It is interesting to consider Reuters’ reaction to the onslaught—against both the news business and the truth itself—coming from Washington. On September 18, 2017, Reuters editor in chief Steven Adler introduced a project called “The Trump Effect: Tracking the Impact of the President’s Policies.” He wrote, “Shortly after Donald J. Trump became U.S. president last January, I wrote a memo to the Reuters staff providing guidance on how to cover the new Administration. The gist was that we should proceed as we would with any leader in the world, whether that leader admired journalists or viewed them as the enemy. That meant trying not to take sides or to make ourselves the story but rather to work dispassionately on behalf of Reuters users, who would need honest, carefully sourced, vigorous reporting on what this presidency meant for them.” He continued by explaining that the Trump Effect would present hard data, video and text stories, and interactive graphics that would demonstrate—for better or worse—prevailing administration policies. The project has a dedicated website and is available to anyone, free of charge. The Trump Effect may be the closest thing the US (and the rest of the world) has to a single source of unbiased American political news.
In early 2018, I was unhappy to learn that the board of the Thomson Reuters Corporation had voted to approve a strategic partnership with the private equity firm Blackstone, which would entail Reuters selling Blackstone a 55 percent majority stake in its Financial & Risk unit. In the filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the details of the venture included the makeup of a new consociation: “The new partnership will be managed by a 10-person board composed of five representatives from the Investors and four from Thomson Reuters. The President and CEO of the new partnership will serve as a non-voting member of the board following the closing of the transaction. At the closing of the proposed transaction, F&R and Reuters will sign a 30-year agreement for Reuters to supply news and editorial content to the new partnership. Under the agreement, F&R will pay Reuters a minimum of US$325 million annually. For the duration of the news contract, Thomson Reuters will grant F&R a license to permit F&R to brand its information feeds and products/services with the ‘Reuters’ mark.”
I had a fairly bad first impression of the Blackstone deal, and was not apprised of how it developed. I see private equity firms like Blackstone as slaughterhouses. They are designed to seek companies that are not well managed, that cannot exploit their own potential, or are floundering for some other reason. A company like that is a sitting duck if a private equity firm goes after it. Thomson Reuters indicated that they would use some of the purchase price from Blackstone to pay off an estimated $3 billion of debt and would use the lion’s share of the remaining money to “repurchase shares via a substantial issuer/bid/tender offer made to all common shareholders.” While I understand the lure of the deal when the money is on the table, it is one’s attitude toward the future that ultimately determines how to proceed. If that attitude is pessimistic, with no courage and belief in the future, going with the money on the table is the next step. But if the attitude is confident, with an entrepreneurial spirit that is encouraged by Blackstone’s interest, then the next step is to garner sufficient confidence to reject the offer and secure a loan to pay down the debt. I believed Thomson Reuters should have had that confidence. Apparently, they did not.
I was relieved when I learned the specifics of the deal, which make it very clear that the ownership of Reuters is still within Thomson Reuters. Technically, what Blackstone is doing is leasing the use of Reuters’ news and editorial content. The term of this lease is thirty years, which might as well be an eternity. But nonetheless, the ownership has not been ceded to Blackstone, which is what I originally feared was the case. Reuters remains in charge of managing the news, and Blackstone cannot change or manipulate it. We shall see how it goes. But I don’t like it.
In the face of overwhelming global pessimism (and growing cynicism), I nonetheless remain optimistic about the future. In taking a reckoning of the power for good, it is clear that sometimes a single force is enough to accomplish a Herculean task. In the case of the Watergate cover-up, uncovering the tentacles that snaked through the White House and reached all the way to the Oval Office—the force of the Washington Post was enough. But it was not a legacy of righting wrongs that gave the Post its power—it was the active support and guidance of Katharine Graham and her editor in chief, Ben Bradlee, both of whom were steadfast in their requirement that Woodward and Bernstein uphold the highest journalistic standards, and who were unflinching in their courage in publishing the results of their reporters’ investigation, in spite of the exceptional potential for negative backlash.
In the final pages of Castro and Stockmaster, Michael Nelson writes, “Pehr Gyllenhammar had acquired for the trustees a standing which was unthinkable when I worked for the Company. Reuters was fortunate that, when Thomson sought to buy Reuters, the Chairman of Trustees was a man of such vision as Pehr Gyllenhammar, who had become Chairman in 1999… I derived some satisfaction from the fact that I had introduced Gyllenhammar to the Reuter family.”
Having put in twenty-seven years as a member of that Reuter family, I can think of no more welcome validation than the suggestion that my own affinity for integrity affected Reuters in the same way that they affected me. It is a privilege to have worn the mantle of principle for so long, and if I have passed that mantle on to someone else, then all that I hoped to accomplish at Reuters has come to pass. I hope the next generation of directors will be able to say the same.
CHAPTER TWO
Heritage
Heritage (n): c. 1200, “that which may be inherited,” from Old French iritage, eritage, heritage “heir; inheritance, ancestral estate, heirloom,” from heriter “inherit,” from Late Latin hereditare, ultimately from Latin heres (genitive heredis) “heir” (see heredity). Meaning “condition or state transmitted from ancestors” is from 1620s.
—Oxford English Dictionary
On a brisk day in October in the year 1658, a fleet of forty-five Swedish warships sailed south from Stockholm toward the narrow Oresund Sound on Denmark’s northern coast. Aboard one of the ships was a middle-aged peasant farmer named Mans Andersson—a man I know virtually nothing about other than the fact that he left his home in Smaland to fight the Danish on behalf of the Swedish crown, and that he would become the first of my ancestors to have the Gyllenhammar name joined to his own.
Sweden’s national registry and genealogical records are among the most comprehensive of any nation, and like many old families, the long line of my Gyllenhammar ancestors is well documented. Occasionally I am asked if I feel a sense of identification or commonality with these earlier generations. My first inclination is to dismiss this kind of personal identification with one’s ancestors as a flight of fancy. Nonetheless, it is impressive to contemplate the collective scope of the Gyllenhammars’ work and accomplishments. One common thread in the family is extensive military service, and other Gyllenhammar vocations over many generations include tanner, legislator, farmer, hunting master, carpenter, police inspector, painter/sculptor, pastry chef, railway engineer, pharmacist, dentist, and composer. This speaks to a broad array of sensibilities from the artistic and intellectual to the athletic and mechanical. It’s now generally accepted that there is a genetic factor at play in determining whether one will excel at music or math, or whether one will be drawn to mechanical disciplines or agriculture. According to some studies, there is even a link between genes and the tolerance (or lack thereof) of dishonesty. So, I suppose I could say that I identify with my ancestors indirectly, through the catholic scope of their qualities, and for the integrity implicit in their inclination toward service of their country.
As a child, I was aware—through various anecdotes and family lore recounted by my parents—of having come from a definitive place, and of roots that were clearly identified in well-documented family trees. My mother was Jewish, the child of Russian-born Mathias Kaplan and Sara Friedman Kaplan, who emigrated to Sweden from Frankfurt. Most of my maternal grandmother’s relatives remained in Germany, where it is believed they were virtually eradicated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.