What did the Cs lack, though? Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. The Cs were squandered talent. But they didn’t need to be.
6.
Today, Chris Langan lives in rural Missouri on a horse farm. He moved there a few years ago, after he got married. He is in his fifties but looks many years younger. He has the build of a linebacker, thick through the chest, with enormous biceps. His hair is combed straight back from his forehead. He has a neat, graying moustache and aviator-style glasses. If you look into his eyes, you can see the intelligence burning behind them.
“A typical day is, I get up and make coffee. I go in and sit in front of the computer and begin working on whatever I was working on the night before,” he told me not long ago. “I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.”
He had just been reading the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky. There were piles of books in his study. He ordered books from the library all the time. “I always feel that the closer you get to the original sources, the better off you are,” he said.
Langan seemed content. He had farm animals to take care of, and books to read, and a wife he loved. It was a much better life than being a bouncer.
“I don’t think there is anyone smarter than me out there,” he went on. “I have never met anybody like me or never seen even an indication that there is somebody who actually has better powers of comprehension. Never seen it and I don’t think I am going to. I could—my mind is open to the possibility. If anyone should challenge me—‘Oh, I think that I am smarter than you are’—I think I could have them.”
What he said sounded boastful, but it wasn’t really. It was the opposite—a touch defensive. He’d been working for decades now on a project of enormous sophistication—but almost none of what he had done had ever been published much less read by the physicists and philosophers and mathematicians who might be able to judge its value. Here he was, a man with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world. He wasn’t holding forth at academic conferences. He wasn’t leading a graduate seminar at some prestigious university. He was living on a slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cutoff T-shirt. He knew how it looked: it was the great paradox of Chris Langan’s genius.
“I have not pursued mainstream publishers as hard as I should have,” he conceded. “Going around, querying publishers, trying to find an agent. I haven’t done it, and I am not interested in doing it.”
It was an admission of defeat. Every experience he had had outside of his own mind had ended in frustration. He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness’ sake. These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that’s because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone.
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 Condé 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 piecework—doing appliqué 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 breakfast—three 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 Manhattan—working during the days to make ends meet—signed 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. “Why? I 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 Review
—an 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 Arps—both of whom had just been turned down for partner at a major Wall Street law firm—and 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 partners—Morris Kramer—came 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 $1 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 500 company 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 firm—and 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 Bill Joy 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. No 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, I’m going to tell a series of stories from the New York immigrant world that Joe Flom grew up in—of a fellow law student, a father and son named Maurice and Mort Janklow, and an extraordinary couple by the name of Louis and Regina Borgenicht—in the hopes of answering a critical question. What were Joe Flom’s opportunities? Since 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 disadvantages—that 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 Depression—turn 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. “We’re like the lady who only wants her name in the newspaper twice—when 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?
B
ICKEL
: “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” firms—in 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: