How Are The Mighty Like London Bridge, Daddy?
In June, I wrote about an extraordinary instance of reporting the morning the Worldcom fraud story broke. CNBC’s Mike Huckman ambushed Salomon analyst Jack Grubman (until then “The Most Powerful Man In The Telecom Industry”) outside his townhouse. Grubman was shaken and disoriented; you could see him struggling to respond to something other than a softball question. But you could also see then and there Grubman’s realization that the world he imagined to be well within his control would soon start falling down, and there was nothing he could do about it. You couldn’t write this stuff. (Well, I couldn’t. Tennessee Williams, maybe…) If Grubman’s tragedy follows the ancient structure, (and so far it does), this week features the amoibaion or lyric dialogue, what we now call “e-mail.” Slate condenses all the salient lines from this episode, where Grubman asks Sanford Weill (his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss) for help getting the Grubman twins into pre-school in exchange for, well, aye, there
