Impeccable Connections, The Rise & Fall of Richard Whitney

"In 'Impeccable Connections,' Malcolm MacKay, who knew his subject, attempts to fathom the man whom puzzled contemporaries could not."

—Maxwell Carter, writing for the The Wall Street Journal

“Read this spellbinding book, which repeatedly takes your breath away, and learn that some things never change.”
—Craig R. Whitney, author of Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment

    Although Richard Whitney is not a common name today, the story of his rise to the top of Wall Street and fall to Sing Sing presages the more recent trajectories of men such as Bernard Madoff, Ivan Boesky, and Charles Keating. In a sense, Whitney’s fall was even greater in that he started at the top of the old-guard establishment.

    
“NOT DICK WHITNEY. NOT DICK WHITNEY!” President Franklin D. Roosevelt exclaimed upon being told Richard Whitney, the long-time president of the New York Stock Exchange, was a criminal. Almost ten years earlier, on October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, as one newspaper’s headline put it the next day, “Richard Whitney Halts Stock Panic.” In 1934, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as the leader of the securities industry in its fight against New Deal regulation. Whitney’s message was clear: the securities industry could regulate itself, and the federal government should stay out. Sound familiar?
    This book tells the tale of Richard Whitney and describes in detail the banking and investment  structure that precipitated the stock market collapse of 1929, and how as president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney played his role while manipulating powerful and trusted friends.

            IMPECCABLE CONNECTIONS is both a biography of an important figure and an excellent primer on the reasons for securities regulations that are in today’s headlines.
Malcolm MacKay is a lawyer and businessman who, as a boy and young man, knew Richard Whitney in his post-prison years. MacKay has thought about Whitney, and why he did what he did, all his life. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.