom never really saw him, since she never landed a job as a
greenskeeper. And he saw her principally in magazines and on giant
billboards around Boston, where dozens of images showed her
modeling various high-fashion accessories.
When I referred to the marital home being loveless, I was not
quite accurate. There was a burgeoning love in that house, but it did
not involve Dad. He’d moved out, and many months later, a new
suitor for my mother appeared on the horizon. Years later they were
married, but even at my young age I realized he must have been
some kind of latter-day saint, taking on this very beautiful lady with
the staggering encumbrance of five kids and a kind of rogue
husband prowling around the outskirts of her life, keeping an iron
grasp on every nickel of her finances.
The name of the new man, who would one day become my
stepfather, was Ed O’Brien. He was an extremely eminent lawyer
and a grandson of a former governor of New Hampshire. Ed was a
very classy guy, and he adored Mom and helped her in every way.
He was not so big and tough as Dad, who had a touch of John
Wayne about him, a kind of western swagger and a suggestion of
unmistakable attitude, which often goes with entirely self-made
men.
Anyway, right now I want to get to the point. Remember, Dad did
not live with us anymore, and Ed occasionally stayed the night.
Well, on this particular morning I was standing in the living room
staring out of the window at Ed’s brand-new Mercedes-Benz
convertible, a $100,000 car even way back then in the late
seventies. Suddenly I saw a car pull up outside the front gates.
Into the expansive front yard strode Lawrence G. McDonald,
wielding what looked to me like a seven-iron. He came striding up
to Ed’s automobile and took an easy backswing, left arm straight,
and completely obliterated the windshield in a shower of splintered

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense - Lehman brothers