John Brooks

John Brooks (December 5, 1920 – July 27, 1993) was a writer and longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, where he worked for many years as a staff writer specializing in financial topics. Brooks was also the author of several books, both fiction, and non-fiction, the best known of which was an examination of the financial shenanigans of the 1960s Wall Street bull market.

John Nixon Brooks was born on December 5, 1920, in New York City but grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He graduated from Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, in 1938 and from Princeton University in 1942. After graduation, Brooks joined the United States Army Air Forces, where he served as communications and radar officer from 1942 until 1945. He was aboard the First United States Army headquarters ship on D-Day during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944.

After leaving the military, Brooks went to work for Time magazine, where he became a contributing editor. He worked at Time for only two years, pining for a chance to write at more length and in a looser style than that dictated by the newsweekly format. In 1949, Brooks got his break. That year he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer – a development he later called the lucky break that made his career. While working at The New Yorker, Brooks also began contributing book reviews to Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.

Brooks was the author of three novels, one – The Big Wheel, published in 1949 – describing a newsmagazine much like Time. He also published ten non-fiction books on business and finance, the subject in which he specialized for The New Yorker. Brooks's best-known books were Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–1938, about the scandal surrounding Wall Street banker Richard Whitney; The Go-Go Years, on the speculative bubble of Wall Street in the 1960s; The Takeover Game, about the merger mania of the 1980s.; and of special note, Business Adventures, which has been cited as Bill Gates' favorite business book. The Go-Go Years earned Brooks the 1974 Gerald Loeb Award for Books.

Brooks also wrote scores of articles and profiles for The New Yorker, many profiling well-known business figures, and written in an informal and erudite style that turned the accounts of bankers and traders into the stuff of drama. Brooks's best-known New Yorker two-part Annals of Business[5][6] article was about Henry Ford II, and the ill-fated introduction of the most famous failed automotive gambit in history, the Edsel. Brooks also wrote widely on other subjects as well, including the government-guaranteed loans to Chrysler Corporation, the public television show Wall Street Week and its creator Louis Rukeyser, an examination of supply-side economics, the banking behemoth Citibank, economist Arthur Laffer, and his Laffer curve, the development of New Jersey's Meadowlands, New York City urban planner Robert Moses, and even the Southern grocery store chain Piggly Wiggly.

Brooks's writing on finance won him three Gerald Loeb Awards and moved Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith to call Brooks's book The Go-Go Years "a small classic in the history of financial insanity." "He was not a breaker of big stories or a shaper of important journalistic institutions," wrote journalist Joseph Nocera, now of The New York Times. "He was a wonderful writer; He was that rarest of birds, a gifted storyteller, with an enviable talent for summing up a character with a single, pithy anecdote or sentence."

Part of Brooks's appeal as a financial journalist was that he wrote for a general-interest publication, The New Yorker. Unlike journalists for more narrowly focused business publications, Brooks realized early on that it was storytelling – and not financial jargon – that would propel readers through his pieces. In his book Once in Golconda, Brooks devoted much of the book to fleshing out the character and peccadilloes of its protagonist, financier Richard Whitney, the aristocratic Morgan broker who headed the New York Stock Exchange but ended up in Sing Sing Prison for his misdeeds.

"Mr. Brooks has convinced me, absolutely, that Richard Whitney ranks in the highest pantheon of American symbols – like Lincoln and Bryan and Melville and Hemingway and Yellow Kid Weil, Buffalo Bill, Horatio Alger, and even Babe Ruth," wrote TK in Harper's magazine, "In him, the upper-class con crested – and America's last chance to do it right the first time ended."

Brooks's tale of easy credit, inflated egos, financial greed, and the end of an era – symbolized by broker Whitney – came to be seen as one of the best accounts of the conditions which led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. "As Mr. Brooks tells this tale of dishonor, desperation, and the fall of the mighty, it takes on overtones of Greek tragedy, a king brought down by pride. Whitney's sordid history has been told before", said The Wall Street Journal in its review. "But in Mr. Brooks's hands, the drama becomes freshly shocking."

Brooks's account of the bull market of the 1960s in The Go-Go Years similarly delineated the personalities at the center of the action, like high-flying portfolio manager Gerald Tsai. In Brooks's retelling of the decade's events, Tsai and others correctly intuited that the ways of the Street were changing and adjusted their trading strategies accordingly. Speculation was on the rise, Brooks noted, made easier by the new casino mentality. Writer Michael Lewis noted that Brooks's outrage at the new speculative excesses of the 1960s marked the end of an era.