In 1944 a draft board in downtown Manhattan rejected Alan Greenspan, then a recent high school graduate, for military service because he had a spot on his lung that looked like it might be tuberculosis. So Greenspan, suddenly without a plan for the future, auditioned to play clarinet for the trumpeter Henry Jerome's traveling big band.
He got the job, but he was never a star. He was a sideman rather than a soloist. Among his fellow musicians he became known as the band's resident intellectual, the clarinetist who could also fill out his bandmates' income tax forms for them. Between sets, when they disappeared into the green room - "which would quickly fill with the smell of tobacco and pot," Greenspan recalls - he read books about business.
The pattern repeated itself, albeit in a more sober form, after the war ended and he began studying economics at New York University. Many of his classmates were swept up by grand questions relating to the new economic order, but Greenspan was more interested in numbers and equations. "I still had the sideman psychology," he writes in his memoir, The Age of Turbulence. "I preferred to focus on technical challenges and did not have a macro view."
His macro view wouldn't come until the 1950s, when his first wife introduced him to Ayn Rand's New York salon. Rand - whom he calls "quite plain to look at" but "a stabilizing force in my life" - pushed him to think beyond mathematics and helped turn him into a libertarian.
By the time former US president Ronald Reagan named Greenspan to run the Federal Reserve in 1987, he had already a lived a full, fascinating, Zelig-like life. For years he was the quietly influential man off to the side. With his book he finally lets us know what he was thinking.
For a memoir from such a high-profile figure, it is surprisingly frank. Large parts of the book are downright entertaining. Its biggest failing - the reason it isn't a great memoir - is Greenspan's reluctance to be as forthright and penetrating about himself as he is about others.
Born in 1926, he was raised in Washington Heights, the only son of parents who soon divorced. He attended George Washington High School a few years behind Henry Kissinger (and a few decades before the baseball stars Rod Carew and Manny Ramirez, a historical oddity that Greenspan, who still remembers Joe DiMaggio's 1936 batting average, probably appreciates). Before joining the Jerome big band, he played in the same informal ensemble as Stan Getz. At Columbia University, Arthur Burns, himself a future chairman of the Fed, became Greenspan's graduate-school adviser.
Like his father, a stockbroker, Greenspan eventually made his way to Wall Street, where he ran a consulting business that forecast the economy. He was doing quite nicely there when Martin Anderson, another Rand acolyte, asked if Greenspan wanted to join former US president Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign.
Except for former US president Jimmy Carter, Greenspan has worked with every president since 1969, and the book offers a fairly blunt critique of each. Gerald Ford, who's portrayed as an unusually decent politician, clearly ranks first. "He always understood what he knew and what he didn't know," Greenspan writes.
Despite their ideological differences, former US president Bill Clinton seems to place second, thanks to his "consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth." At one point, with urging from Newt Gingrich, the House speaker, Greenspan called Rush Limbaugh to argue for the Clinton administration's Mexican loan guarantees. Greenspan even shares some of the credit for his signature insight - recognizing early on that technology was transforming the economy - with Clinton.
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