The Revolutionary

"It would be nice for your story if I tell you that I did. I don't remember. I just have never seen in my mind any differences. Now, would I feel this way if I were black, or poor, or handicapped, I don't know. But I get on the subway and I don't feel any different from anyone else, and I don't think I did back then."

In the same conversation, Bloomberg mentioned the only movie he has ever financed, made from an Arthur Miller novel called "Focus." In Bloomberg's telling, "it was the story of a WASPy guy between the wars. He had to get a pair of glasses, and people started asking him if he was Jewish. 'Are you one of them?' they'd say. It was amazing how much a pair of glasses can change things. And then, in the end, the guy answers, 'Yes, I am one of them,' which showed how we really all are connected, we are a single country." It is not difficult to see why the story resonated with Bloomberg, who may say he neither felt nor feels different, but whose life experience clearly shows that he understands things that can divide. That he wants to overcome such divisions of religion, race and class is a tribute to his determination to make the most, and the best, of everything.

"The patriotism is real," says Marjorie Bloomberg Tiven. "It was part of what we were taught, and what we believed: that we were among the luckiest people in the world. My father was one generation away from an immigrant experience. There was an intense appreciation of the security, the physical security, that we felt." Service was crucial. "I remember when my father was called for jury duty and apparently told the judge that he was busy at work and had to be excused. He was in the court at Scollay Square … He told us this story at the dinner table. The judge said to him, 'Mr. Bloomberg, if you were the defendant, who would you like on the jury? One of those bums out there, or someone like yourself?' The lesson was that the system only works if everybody does his part and doesn't duck out of service. These are the values Mike was lucky enough to grow up with."

He knows it, and is grateful, and he relishes a life that emerged from an age when meritocracy and discrimination were at war. To Bloomberg, the question again: why are you so driven? "I enjoy it," he says, with emphasis. "I've never not liked a day of work. I'm the luckiest guy in the world … If you love what you're doing, you never want it to end."

From high school, Bloomberg went to Johns Hopkins (where, he noted in his memoir, he was "the first Jew to be admitted to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity"), took an engineering degree and then ended up at Harvard Business School. His mother was crucial in this era of his life, as in all others. "It's a good thing she was 20 minutes away" in Medford, Bloomberg says, "because I couldn't have typed my own papers." It was 1966 when he got his M.B.A., but the "Johnny Tremain" and Paul Revere devotee decided to join the military before seeking a larger fortune. He was accepted into Officer Candidate School, but the doctors discovered he had flat feet. "I've always felt a little lacking, a little embarrassed, that I wasn't in the Army," he says. Before long he was at Salomon Brothers, a meritocratic trading firm on Wall Street. He was on his way.

Jim Blume, now an investment adviser in Berkeley, Calif., got to know Bloomberg at Harvard, and they were close when they were young together in New York. They shared a summer house in the Hamptons (Bloomberg initiated the idea and organized the share). "He was a trader and I was a research analyst," Blume says. "And this time he called me up and said, 'Blume—what's going on? Stay with me a moment' … He put me on hold and three minutes later came back and said, 'Now, what did you want?' I said, 'Bloomberg, you called me!' He was always in that state of perpetual motion, always got a deal going."