Last Man Standing on Wall Street

Dozens of books have chronicled the debacles, disasters, villains, and losers that made the Panic of 2008 so expensive and compelling. Winners have been few and far between, and heroes even scarcer. But journalist Duff McDonald believes he's found a winner—and possibly a hero—in Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. In Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase, McDonald, a veteran magazine journalist and contributing editor to New York, traces the life and career of the prickly, tough executive who has emerged as the nation's most prominent banker, and describes how he steered the bank through the crisis.

A podcast of McDonald's conversation with NEWSWEEK's Daniel Gross can be heard here. Listeners can also subscribe to Gross's "Every Day I Read the Book" podcast on iTunes.

Would you describe Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase as both a winner and a hero of the crisis?
Absolutely. If you take the position that Wall Street is a zero-sum game at the end of the day, someone wins business, someone loses it—JPMorgan has absolutely gained market share across the majority of its businesses. Personally, Dimon's profile has certainly improved and risen to greater heights than it's been at before. A hero? The Bear Stearns acquisition in March of '08, even though it wasn't the end of the crisis, had heroic qualities to it. JPMorgan agreed, despite reservations, to step in and take over the assets of a foundering firm. He's emerged with a mix of traits rarely seen—a master of detail and operations, but also an inspiring and charismatic leader who definitely elicits a level of loyalty among subordinates that I'm not sure I've ever seen before.

Dimon's not a flamboyant personality. What's important for readers to know about his background?
He's the grandson of Greek immigrants. His grandfather was a broker, his father was a broker. His isn't a Horatio Alger tale or anything. Jamie grew up on Park Avenue; he went to Browning, which is a private boys' school just off Park Avenue. He went to Tufts and then Harvard Business School, and, as readers of the business press are certainly aware, hooked up with Sandy Weill.

There's this 10- to 15-year period where Weill parlays Commercial Credit, after a series of mergers, into Citigroup. Dimon was there almost every step of the way. What was his role?
When Sandy put his team together in Baltimore at Commercial Credit in the 1980s, he hired a bunch of veterans, including a number of folks who were high-ranking people at Citigroup, at Merrill Lynch, at American Express, and Jamie was only a few years out of Harvard. They called him "the kid," and yet despite that he had an equal, if not a more prominent, voice among the group by virtue of his work, his thoughtfulness, his intelligence and focus on the task at hand. From the beginning he was Sandy's right-hand man, but in a more profound sense than sidekick.

Until they have this famous falling-out in 1998 after the merger with Citigroup.
Travelers, which was the name of their firm at that point, engineered a merger with Citigroup, and that resulted in all sorts of Machiavellian maneuvers—who's on the board, who's not, who's running which department, who's not. A lot of stress had been building in the relationship between Dimon and Weill. And a series of events happens in a fairly quick period of time that results in Weill firing Dimon almost immediately as soon as the merger was consummated.

Dimon then does what is unthinkable to a lot of people on Wall Street: he leaves New York for a regional banking job.
He took several months to decide on his next move, and decided that what he loved was working for big banks, and that was where his strengths were. So he became CEO of Bank One in Chicago, which, while small relative to Citigroup, was still one of the nation's largest banks. He went out there in 2000 and entered on a turnaround strategy, and within four years had sold the company to JPMorgan.

To what degree was JPMorgan Chase really acquiring Jamie Dimon rather than Bank One?
Bill Harrison, who was the CEO of JPMorgan Chase at the time, is quite candid about the fact that while Bank One's retail-banking assets definitely were an addition to their portfolio and their footprint, Jamie was the motivating factor in the deal. The media accounts of his return were almost a sigh of relief: "Ahh, he's back."