The Liberal's Financier

...Russell Baker's Great Mentioner from time to time drops Rohatyn's name as treasury secretary or Federal Reserve chairman in a future Democratic national administration...

...Felix Rohatyn, still chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, was on the front page of the New York Times at the center of another wrangle between Governor Mario Cuomo and Mayor Edward Koch, this one over the best way to use mac's annual surpluses...

...American revival requires that we set aside such "secondary" issues as national health insurance and, oddly linked together, gay rights...

...Carefully read, this small volume should make it clear just how little is to be expected from even the best representatives of our business elite...

...Many Great Society programs, he asserts, "led to uncontrollable spending and threatened to bankrupt our economy...

...Eastern intellectuals, and foreigners...

...In Great Britain, he would probably find a home among the Tory "wets," conservatives who think that Maggie has gone too far in dismantling the welfare state...

...a Democrat with a program that could make the loyal opposition seem thoughtful...

...A fifth of the municipal labor force was laid of f and as a result the city became dirtier, even more unsafe, and meaner in its treatment of the sick, poor and elderly...

...Not unlike Rea-ganomics, mac's program of salvation took income and benefits away from the poor and the working class and enlarged the income and assets of the certifiably unneedy...

...For one thing, he is intelligent, and therefore capable of learning...

...Not only is he a Democrat, he also accepts unions as legitimate institutions, frets over unemployment and urban blight, and, as a refugee from the Nazis, warns that "democracy is fragile...

...Alas, it doesn't take much in Reagan's America to acquire a liberal reputation...

...Again and again, these short takes reiterate their author's confidence that reasonable people can sit down together and strike mutually beneficial bargains, because "In times of upheaval, the passions must be for moderation and not for extremes...

...Why should they have been rescued by mac while the innocent suffered...

...As for the developers and real estate tycoons, theirs was the sort of sacrifice anyone would willingly shoulder: acceptance of generous lax concessions for doing what, in all probability, they would have done in any case...

...His verdict on (The Great Society borders upon caricature: "The Great Society...

...No bankers or bank stockholders were penalized, although their role in financing the city's mounting deficits was pivotal...

...In collaboration with that dedicated acquistor Harold Ge-neen, he brought under International Telephone and Telegraph's corporate umbrella builders, baking companies, secretarial schools, insurance companies, and car rental agencies, among other implausible companions...

...Summoned to public service in 1975 by then Governor Hugh Carey, Rohatyn transferred his superb negotiating skills to the fractious players in the fiscal crisis drama—union leaders, bankers, President Gerald Ford, Congressional influ-entials, and local and state politicians...

...For a third, lie realizes that free markets are less than a cure for every ill...

...An extension of this perspective to the entire country would bode ill for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries...

...Teachers, clerks, health workers, firefighters, police, bridge tenders, bus drivers, and many other specialists who keep New York functioning were compelled to swallow wage cuts and benefit reductions...

...If into the bargain the man is affable, articulateand a keen judgeof food and wine, he becomes, as Jimmy Durante was wont to phrase it, "da toast of the intellectuals"-And the no doubt gratified recipient of George Will's accolade as "the most dangerous man in America...

...It is worth subsidizing blue-collar jobs for ghetto youths because their idleness threatens social stability...

...I am still convinced," he says, "that there has to be a middle road between the liberalism of the 1960s and the Reaganism or Thatcherism of the 1980s...

...However, it is only the absence of a credible democratic Left and mass defect ions by mainstream Democrats from the New Deal and Great Society thai allow Rohatyn to be confused with liberalism...

...Unlike most of his peers in the financial community, too, Rohatyn argues for equity: "When a democratic society does not meet the test of fairness-when, as is now the case, the Administration seems indifferent to fairness-freedom is in jeopardy...

...Transit fares rose...

...On social policy, Rohatyn endorses a good deal of conservative "wisdom...

...As a partner in Lazard Freres, Rohatyn's great specialty has been the conglomerate game...

...For another, he values the opinions of constituencies ignored by Reaganauts-labor leaders...

...As he tells and retells the tale, successful resolution of New York's chronic financial troubles depended upon recognition by all parties of the gravity of the situation, a perception that therapy required cooperation in place of conflict, and the realization that sacrifices by business, labor and ordinary citizens were the key to renewed municipal prosperity...

...Revival in the Northeast and Midwest is urgent because the strain of coexistence between a prosperous Sunbelt and a depressed Frost Belt is too great to long be tolerated by the public...

...An enlightened financier must be as rare as a literate social scientist...

...Low income students were compelled for the first time in its history to pay tuition in the City University...

...If sweet reason and evolving collegiality prevailed in paranoid New York, why not nationally...

...Why did the prudent types at the head of Chase, Citibank, and the other money market institutions continue to fund political improvidence...

...By attempting to reduce the risk, it succeeded in eliminating many of the incentives 10 create wealth...

...aimed at cradle-to-grave security, income transfer, elimination of poverty, pervasive regulation...

...As a model of shared sacrifice, New-York City, Rohatyn to the contrary not-withstanding, severely violates the canons of fairness which he promulgates...

...Among American corporate types, Rohatyn is a rarity...

...A leading exponent of industrial policy, our man advocates a revived Reconstruction Finance Corporation torestructure faltering industries, bring jobs to inner cities and otherwise complement the private sector...

...Mind you, I should much prefer Felix Rohatyn in a high Washington role to the social Darwinists currently in power...

...Much as mac assumed financing tasks beyond the capacity of local investors, the RFC will take risks in the public interest not acceptable by large banks and insurance companies...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman In at least one respect, Thanksgiving was no different from a great many other days in New York...

...And, yes, the scrapbook we now have of Rohatyn's speeches, Congressional testimony and pieces in such periodicals as the New York Review of Books, the Economist and the Times Sunday Magazine, focuses on the lessons of the Big Apple's brush with bankruptcy for New Yorkers as well as their application nationwide...

...No wonder liberals have given Rohatyn good notices...