Nixon, Reagan and former US president George H.W. Bush each receives a mix of praise and criticism. Only the US President George W. Bush goes without receiving credit for a single significant accomplishment.
The Age of Turbulence is really two books, one of which I suspect Greenspan preferred writing and one of which he understood his audience would prefer reading. The second half - the typically Greenspan half - is a series of meditations on economic issues, like income inequality and the rise of China.
The first 250-odd pages are a standard autobiography, and Greenspan confesses in the acknowledgments that learning to write in the first person was a struggle. For all of the book's candor, this is a struggle he does not quite win. This first half of the book is utterly readable, but it lacks a narrative core. It's telling that the book opens on Sept. 11, 2001, with Greenspan on a plane flying home from Switzerland that gets rerouted. This is supposed to serve as drama.
Greenspan also doesn't really let readers inside his life. He laments that Nixon's televised announcement of price controls in 1971 preempted Bonanza - "a show I loved to watch" - and he calls his wife, Andrea Mitchell, "very beautiful." But he does not easily admit error. He does not even confess to having his own ambitions. He seems to want people to believe that he accepted his fantastic ascent with reluctance.
Yet, perhaps accidentally, he has still managed to create a lasting image of himself. He never seems happier than when pouring over economic indicators that allow him to predict everything from the 1958 steel recession to the 1990s boom. "My early training was to immerse myself in extensive detail in the workings of some small part of the world and to infer from that detail the way that segment of the world behaves. That is the process I have applied throughout my career," he writes.
He lacks the same sure footing when confronting the great political issues, and even the economic ones, of the last few decades. He provided the critically influential voice in support of the current administration's tax cuts, for instance, but he now disowns them. He worries that the backlash to globalization could create a "truly serious economic crisis," but his proposed remedies - like higher pay for math teachers - don't seem up to the task.
Despite Rand's tutoring he never quite escapes the sideman's psychology. Now, there should be no shame in that. Greenspan may have had a better feel for the ups and downs of the postwar American economy than anyone else, and he put his talents to good use as a central banker. The question that lingers is why the rest of us allowed him to be treated as something much more.
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