The Three Lessons of Joe Flom “MARY GOT A QUARTER.”

1.

Joe Flom is the last living “named ” partner of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. He has a corner office high atop the Conde Nast tower in Manhattan. He is short and slightly hunched. His head is large, framed by long prominent ears, and his narrow blue eyes are hidden by oversize aviator-style glasses. He is slender now, but during his heyday, Flom was extremely overweight. He waddles when he walks. He doodles when he thinks. He mumbles when he talks, and when he makes his way down the halls of Skadden, Arps, conversations drop to a hush.

Flom grew up in the Depression in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Isadore, was a union organizer in the garment industry who later went to work sewing shoulder pads for ladies' dresses. His mother worked at what was called pieceworkdoing applique at home. They were desperately poor. His family moved nearly every year when he was growing up because the custom in those days was for landlords to give new tenants a month's free rent, and without that, his family could not get by.

In junior high school, Flom took the entrance exam for the elite Townsend Harris public high school on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, a school that in just forty years of existence produced three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, and one Supreme Court Justice, not to mention George Gershwin and Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. He got in. His mother would give him a dime in the morning for breakfastthree donuts, orange juice, and coffee at Nedick's. After school, he pushed a hand truck in the garment district. He did two years of night school at City College in upper Manhattanworking during the days to make ends meetsigned up for the army, served his time, and applied to Harvard Law School.

“I wanted to get into the law since I was six years old,” Flom says. He didn't have a degree from college. Harvard took him anyway. “WhyI wrote them a letter on why I was the answer to sliced bread,” is how Flom explains it, with characteristic brevity. At Harvard, in the late 1940s, he never took notes. “All of us were going through this first year idiocy of writing notes carefully in the classroom and doing an outline of that, then a condensation of that, and then doing it again on onionskin paper, on top of other paper,” remembers Charles Haar, who was a classmate of Flom's. “It was a routinized way of trying to learn the cases. Not Joe. He wouldn't have any of that. But he had that quality which we always vaguely subsumed under 'thinking like a lawyer.' He had the great capacity for judgment.”

Flom was named to the Law Reviewan honor reserved for the very top students in the class. During “hiring season,” the Christmas break of his second year, he went down to New York to interview with the big corporate law firms of the day. “I was ungainly, awkward, a fat kid. I didn't feel comfortable,” Flom remembers. “I was one of two kids in my class at the end of hiring season who didn't have a job. Then one day, one of my professors said that there are these guys starting a firm. I had a visit with them, and the entire time I met with them, they were telling me what the risks were of going with a firm that didn't have a client. The more they talked, the more I liked them. So I said, What the hell, I'll take a chance. They had to scrape together the thirty-six hundred a year, which was the starting salary.” In the beginning, it was just Marshall Skadden, Leslie A rps both of whom had just been turned down for partner at a major W all Street law firmand John Slate, who had worked for Pan Am airlines. Flom was their associate. They had a tiny suite of offices on the top floor of the Lehman Brothers Building on Wall Street. “What kind of law did we do?” Flom says, laughing. “Whatever came in the door!”

In 1954, Flom took over as Skadden's managing partner, and the firm began to grow by leaps and bounds. Soon it had one hundred lawyers. Then two hundred. When it hit three hundred, one of Flom's partnersMorris Kramercame to him and said that he felt guilty about bringing in young law school graduates. Skadden was so big, Kramer said, that it was hard to imagine the firm growing beyond that and being able to promote any of those hires. Flom told him, “Ahhh, we'll go to one thousand.” Flom never lacked for ambition.

Today Skadden, Arps has nearly two thousand attorneys in twenty-three offices around the world and earns well over $i billion a year, making it one of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world. In his office, Flom has pictures of himself with George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton. He lives in a sprawling apartment in a luxurious building on Manhattan's Upper East Side. For a period of almost thirty years, if you were a Fortune 500company about to be taken over or trying to take over someone else, or merely a big shot in some kind of fix, Joseph Flom has been your attorney and Skadden, Arps has been your law firmand if they weren't, you probably wished they were.

2.

I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story. Brilliant immigrant kid overcomes poverty and the Depression, can't get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability. It's a rags-to-riches story, and everything we've learned so far from hockey players and software billionaires and the Termites suggests that success doesn't happen that way. Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Just as we did, then, with BillJoy and Chris Langan, let's start over with Joseph Flom, this time putting to use everything we've learned from the first four chapters of this book. No more talk of Joe Flom's intelligence, or personality, or ambition, though he obviously has these three things in abundance. N o glowing quotations from his clients, testifying to his genius. No more colorful tales from the meteoric rise of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

Instead, Fm going to tell a series of stories from the New York immigrant world that Joe Flom grew up inof a fellow law student, a father and son named Maurice and Mort Janklow, and an extraordinary couple by the name of Louis and Regina Borgenichtin the hopes of answering a critical question. What were Joe Flom's opportunitiesSince we know that outliers always have help along the way, can we sort through the ecology of Joe Flom and identify the conditions that helped create him?

We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds. But the true story of Joe Flom's life turns out to be much more intriguing than the mythological version because all the things in his life that seem to have been disadvantagesthat he was a poor child of garment workers; that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against; that he grew up in the Depressionturn out, unexpectedly, to have been advantages. Joe Flom is an outlier. But he's not an outlier for the reasons you might think, and the story of his rise provides a blueprint for understanding success in his profession. By the end of the chapter, in fact, we'll see that it is possible to take the lessons of Joe Flom, apply them to the legal world of New York City, and predict the family background, age, and origin of the city's most powerful attorneys, without knowing a single additional fact about them. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

3.

One of Joe Flom's classmates at Harvard Law School was a man named Alexander Bickel. Like Flom, Bickel was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who lived in Brooklyn. Like Flom, Bickel had gone to public school in New York and then to City College. Like Flom, Bickel was a star in his law school class. In fact, before his career was cut short by cancer, Bickel would become perhaps the finest constitutional scholar of his generation. And like Flom and the rest of their law school classmates, Bickel went to Manhattan during “hiring season” over Christmas of 1947 to find himself a job.

His first stop was at Mudge Rose, down on Wall Street, as traditional and stuffy as any firm of that era. Mudge Rose was founded in 1869. It was where Richard Nixon practiced in the years before he won the presidency in 1968. “Were like the lady who only wants her name in the newspaper twicewhen she's born and when she dies,” one of the senior partners famously said. Bickel was taken around the firm and interviewed by one partner after another, until he was led into the library to meet with the firm's senior partner. You can imagine the scene: a dark-paneled room, an artfully frayed Persian carpet, row upon row of leather-bound legal volumes, oil paintings of Mr. Mudge and Mr. Rose on the wall.

“After they put me through the whole interview and everything,” Bickel said many years later, “I was brought to [the senior partner], who took it upon himself to tell me that for a boy of my antecedents“ and you can imagine how Bickel must have paused before repeating that euphemism for his immigrant background”I certainly had come far. But I ought to understand how limited the possibilities of a firm like his were to hire a boy of my antecedents. And while he congratulated me on my progress, I should understand he certainly couldn't offer me a job. But they all enjoyed seeing me and all that.”

It is clear from the transcript of Bickel's reminiscences that his interviewer does not quite know what to do with that information. Bickel was by the time of the interview at the height of his reputation. He had argued cases before the Supreme Court. He had written brilliant books. Mudge Rose saying no to Bickel because of his “antecedents” was like the Chicago Bulls turning down Michael Jordan because they were uncomfortable with black kids from North Carolina. It didn't make any sense.

“But for stars?” the interviewer asked, meaning, Wouldn't they have made an exception for you ?

BICKEL: “Stars, schmars...”

In the 1940s and 1950s, the old-line law firms of New York operated like a private club. They were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan, in and around Wall Street, in somber, granite-faced buildings. The partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and summered in the same oceanside towns on Long Island. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as “white-shoe” firmsin apparent reference to the white bucks favored at the country club or a cocktail party, and they were very particular in whom they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal establishment of that era, they were looking for:

lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities and “clean-cut” appearances, are graduates of the “right schools,” have the “right” social background and experience in the affairs of the world, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean, in discussing the qualities students need to obtain a job, offers a somewhat more realistic picture: “To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these. Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs; if he has three, he could go anywhere.”

Bickel's hair was not fair. His eyes were not blue. He spoke with an accent, and his family connections consisted, principally, of being the son of Solomon and Yetta Bickel of Bucharest, Romania, by way, most recently, of Brooklyn. Flom's credentials were no better. He says he felt “uncomfortable” when he went for his interviews downtown, and of course he did: he was short and ungainly and Jewish and talked with the flat, nasal tones of his native Brooklyn, and you can imagine how he would have been perceived by some silver-haired patrician in the library. If you were not of the right background and religion and social class and you came out of law school in that era, you joined some smaller, second-rate, upstart law firm on a rung below the big names downtown, or you simply went into business for yourself and took “whatever came in the door”that is, whatever legal work the big downtown firms did not want for themselves. That seems horribly unfair, and it was. But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.

4.

The old-line W all Street law firms had a very specific idea about what it was that they did. They were corporate lawyers. They represented the country's largest and most pres tigious companies, and “represented” meant they handled the taxes and the legal work behind the issuing of stocks and bonds and made sure their clients did not run afoul of federal regulators. They did not do litigation; that is, very few of them had a division dedicated to defending and filing lawsuits. As Paul Cravath, one of the founders of Cra vath, Swaine and Moore, the very whitest of the white-shoe firms, once put it, the lawyer's job was to settle disputes in the conference room, not in the courtroom. “Among my classmates at Harvard, the thing that bright young guys did was securities work or tax,” another white-shoe partner remembers. “Those were the distinguished fields. Litiga tion was for hams, not for serious people. Corporations just didn't sue each other in those days.”

What the old-line firms also did not do was involve themselves in hostile corporate takeovers. It's hard to imagine today, when corporate raiders and private-equity firms are constantly swallowing up one company after another, but until the 1970s, it was considered scandalous for one company to buy another company without the target agreeing to be bought. Places like Mudge Rose and the other establishment firms on Wall Street would not touch those kinds of deals.

“The problem with hostile takeovers is that they were hostile/' says Steven Brill, who founded the trade magazine American Lawyer. ”It wasn't gentlemanly. If your best buddy from Princeton is the CEO of Company X, and he's been coasting for a long time, and some corporate raider shows up and says this company sucks, it makes you uncomfortable. You think, If he goes, then maybe I go too. It's this whole notion of not upsetting the basic calm and stable order of things."*

The work that “came in the door” to the generation of Jewish lawyers from the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, then, was the work the white-shoe firms disdained: litigation and, more important, “proxy fights,”

* The lawyer and novelist Louis Auchincloss, who very much belongs to the old WASP-y white-shoe legal establishment in New York, has a scene in his book The Scarlet Letters that perfectly captures the antipathy the downtown firms felt toward takeover law. “Face it, my dear, your husband and I are running a firm of shysters,” a takeover attor ney explains to the wife of his law partner.

He continues: “Nowadays when one wishes to acquire a company that doesn't wish to be acquired, one's counsel bring all kinds of nuisance suits to induce it to change its mind. We sue for mismanagement by the directors, for unpaid dividends, for violation of the bylaws, for improper issuance of stock. We allege criminal misconduct; we shout about antitrust; we sue for ancient and dubious liabilities. And our opponent's counsel will answer with inordinate demands for all our files and seek endless interrogatories in order to enmesh our client in a hopeless tangle of red tape It is simply war, and you know the quality that applies to that and love.”

which were the legal maneuvers at the center of any hostile-takeover bid. An investor would take an interest in a company; he would denounce the management as incompetent and send letters to shareholders, trying to get them to give him their “proxy” so he could vote out the firm's executives. And to run the proxy fight, the only lawyer the investor could get was someone like Joe Flom.

In Skadden, the legal historian Lincoln Caplan describes that early world of takeovers:

The winner of a proxy contest was determined in the snake pit. (Officially, it was called the counting room.) Lawyers for each side met with inspectors of elections, whose job it was to approve or eliminate questionable proxies. The event was often informal, contentious and unruly. Adversaries were sometimes in T-shirts, eating watermelon or sharing a bottle of scotch. In rare cases, the results of the snake pit could swing the outcome of a contest and turn on a single ballot.

Lawyers occasionally tried to fix an election by engineering the appointment of inspectors who were beholden to them; inspectors commonly smoked cigars provided by each side. Management's lawyer would contest the proxies of the insurgents (“I challenge this!”) and vice versa Lawyers who prevailed in the snake pit excelled at winging it. There were lawyers who knew more about the rules of proxy contests, but no one was better in a fight than Joe Flom...

Flom was fat (a hundred pounds overweight then, one lawyer said...), physically unattractive (to a partner, he resembled a frog), and indifferent to social niceties (he would fart in public or jab a cigar close to the face of someone he was talking to, without apology). But in the judgment of colleagues and of some adversaries, his will to win was unsurpassed and he was often masterful.

The white-shoe law firms would call in Flom as well whenever some corporate raider made a run at one of their establishment clients. They wouldn't touch the case. But they were happy to outsource it to Skadden, Arps. “Flom's early specialty was proxy fights, and that was not what we did, just like we don't do matrimonial work,” said Robert Rif kind, a longtime partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore. “And therefore we purported not to know about it. I remember once we had an issue involving a proxy fight, and one of my senior corporate partners said, Well, let's get Joe in. And he came to a conference room, and we all sat around and described the problem and he told us what to do and he left. And I said, 'We can do that too, you know.' And the partner said, 'No, no, no, you can't. We're not going to do that.' It was just that we didn't do it.”

Then came the 1970s. The old aversion to lawsuits fell by the wayside. It became easier to borrow money. Federal regulations were relaxed. Markets became internationalized. Investors became more aggressive, and the result was a boom in the number and size of corporate takeovers. “In nineteen eighty, if you went to the Business Roundtable [the association of major American corporate executives] and took surveys about whether hostile takeovers should be allowed, two-thirds would have said no,” Flom said. “Now, the vote would be almost unanimously yes.” Companies needed to be defended against lawsuits from rivals. Hostile suitors needed to be beaten back. Investors who wanted to devour unwilling targets needed help with their legal strategy, and shareholders needed formal representation. The dollar figures involved were enormous. From the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s, the amount of money involved in mergers and acquisitions every year on Wall Street increased 2,000 percent, peaking at almost a quarter of a trillion dollars.

All of a sudden the things that the old-line law firms didn't want to dohostile takeovers and litigationwere the things that every law firm wanted to do. And who was the expert in these two suddenly critical areas of law The once marginal, second-tier law firms started by the people who couldn't get jobs at the downtown firms ten and fifteen years earlier.

“[The white-shoe firms] thought hostile takeovers were beneath contempt until relatively late in the game, and until they decided that, hey, maybe we ought to be in that business, they left me alone,” Flom said. “And once you get the reputation for doing that kind of work, the business comes to you first.”

Think of how similar this is to the stories of Bill Joy and Bill Gates. Both of them toiled away in a relatively obscure field without any great hopes for worldly success. But thenboom!the personal computer revolution happened, and they had their ten thousand hours in. They were ready. Flom had the same experience. For twenty years he perfected his craft at Skadden, Arps. Then the world changed and he was ready. He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.

“It's not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else,“ Rif kind says. ”It's that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.”*

Lesson Number Two:Demographic Luck

5.

Maurice Janklow enrolled in Brooklyn Law School in 1919. He was the eldest son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. He had seven brothers and sisters. One ended up running a small department store in Brooklyn. Two others were in the haberdashery business, one had a graphic design studio, another made feather hats, and another worked in the finance department at Tishman Realty. Maurice, however, was the family intellectual, the only one to go to college. He got his law degree and set up a practice on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. He was an elegant man who dressed in a homburg and Brooks Brothers * The best analysis of how adversity turned into opportunity for Jewish lawyers has been done by the legal scholar Eli Wald. Wald is careful to make the point, however, that Flom and his ilk weren't merely lucky. Lucky is winning the lottery. They were given an opportunity, and they seized it. As Wald says: “Jewish lawyers were lucky and they helped themselves. That's the best way to put it. They took advantage of the circumstances that came their way. The lucky part was the unwillingness of the WASP firms to step into takeover law. But that word luck fails to capture the work and the efforts and the imagination and the acting on opportunities that might have been hidden and not so obvious.”

suits. In the summer, he wore a straw boater. He married the very beautiful Lillian Levantin, who was the daughter of a prominent Talmudist. He drove a big car. He moved to Queens. He and a partner then took over a writing-paper business that gave every indication of making a fortune.

Here was a man who looked, for all the world, like the kind of person who should thrive as a lawyer in New York City. He was intelligent and educated. He came from a family well schooled in the rules of the system. He was living in the most economically vibrant city in the world. But here is the strange thing: it never happened. Maurice Janklow's career did not take off the way that he'd hoped. In his mind, he never really made it beyond Court Street in Brooklyn. He struggled and floundered.

Maurice Janklow had a son named Mort, however, who became a lawyer as well, and the son's story is very different from that of the father. Mort Janklow built a law firm from scratch in the 1960s, then put together one of the very earliest cable television franchises and sold it for a fortune to Cox Broadcasting. He started a literary agency in the 1970s, and it is today one of the most prestigious in the world.* He has his own plane. Every dream that eluded the father was fulfilled by the son.

Why did Mort Janklow succeed where Maurice Janklow did notThere are, of course, a hundred potential answers to that question. But let's take a page from the analysis of the business tycoons born in the 1830s and the software programmers born in 1955 and look at the differ-

* Janklow and Nesbit, the agency he started, is, in fact, my literary agency. That is how I heard about Janklow's family history.

ences between the two Janklows in terms of their generation. Is there a perfect time for a New York Jewish lawyer to be bornIt turns out there is, and this same fact that helps explain Mort Janklow's success is the second key to Joe Flom's success as well.

6.

Lewis Terman's genius study, as you will recall from the chapter about Chris Langan, was an investigation into how some children with really high IQs who were born between 1903and 1917 turned out as adults. And the study found that there was a group of real successes and there was a group of real failures, and that the successes were far more likely to have come from wealthier families. In that sense, the Terman study underscores the argument Annette Lareau makes, that what your parents do for a living, and the assumptions that accompany the class your parents belong to, matter.

There's another way to break down the Terman results, though, and that's by when the Termites were born. If you divide the Termites into two groups, with those born be tween 1903 and 1911 on one side, and those between 1912 and 1917 on the other, it turns out that the Terman failures are far more likely to have been born in the earlier group.

The explanation has to do with two of the great cataclysmic events of the twentieth century: the Great Depression and World War II. If you were born after 1912 say, in 1915you got out of college after the worst of the Depression was over, and you were drafted at a young enough age that going away to war for three or four years was as much an opportunity as it was a disruption (provided you weren't killed, of course).

The Termites born before 1911, though, graduated from college at the height of the Depression, when job opportunities were scarce, and they were already in their late thirties when the Second W orld W ar hit, meaning that when they were drafted, they had to disrupt careers and families and adult lives that were already well under way. To have been born before 1911 is to have been demographically unlucky. The most devastating events of the twentieth century hit you at exactly the wrong time.

This same demographic logic applies to Jewish lawyers in New York like Maurice Janklow. The doors were closed to them at the big downtown law firms. So they were overwhelmingly solo practitioners, handling wills and divorces and contracts and minor disputes, and in the Depression the work of the solo practitioner all but disappeared. “Nearly half of the members of the metropolitan bar earned less than the minimum subsistence level for American families,” Jerold Auerbach writes of the Depression years in New York. “One year later 1,500 lawyers were prepared to take the pauper's oath to qualify for work relief. Jewish lawyers (approximately one-half of the metropolitan bar) discovered that their practice had become a 'dignified road to starvation.' ” Regardless of the number of years they had spent in practice, their income was “strikingly less” than that of their Christian colleagues. Maurice Janklow was born in 1902. When the Depression started, he was newly married and had just bought his big car, moved to Queens, and made his great gamble on the writing-paper business. His timing could not have been worse.

“He was going to make a fortune,” Mort Janklow says of his father. "But the Depression killed him economically. He didn't have any reserves, and he had no family to fall back on. And from then on, he became very much a scrivener-type lawyer. He didn't have the courage to take risks after that. It was too much for him. My father used to close titles for twenty-five dollars. He had a friend who worked at the Jamaica Savings Bank who would throw him some business. He would kill himself for twenty-five bucks, doing the whole closing, title reports. For twentyfive bucks!

“I can remember my father and mother in the morning,” Janklow continued. “He would say to her, 'I got a dollar seventy-five. I need ten cents for the bus, ten cents for the subway, a quarter for a sandwich,' and he would give her the rest. They were that close to the edge.”

7.

Now contrast that experience with the experience of someone who, like Mort Janklow, was born in the 1930s.

Take a look at the following chart, which shows the birthrates in the United States from 1910 to 1950. In 1915, there are almost three million babies. In 1935, that number drops by almost six hundred thousand, and then, within a decade and a half, the number is back over three million again. To put it in more precise terms, for every thousand Americans, there were 29.5 babies born in 1915; 18.7 babies born in 1935; and 24.1 babies born in 1950. The decade of 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 Total Births Births per 1,000 2,777,000 30.1 2,965,000 29.5 2,950,000 27.7 2,909,000 25.1 2,618,000 21.3 2,377,000 18.7 2,559,000 19.4 2,858,000 20.4 3,632,000 24.1 the 1930s is what is called a “demographic trough.” In response to the economic hardship of the Depression, families simply stopped having children, and as a result, the generation born during that decade was markedly smaller than both the generation that preceded it and the generation that immediately followed it.

Here is what the economist H. Scott Gordon once wrote about the particular benefits of being one of those people born in a small generation:

When he opens his eyes for the first time, it is in a spacious hospital, well-appointed to serve the wave that preceded him. The staff is generous with their time, since they have little to do while they ride out the brief period of calm until the next wave hits. When he comes to school age, the magnificent buildings are already there to receive him; the ample staff of teachers welcomes him with open arms. In high school, the basketball team is not as good as it was but there is no problem getting time on the gymnasium floor. The university is a delightful place; lots of room in the classes and residences, no crowding in the cafeteria, and the professors are solicitous. Then he hits the job market. The supply of new entrants is low, and the demand is high, because there is a large wave coming behind him providing a strong demand for the goods and services of his potential employers.

In New York City, the early 1930s cohort was so small that class sizes were at least half of what they had been twenty-five years earlier. The schools were new, built for the big generation that had come before, and the teachers had what in the Depression was considered a high-status job.

“The New York City public schools of the 1940s were considered the best schools in the country,” says Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University who has written widely on the city's educational history. “There was this generation of educators in the thirties and forties who would have been in another time and place college professors. They were brilliant, but they couldn't get the jobs they wanted, and public teaching was what they did because it was security and it had a pension and you didn't get laid off.”

The same dynamic benefited the members of that generation when they went off to college. Here is Ted Friedman, one of the top litigators in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Flom, he grew up poor, the child of struggling Jewish immigrants.

“My options were City College and the University of Michigan,” Friedman said. City College was free, and Michiganthen, as now, one of the top universities in the United Stateswas $450 a year. “And the thing was, after the first year, you could get a scholarship if your grades were high,” Friedman said. “So it was only the first year I had to pay that, if I did well.” Friedman's first inclination was to stay in New York. “Well, I went to City College for one day, I didn't like it. I thought, This is going to be four more years of Bronx Science [the high school he had attended], and came home, packed my bags, and hitch hiked to Ann Arbor.” He went on:

I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket from the summer. I was working the Catskills to make enough money to pay the four-hundred-fifty-dollar tuition, and I had some left over. Then there was this fancy restaurant in Ann Arbor where I got a job waiting tables. I also worked the night shift at River Rouge, the big Ford plant. That was real money. It wasn't so hard to get that job. The factories were looking for people. I had another job too, which paid me the best pay I ever had before I became a lawyer, which was working in construction. During the summer, in Ann Arbor, we built the Chrysler proving grounds. I worked there a few summers during law school. Those jobs were really high paying, probably because you worked so much overtime.

Think about this story for a moment. The first lesson is that Friedman was willing to work hard, take responsibility for himself, and put himself through school. But the second, perhaps more important lesson is that he hap-

pened to come along at a time in America when if you were willing to work hard, you could take responsibility for yourself and put yourself through school. Friedman was, at the time, what we would today call “economically disadvantaged.” He was an inner-city kid from the Bronx, neither of whose parents went to college. But look at how easy it was for him to get a good education. He graduated from his public high school in New York at a time when New York City public schools were the envy of the world. His first option, City College, was free, and his second option, the University of Michigan, cost just $450and the admissions process was casual enough, apparently, that he could try one school one day and the other the next.

And how did he get thereHe hitchhiked, with the money that he made in the summer in his pocket, and when he arrived, he immediately got a series of really good jobs to help pay his way, because the factories were “looking for people.” And of course they were: they had to feed the needs of the big generation just ahead of those born in the demographic trough of the 1930s, and the big generation of baby boomers coming up behind them. The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young wouldbe lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

Today, Mort Janklow has an office high above Park Avenue filled with gorgeous works of modern arta Dubuffet, an Anselm Kiefer. He tells hilarious stories.

(“My mother had two sisters. One lived to be ninetynine and the other died at ninety. The ninety-nine-yearold was a smart woman. She married my Uncle Al, who was the chief of sales for Maidenform. Once I said to him, 'What's the rest of the country like, Uncle Al?' And he said, 'Kiddo. When you leave New York, every place is Bridgeport.' ”) He gives the sense that the world is his for the taking. “I've always been a big risk taker,” he says. “When I built the cable company, in the early stages, I was making deals where I would have been bankrupt if I hadn't pulled it off. I had confidence that I could make it work.”

Mort Janklow went to New York City public schools when they were at their best. Maurice Janklow went to New York City public schools when they were at their most overcrowded. Mort Janklow went to Columbia University Law School, because demographic trough babies have their pick of selective schools. Maurice Janklow went to Brooklyn Law School, which was as good as an immigrant child could do in 1919. Mort Janklow sold his cable business for tens of millions of dollars. Maurice Janklow closed titles for twenty-five dollars. The story of the Janklows tells us that the meteoric rise of Joe Flom could not have happened at just any time. Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.

“My mother was coherent until the last five or six months of her life,” MortJanklow said. “And in her delirium she talked about things that she'd never talked about before. She shed tears over her friends dying in the 1918 flu epidemic. That generationmy parents' generationlived through a lot. They lived through that epidemic, which took, whatten percent of the world's population. Panic in the streets. Friends dying. And then the First World War, then the Depression, then the Second World War. They didn't have much of a chance. That was a very tough period. My father would have been much more successful in a different kind of world.”

Lesson Number Three:The Garment Industry and Meaningful Work

8.

In 1889, Louis and Regina Borgenicht boarded an ocean liner in Hamburg bound for America. Louis was from Galacia, in what was then Poland. Regina was from a small town in Hungary. They had been married only a few years and had one small child and a second on the way. For the thirteen-day journey, they slept on straw mattresses on a deck above the engine room, hanging tight to their bunk beds as the ship pitched and rolled. They knew one person in New York: Borgenicht's sister, Sallie, who had immigrated ten years before. They had enough money to last a few weeks, at best. Like so many other immigrants to America in those years, theirs was a leap of faith.

Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went to his sister's fish store on Ludlow Street and persuaded her to give him a consignment of herring on credit. He set up shop on the sidewalk with two barrels of fish, hopping back and forth between them and chanting in German:

For frying For baking For cooking Good also for eating Herring will do for every meal, And for every class!

By the end of the week, he had cleared $8. By the second week, $13. Those were considerable sums. But Louis and Regina could not see how selling herring on the street would lead to a constructive business. Louis then decided to try being a pushcart peddler. He sold towels and tablecloths, without much luck. He switched to notebooks, then bananas, then socks and stockings. Was there really a future in pushcarts Regina gave birth to a second child, a daughter, and Louis's urgency grew. He now had four mouths to feed.

The answer came to him after five long days of walking up and down the streets of the Lower East Side, just as he was about to give up hope. He was sitting on an overturned box, eating a late lunch of the sandwiches Regina had made for him. It was clothes. Everywhere around him stores were openingsuits, dresses, overalls, shirts, skirts, blouses, trousers, all made and ready to be worn.

Coming from a world where clothing was sewn at home by hand or made to order by tailors, this was a revelation. “To me the greatest wonder in this was not the mere quantity of garmentsalthough that was a miracle in itself“ Borgenicht would write years later, after he became a prosperous manufacturer of women's and children's clothing, ”but the fact that in America even poor people could save all the dreary, time-consuming labor of making their own clothes simply by going into a store and walking out with what they needed. There was a field to go into, a field to thrill to.”

Borgenicht took out a small notebook. Everywhere he went, he wrote down what people were wearing and what was for salemenswear, women's wear, children's wear. He wanted to find a “novel” item, something that people would wear that was not being sold in the stores. For four more days he walked the streets. On the evening of the final day as he walked toward home, he saw a half dozen girls playing hopscotch. One of the girls was wearing a tiny embroidered apron over her dress, cut low in the front with a tie in the back, and it struck him, suddenly, that in his previous days of relentlessly inventorying the clothing shops of the Lower East Side, he had never seen one of those aprons for sale.

He came home and told Regina. She had an ancient sewing machine that they had bought upon their arrival in America. The next morning, he went to a dry-goods store on Hester Street and bought a hundred yards of gingham and fifty yards of white crossbar. He came back to their tiny apartment and laid the goods out on the dining room table. Regina began to cut the ginghamsmall sizes for toddlers, larger for small childrenuntil she had forty aprons. She began to sew. At midnight, she went to bed and Louis took up where she had left off. At dawn, she rose and began cutting buttonholes and adding buttons. By ten in the morning, the aprons were finished. Louis gathered them up over his arm and ventured out onto Hester Street.

“Children's aprons! Little girls' aprons! Colored ones, ten cents. White ones, fifteen cents! Little girls' aprons!”

By one o'clock, all forty were gone.

“Ma, we've got our business,” he shouted out to Regina, after running all the way home from Hester Street.

He grabbed her by the waist and began swinging her around and around.

“You've got to help me,” he cried out. “We'll work together! Ma, this is our business”

9.

Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.

Louis Borgenicht, for example, left the impoverished home of his parents at age twelve to work as a salesclerk in a general store in the Polish town of Brzesko. When the opportunity came to work in Schnittwaren Handlung (literally, the handling of cloth and fabrics or “piece goods,” as they were known), he jumped at it. “In those days, the piece-goods man was clothier to the world,” he writes, “and of the three fundamentals required for life in that simple society, food and shelter were humble. Clothing was the aristocrat. Practitioners of the clothing art, dealers in wonderful cloths from every corner of Europe, traders who visited the centers of industry on their annual buying toursthese were the merchant princes of my youth. Their voices were heard, their weight felt.”

Borgenicht worked in piece goods for a man named Epstein, then moved on to a store in neighboring Jaslow called Brandstatter's. It was there that the young Borgenicht learned the ins and outs of all the dozens of different varieties of cloth, to the point where he could run his hand over a fabric and tell you the thread count, the name of the manufacturer, and its place of origin. A few years later, Borgenicht moved to Hungary and met Regina. She had been running a dressmaking business since the age of sixteen. Together they opened a series of small piecegoods stores, painstakingly learning the details of smallbusiness entrepreneurship.

Borgenicht's great brainstorm that day on the upturned box on Hester Street, then, did not come from nowhere. He was a veteran of Schnittwaren Handlung, and his wife was a seasoned dressmaker. This was their field. And at the same time as the Borgenichts set up shop inside their tiny apartment, thousands of other Jewish immigrants were doing the same thing, putting their sewing and dressmaking and tailoring skills to use, to the point where by 1900, control of the garment industry had passed almost entirely into the hands of the Eastern European newcomers. As Borgenicht puts it, the Jews "bit deep into the welcoming land and worked like madmen at what they knew.30 Today, at a time when New York is at the center of an enormous and diversified metropolitan area, it is easy to forget the significance of the set of skills that immi grants like the Borgenichts brought to the New World. From the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century, the garment trade was the largest and most economically vibrant industry in the city. More people worked making clothes in New York than at anything else, and more clothes were manufactured in New York than in any other city in the world. The distinctive buildings that still stand on the lower half of Broadway in Manhattanfrom the big tenand fifteen-story industrial warehouses in the twenty blocks below Times Square to the cast-iron lofts of S0H0 and Tribecawere almost all built to house coat makers and hatmakers and lingerie man ufacturers and huge rooms of men and women hunched over sewing machines. To come to New York City in the 1890s with a background in dressmaking or sewing or Schnittwaren Handlung was a stroke of extraordinary good fortune. It was like showing up in Silicon Valley in 1986 with ten thousand hours of computer programming already under your belt.

“There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills,” says the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. “T o exploit that opportunity, you had to have certain virtues, and those immigrants worked hard. They sacrificed. They scrimped and saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remember that the garment industry in those years was growing by leaps and bounds. The economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed.”

Louis and Regina Borgenicht and the thousands of others who came over on the boats with them were given a golden opportunity. And so were their children and grandchildren, because the lessons those garment workers brought home with them in the evenings turned out to be critical for getting ahead in the world.

10.

The day after Louis and Regina Borgenicht sold out their first lot of forty aprons, Louis made his way to H. B. Claflin and Company. Claflin was a dry-goods “commission” house, the equivalent of Brandstatter's back in Poland. There, Borgenicht asked for a salesman who spoke German, since his English was almost nonexistent. He had in his hand his and Regina's life savings$125and with that money, he bought enough cloth to make ten dozen aprons. Day and night, he and Regina cut and sewed. He sold all ten dozen in two days. Back he went to Claflin for another round. They sold those too. Before long, he and Regina hired another immigrant just off the boat to help with the children so Regina could sew full-time, and then another to serve as an apprentice. Louis ventured uptown as far as Harlem, selling to the mothers in the tenements. He rented a storefront on Sheriff Street, with living quarters in the back. He hired three more girls, and bought sewing machines for all of them. He became known as “the apron man.” He and Regina were selling aprons as fast as they could make them.

Before long, the Borgenichts decided to branch out. They started making adult aprons, then petticoats, then women's dresses. By January of 1892, the Borgenichts had twenty people working for them, mostly immigrant Jews like themselves. They had their own factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a growing list of customers, including a store uptown owned by another Jewish immigrant family, the Bloomingdale brothers. Keep in mind the Borgenichts had been in the country for only three years at this point. They barely spoke English. And they weren't rich yet by any stretch of the imagination. Whatever profit they made got plowed back into their business, and Borgenicht says he had only $200 in the bank. But already he was in charge of his own destiny.

This was the second great advantage of the garment industry. It wasn't just that it was growing by leaps and bounds. It was also explicitly entrepreneurial. Clothes weren't made in a single big factory. Instead, a number of established firms designed patterns and prepared the fabric, and then the complicated stitching and pressing and button attaching were all sent out to small contractors. And if a contractor got big enough, or ambitious enough, he started designing his own patterns and preparing his own fabric. By 1913, there were approximately sixteen thousand separate companies in New York City's garment business, many just like the Borgenichts' shop on Sheriff Street.

“The threshold for getting involved in the business was very low. It's basically a business built on the sewing machine, and sewing machines don't cost that much,” says Daniel Soyer, a historian who has written widely on the garment industry. “So you didn't need a lot of capital. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was probably fifty dollars to buy a machine or two. All you had to do to be a contractor was to have a couple sewing machines, some irons, and a couple of workers. The profit margins were very low but you could make some money.”

Listen to how Borgenicht describes his decision to expand beyond aprons:

From my study of the market I knew that only three men were making children's dresses in 1890. One was an East Side tailor near me, who made only to order, while the other two turned out an expensive product with which I had no desire at all to compete. I wanted to make “popular price” stuffwash dresses, silks, and woolens. It was my goal to produce dresses that the great mass of the people could afford, dresses that wouldfrom the business anglesell equally well to both large and small, city and country stores. With Regina's helpshe always had excellent taste, and judgmentI made up a line of samples. Displaying them to all my “old” customers and friends, I hammered home every pointmy dresses would save mothers endless work, the materials and sewing were as good and probably better than anything that could be done at home, the price was right for quick disposal.

On one occasion, Borgenicht realized that his only chance to undercut bigger firms was to convince the wholesalers to sell cloth to him directly, eliminating the middleman. He went to see a Mr. Bingham at Lawrence and Company, a “tall, gaunt, white-bearded Yankee with steel-blue eyes.” There the two of them were, the immigrant from rural Poland, his eyes ringed with fatigue, facing off in his halting English against the imperious Yankee. Borgenicht said he wanted to buy forty cases of cashmere. Bingham had never before sold to an individual company, let alone a shoestring operation on Sheriff Street.

“You have a hell of a cheek coming in here and asking me for favors!” Bingham thundered. But he ended up saying yes.

What Borgenicht was getting in his eighteen-hour days was a lesson in the modern economy. He was learning market research. He was learning manufacturing. He was learning how to negotiate with imperious Yankees. He was learning how to plug himself into popular culture in order to understand new fashion trends.

The Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York in the same period didn't have that advantage. They didn't have a skill specifie to the urban economy. They went to work as day laborers and domestics and construction workersjobs where you could show up for work every day for thirty years and never learn market research and manufacturing and how to navigate the popular culture and how to negotiate with the Yankees, who ran the world.

Or consider the fate of the Mexicans who immigrated to California between 1900 and the end of the 1920s to work in the fields of the big fruit and vegetable growers. They simply exchanged the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California. “The conditions in the garment industry were every bit as bad,” Soyer goes on. “But as a garment worker, you were closer to the center of the industry. If you are working in a field in California, you have no clue what's happening to the produce when it gets on the truck. If you are working in a small garment shop, your wages are low, and your conditions are terrible, and your hours are long, but you can see exactly what the successful people are doing, and you can see how you can set up your own job.”“”

When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets.

Those three things autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and rewardare, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make * I realize that it seems strange to refer to American Jewish immigrants as lucky when the families and relatives they left behind in Europe were on the verge of extermination at the hands of the Nazis. Borgenicht, in fact, unwittingly captures this poignancy in his memoir, which was published in 1942. He called it The Happiest Man. After numerous chapters brimming with optimism and cheer, the book ends with the sobering reality of Nazi-dominated Europe. Had The Happiest Man been published in 1945, when the full story of the Holocaust was known, one imagines it would have had a very different title.

that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you takeFm guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that's worth more to most of us than money.

Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur, and the miracle of the garment industryas cutthroat and grim as it waswas that it allowed people like the Borgenichts, just off the boat, to find something meaningful to do as well.“” When Louis Borgenicht came home after first seeing that child's apron, he danced a jig. He hadn't sold anything yet. He was still penniless and desperate, and he knew that to make something of his idea was going to require years of backbreaking labor. But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him. Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn't recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

* Just to be clear: to say that garment work was meaningful is not to romanticize it. It was incredibly hard and often miserable labor. The The most important consequence of the miracle of the garment industry, though, was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced. Imagine what it must have been like to watch the meteoric rise of Regina and Louis Borgenicht through the eyes of one of their offspring. They learned the same lesson that little Alex W illiams would learn nearly a century latera lesson crucial to those who wanted to tackle the upper reaches of a profession like law or medicine: if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.

11.

In 1982, a sociology graduate student named Louise Farkas went to visit a number of nursing homes and residential hotels in New York City and Miami Beach. She was looking for people like the Borgenichts, or, more precisely, the children of people like the Borgenichts, who had come to New York in the great wave of Jewish immigration at the turn of the last century. And for each of the people she interviewed, she constructed a family tree showing what conditions were inhuman. One survey in the 1 8 9 0 s put the average workweek at eighty-four hours, which comes to twelve hours a day. At times, it was higher. “During the busy season,” David Von Drehle writes in Triangle: The Fire That Changed Amierca, “it was not unusual to find workers on stools or broken chairs, bent over their sewing or hot irons, from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M., a hundred or more hours a week. Indeed, it was said that during the busy seasons the grinding hum of sewing machines never entirely ceased on the Lower East Side, day or night.”

Mi a line of parents and children and grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren did for a living.

Here is her account of “subject #18”:

A Russian tailor artisan comes to America, takes to the needle trade, works in a sweat shop for a small salary. Later takes garments to finish at home with the help of his wife and older children. In order to increase his salary he works through the night. Later he makes a garment and sells it on New York streets. He accumulates some capital and goes into a business venture with his sons. They open a shop to create men's garments. The Russian tailor and his sons become men's suit manufacturers supplying several men's stores The sons and the father become prosperous The sons' children become educated professionals.

Tailor/Garment Maker Garment Maker Garment Maker Garment Maker Lawyer Lawyer Here's another. It's a tanner who emigrated from Poland in the late nineteenth century.

Leather Tanner Bag Manufacturer Bag Manufacturer. Bag Manufacturer Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Lawyer Lawyer Lawyer 152 Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.

Ted Friedman, the prominent litigator in the 1970s and 1980s, remembers as a child going to concerts with his mother at Carnegie Hall. They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets“Mary got a quarter,” Friedman says. “There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn't know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month.”“”

Friedman's mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the age of fifteen and had become a prominent garment union organizer, and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professions.

* The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously “the people of the book.” There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

What did Joe Flom's father doHe sewed shoulder pads for women's dresses. What did Robert Oppenheimer's father doHe was a garment manufacturer, like Louis Borgenicht. One flight up from Flom's corner office at Skadden, Arps is the office of Barry Garfinkel, who has been at Skadden, Arps nearly as long as Flom and who for many years headed the firm's litigation department. What did Garfinkel's mother doShe was a milliner. She made hats at home. What did two of Louis and Regina Borgenicht's sons doThey went to law school, and no less than nine of their grandchildren ended up as doctors and lawyers as well.

Here is the most remarkable of Farkas's family trees. It belongs to a Jewish family from Romania who had a small grocery store in the Old Country and then came to New York and opened another, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is the most elegant answer to the question of where all the Joe Floms came from.

Small Grocer Supermarket Supermarket Supermarket Supermarket Supermarket Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Psychologist Doctor Doctor Lawyer Lawyer Lawyer Doctor

12.

Ten blocks north of the Skadden, Arps headquarters in midtown Manhattan are the offices of Joe Flom's great rival, the law firm generally regarded as the finest in the world.

It is headquartered in the prestigious office building known as Black Rock. To get hired there takes a small miracle. Unlike New York's other major law firms, all of which have hundreds of attorneys scattered around the major capitals of the world, it operates only out of that single Manhattan building. It turns down much more business than it accepts. Unlike every one of its competitors, it does not bill by the hour. It simply names a fee. Once, while defending Kmart against a takeover, the firm billed $20 million for two weeks' work. Kmart paidhappily. If its attorneys do not outsmart you, they will outwork you, and if they can't outwork you, they'll win through sheer intimidation. There is no firm in the world that has made more money, lawyer for lawyer, over the past two decades. On Joe Flom's wall, next to pictures of Flom with George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, there is a picture of him with the rival firm's managing partner.

No one rises to the top of the New York legal profession unless he or she is smart and ambitious and hardworking, and clearly the four men who founded the Black Rock firm fit that description. But we know far more than that, don't weSuccess is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities, and at this point, after examining the lives of Bill Joy and Bill Gates, pro hockey players and geniuses, and Joe Flom, the Janklows, and the Borgenichts, it shouldn't be hard to figure out where the perfect lawyer comes from.

This person will have been born in a demographic trough, so as to have had the best of New York's public schools and the easiest time in the job market. He will be Jewish, of course, and so, locked out of the old-line downtown law firms on account of his “antecedents.” This person's parents will have done meaningful work in the garment business, passing on to their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward. A good schoolalthough it doesn't have to be a great schoolwill have been attended. He need not have been the smartest in the class, only smart enough.

In fact, we can be even more precise. Just as there is a perfect birth date for a nineteenth-century business tycoon, and a perfect birth date for a software tycoon, there is a perfect birth date for a New York Jewish lawyer as well. It's 1930, because that would give the lawyer the benefit of a blessedly small generation. It would also make him forty years of age in 1970, when the revolution in the legal world first began, which translates to a healthy fifteen-year Hamburg period in the takeover business while the white-shoe lawyers lingered, oblivious, over their two-martini lunches. If you want to be a great New York lawyer, it is an advantage to be an outsider, and it is an advantage to have parents who did meaningful work, and, better still, it is an advantage to have been born in the early 1930s. But if you have all three advantageson top of a good dose of ingenuity and drivethen that's an unstoppable combination. That's like being a hockey player born on January 1.

The Black Rock law firm is W achtell, Lipton, Rosen 8t Katz. The firm's first partner was Herbert Wachtell. He was born in 1931. He grew up in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union housing across from Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father was in the ladies' undergarment business with his brothers, on the sixth floor of what is now a fancy loft at Broadway and Spring Street in SoHo. He went to New York City public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School.

The second partner was Martin Lipton. He was born in 1931. His father was a manager at a factory. He was a descendant of Jewish immigrants. He attended public schools in Jersey City, then the University of Pennsylvania, then New York University Law School.

The third partner was Leonard Rosen. He was born in 1930. He grew up poor in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father worked in the garment district in Manhattan as a presser. He went to New York City public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School. The fourth partner was George Katz. He was born in 1931. He grew up in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment in the Bronx. His parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father sold insurance. His grandfather, who lived a few blocks away, was a sewer in the garment trade, doing piecework out of his house. He went to New York City public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School.

Imagine that we had met any one of these four fresh out of law school, sitting in the elegant waiting room at Mudge Rose next to a blue-eyed Nordic type from the “right”

background. W e'd all have bet on the Nordic type. And we would have been wrong, because the Katzes and the Rosens and the Liptons and the Wachtells and the Floms had something that the Nordic type did not. Their worldtheir culture and generation and family historygave them the greatest of opportunities.