Eminentoes / You're All Right, Jacques!
Brooks, David
e are truly living in the age of Souter. It is an age in which Robert Bork can't get on the W Supreme Court, but gray decencies such as David Souter and Anthony_ Kennedy pass in without a peep. It...
...Attali bought 600 Norman Foster–designed desks at $900 apiece...
...1 t is Attali's misfortune to have a face that is smug even at rest...
...At the outbreak of the Algerian war he moved with his family to France, where Jacques's brainpower (and his father's growing wealth) gained him entry into elite French schools, including the Ecole National d'Administration, where a few dozen students a year are taught that they are brilliant and then sent off to run France...
...Critics have not failed to notice his sloppiness...
...In 1982 Attali wrote a history of time, in which he neglected to put quotation marks around the writings of other French philosophers...
...It lacks much in the way of a chin, and his mouth, indented, falls naturally into a shape that suggests superciliousness...
...Much of its money goes, after rigorous bureaucratic controls, into the pockets of European consultants who are friendly with TACIS officials or into the miasma of the ex-Soviet public sector...
...I now look for him in paintings of the Last Supper...
...It will become Japan's granary, like Poland was for seventeenth-century Flanders...
...Under Attali, the EBRD was vain, daring, overambitious, passionate, and disorganized...
...One gets the impression he mousses each hair individually...
...A French bureaucrat once said that during the Elysee Palace years, staffers used to scamper after Attali trying to chase down his ideas with great butterfly nets...
...He has dragged the Westernnations into cleaning up the deadly Soviet power plants...
...People will call me a megalomaniac," he reasoned, "but let me tell you my dream for this bank: to make it a kind of security council for Europe...
...In Verbatim, he allegedly lifted passages of Mitterrand's wisdom from a forthcoming set of conversations with Elie Wiesel...
...Despite intense lobbying he couldn't persuade industrial countries to put up the billions of dollars required to build the project...
...His resignation was built around the sentence: "I know of no action that I have taken that in any way could be worthy of reproach...
...I71...
...He has published a history of the Warburg banking family, a meditation on "the political economy of music," and a daring novel entitled The First Day After Me—as if anybody could be interested in a world that no longer contains Jacques Attali...
...So the pictures depict Attali perched between Mitterrand and Thatcher, between Mitterrand and Gorbachev...
...Attali reportedly met Francois Mitterrand for the first time at a Paris disco in 1968, and began lecturing him about the effects of oil price fluctuations...
...Attali was born in Algeria in 1943, the son of a then-poor Jewish perfume merchant...
...The European governments that are keen to rein in Attali have just finished throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into serial HDTV technology, which, as George Gilder wrote years ago, was obsolete on the drawing board...
...The photographs he has distributed to the French press to publicize his current bestseller, Verbatim, capture much about the man...
...He can be seen wherever the air is thick with consultation, with his matching Hermes tie and kerchief, his gold-plated Benjamin Franklin glasses, his subtle cuffs...
...Attali is, in weird ways, just like the East European leaders he has to deal with...
...He is arrogant...
...There is about him a whiff of corruption—he reportedly charged $30,000 of personal expenses on his EBRD credit card, including trips to racy night clubs...
...Britain supported it because it would be located in London, and Mitterrand supported it because Attali did...
...He is just about the only European political leader who has upbraided the European governments for their cruel treatment of the post-Communist nations...
...The $60 million for the EBRD headquarters were supplied by Britain, causing the tabloid the Sun to editorialize, "The budget director of the bank is a Mr...
...Pissaloux...
...I want to act as a theoretician for politicians," Attali once said...
...He was among the first to publicize opportunities in the Central Asian republics...
...Though a socialist, he is a one-man rebellion against the egalitarianism of souls...
...The kitchen and wine cellar of the bank acquired legendary status, as did the mini-skirted receptionists...
...There was talk that it would become Europe's central bank...
...The EBRD itself was another of Attali's schemes...
...You miss the first five minutes of a conversation with him because you are so dazzled by how well dressed he is...
...A ttali is a difficult, daring, and remarkable jerk, the sort of nonstandard issue that exposes the myth that technocracies serve reason, not the individual...
...My model in America was Kissinger...
...Now the flamboyant Jacques Attali has been ousted as president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the only thing we know about his successor is that you won't be able to remember anything about him five minutes after you read about his appointment...
...He has protested vigorously as the EC nations preserve trade barriers to the east...
...Then he boasted that it would become the world's largest merchant bank...
...He didn't get any laureates, but by dangling large salaries (and a diplomatic tax rate of 10 percent) he quickly filled 700 positions...
...He provided nine restaurants...
...When Mitterrand became president of France, he seems to have realized that he had come to power lacking a think tank (Reagan and Thatcher had theirs) and so hired Attali...
...All over the taxpayers...
...Every regulatory i is dotted and every t is crossed...
...In a recent book he sketched out his views of America: "The United States will find itself in a situation of being symbolically secondary...
...To staff the EBRD would be simple, Attali said...
...But if wasting money were grounds for dismissal, the World Bank building would be a windowless shell...
...And we don't have so many outrageous personalities that we can spare the likes of Jacques Attali and still expect to wake up to an entertaining world...
...Yet if all public servants were as entertaining as Attali, I would happily pay my tax bill...
...He is a pianist, a collector of antiques, a film-maker, an avid tennis player, a husband to a former model, and the father of two children, who are named Jeremie and Bethsabee...
...The movie version is to star Gerard Depardieu...
...One of the bank's first projects was to help fund the link-up between Czech airlines and Air France, which Mitterrand had appointed Attali's twin brother Bernard to head in 1988 (Bernard's first job in the airline business...
...The European Community has another program to aid the east, TACIS, whose directors are only quietly arrogant and who are never sloppy...
...He is aptly named because that is what Europe keeps doing...
...Then he said it would be an organ to launch a new Marshall Plan...
...The program is regarded as a pathetic joke across the former Soviet Union and among Western officials...
...In reality, the anti-Attali push, and the obvious glee with which it was conducted, was an affair of personality, a triumph of grayness over flair...
...Not without reason has he been called "God's Sherpa...
...Stuck in the middle of a lovely photo of Bush, Thatcher, and Mulroney at a G-7 summit is the beaming face of Jacques Attali...
...Few other countries could figure out exactly what it was supposed to do...
...Under his successor, it will be rationalistic, meticulous, and irrelevant...
...The fall of Attali is a tragedy not because he was doing a good job, but because it makes the world a duller place, and represents another triumph of technocracy over charisma...
...The book is supposed to consist of extracts from the sayings and judgments of Francois Mitterrand 1981-86, but Attali rarely strays far from autobiography...
...Like French .foreign policy, Attali is ugly, yet vain...
...It is an age in which the likes of Margaret Thatcher are brought low by decent John Major and his band of forgettable men...
...I will just get hold of the lists of Nobel Laureates in economics and choose from them...
...In an age in which only modesty is considered tasteful, Attali has set out to be a great man, to surround himself with great things, and to travel in great style...
...ut le monde multilateral has a B strict code of decorum, and Attali was too much the arriviste...
...He is sloppy—he double-billed his expenses for a $10,000 flight to Tokyo...
...0 n the world stage, Attali has been a wonderful presence...
...after a string of particularly bad books, Le Monde remarked that Attali isn't so much prolific as incontinent...
...He spent $800,000 on private planes for himself and $400,000 on artwork...
...It was this sort of Socialist thinking that made Attali an odd choice ten years later to lead Eastern Europe out of socialism...
...Though he rarely gets to bed before midnight, he rises at 4:00 so that he can write for three hours before heading off to work...
...He is famous for accepting invitations to three dinner parties an evening in Paris, and showing up at each...
...He spent $1.1 million on a marble lobby for his bank, amidst other lavish expenditures...
...The global finance ministers who engineered the ouster of Attali did so on the grounds that he was wasting money...
...The plan instituted massive nationalization of banks and industry, protectionism, reflation, longer vacations for French workers, and so on...
...One of his grander notions was a system of dams and dikes to stem the flooding in Bangladesh...
...Already it can't sell anything to Japan but agricultural products...
...Attali was fired not because he was bad for Eastern Europe, but because he was bad for the smooth functioning of the EBRD bureaucracy...
...Nor could Attali...
...Installed in the Elysee Palace in the office separating Mitterrand's office from the rest of the world (at a desk designed for Napoleon), Attali helped devise the 1981 Socialist economic plan that caused a massive capital flight from France and would have destroyed the French economy had not Mitterrand eventually jettisoned it...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
