We appeared to have gotten to one of those historically precarious moments when any catastrophe that you predicted was sure to come true. Anyone could go for it: What’s your most satisfying darkness-at-noon vision? Who do you want fired and humiliated? Who do you want convicted?
Indeed, what if, after thriving for twenty years, the business culture itself—the broad social power of private enterprise, the no-guilt thrill of making vast amounts of money, the inevitability of an ever-increasing net worth, the great art of the transaction—was finally over? Kaput?
Thinking just this, on a fine Manhattan summer evening, as WorldCom was collapsing and Messier was getting the boot, I found myself on the Forbes family yacht—once a very potent symbol of upper-class American capitalism, before capitalism got hijacked by the arrivistes and entrepreneurs and spreadsheet accountants.
It was one of those meet-and-greet affairs that magazines are always hosting for advertisers and other media people. Forbes, the capitalist tool, had once had an advantage in this kind of promotional thing because of the yacht, the Highlander. But in the age of G4s or even larger personal jet transport, the boat seemed quaint.
Still, if the business culture really was kaput, I was thinking, we could well go into a new era, or back into an old era, in which one could not be self-respecting (that is, a self-respecting liberal-type person) and be on the Forbes yacht. The Forbes yacht might again stand for something other than what it stood for now, which was just a promotional thing; it could, possibly, go back to being a resented symbol of wealth, class, and exclusivity.
Now, I like Tim Forbes—son of Malcolm, the over-the-top father and protomogul, and brother of Steve, who keeps running for president—who is a kind of counter media mogul. He’s a self-effacing, none-too-hip, always somewhat-pained-looking anomaly of a modern media executive. Tim might be, you suspect, a lot happier having inherited a more anonymous sort of business—for instance, a water utility—but he seems dutifully to make the best of his fate. In fact, this aura of dutifulness, rather than ego gratification, may be one of the reasons that he seems popular among his staff—something unusual for most ego-charged media executives.
We sat together at one of the little tables on the yacht, eating the catered dinner and marveling at this whole breathtaking moment of corporate humiliation.
Now, we were both old and jaded enough to appreciate that in all likelihood this was just a periodic blip. Various deserving people would be pilloried and hung out to dry, and there would be a requisite shocked, shocked, moment of sanctimony and contrition, and then the markets would get going again. This made sense.
“It’s very hard to imagine the end of this,” said Tim.
The business culture was just way too ingrained in careers and aspirations and relationships to be undone by what was, relative to the vastness of the American economy, just rounding-error-level corruption. We shared a moment’s amusement about the recent Wall Street Journal story naming this business era as the most corrupt since just before the Great Depression.
And yet that the Journal, of all places, could so easily be caught up in the antibusiness fever—partly, of course, trying to distance itself from the current mess—was precisely the point. It really could happen. It really could come apart. And not just the economy, but the central organizing faith of our time: that personal ambition, relentless salesmanship, financial savvy, and, well, greed were the most efficient and even liberal agents of societal advancement and harmony. All of that, almost in the blink of an eye, could go back to being not just uncool but really nasty stuff. Quite possibly, business would return to being the province of only bores and bad guys. Certainly, people everywhere were rushing for the doors (our M.B.A. president himself has seemed to be frantically searching for an exit from any identification with the business culture).
But Tim Forbes seemed much more awestruck than depressed by this possibility.
While such a turn of events, an epochal rejection of the business culture, might be a deeply dispiriting notion for his colleagues at Fortune and BusinessWeek and the Journal (not least because many of these people would want to participate in the repudiation), for Tim Forbes there was the possibility that this might be very good news.
“You know, we have always been,” Tim said, with a certain twinkle, “the magazine for true believers.”
If you go back twenty years, it would not at all be a prosaic thing to say I am a capitalist or I believe in unfettered markets or Government is too big. Rather, saying something like this would have defined you as a contrarian or country club member and, quite likely, a Forbes reader. I remember my own grim fascination with the Forbes motto, “Capitalist Tool”—it seemed so brazen and taunting.
To be a Forbes reader was not to have any sort of liberal or youthful or ambivalent impulses whatsoever. Dick Cheney surely read Forbes. Certainly, there wasn’t any greater cheerleader for the Reagan revolution than Forbes. Deregulation, laissez-faire capitalism, hands-off government, pro forma anticommunism, was Forbes stuff. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, even became—and in some preserved-in-amber state remains—the ceremonial chairman of the company.
Nor was there any greater voice in the eighties for the sheer joie de vivre of wealth. Forbes’s “400 Richest Americans” issue, which debuted in the early Reagan years, may rank as a seminal work of the business culture. For one thing, it vividly established a new benchmark of riches—there were really, it turned out, a whole lot of people who had achieved mythic levels of dough. Absolute-freedom money. Start-your-own-nation stuff. For another, it was a folksy instruction manual. Anybody, apparently, with a head for business and a modicum of audacity could make a few hundred million bucks.
And then there was Malcolm himself. He was a Reagan complement. While each man represented stiff and conservative and un-emoting constituencies, they were both showmen. Hollywood was, ultimately, the point (Malcolm Forbes’s 70th-birthday party in Morocco, with Elizabeth Taylor on his arm, was a pivotal Hollywood-business-culture moment). Both men helped foster the most profound transition of our time: making business sexy, expansive, embracing, even polymorphous.
But this left Forbes, especially after polymorphous Malcolm died, as an awkward cultural fit. That it neither acquired nor was acquired; that it remained in private hands; that the company was known for a yacht instead of a G4—all of this suddenly made it seem quaint and fragile. The fact that Forbes remained an independent company was not so much an accomplishment as an eccentricity—and probably a costly one. (If the business magazine Fast Company, an unproven title with limited revenues, sold for nearly $400 million, how much would that have made Forbes worth—$2 billion or $3 billion? How could the Forbes family, if they had any head for business at all, not have taken the money and run?)
So much about the magazine seemed out of sync. The brothers, with their odd primogeniture plan (Steve, by dint of first birth, got the top title and biggest share of the business). The crotchety old editor, James W. Michaels, on the job for decades, only to finally retire and be replaced by another lifelong veteran of the magazine, William Baldwin (just a somewhat younger icon of crotchetiness). And then you had the magazine’s uplifting quotations and mini-sermons and ritualistic pomposity. And, of course, there was Steve Forbes’s loopy quest for the presidency and efforts to restore the Republican Party to its place as the party of the pants-pulled-up-too-high set.
Like all business magazines in the nineties, Forbes raked it in. But as business became the big media subject, and one of the great media revenue generators, Forbes also got roughed up by the competition.
Forbes may have remained the magazine of true believers, but Fortune and BusinessWeek (and so many other New Economy comets) became the must-reads of the yuppies and entrepreneurs and opportunists and faddists and marketers and digital schemers and reconstructed radlibs. These magazines were