What do you think?
Rate this book
Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman
Extensive exclusive interviews inform this account of the bitter internecine fighting that led the way to the takeover of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, one of America's most prestigious investment institution, by the mammoth American Express. Reprint.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
237 people are currently reading
697 people want to read
About the author
Ken Auletta
30 books98 followersKen Auletta has written Annals of Communications columns and profiles for The New Yorker magazine since 1992. He is the author of eleven books, including five national bestsellers: Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed And Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled, The End of the World As We Know It, which was published in November of 2009.
Auletta has won numerous journalism honors. He has been chosen a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and one of the 20th Century's top 100 business journalists by a distinguished national panel of peers.
For two decades Auletta has been a national judge of the Livingston Awards for journalists under thirty-five. He has been a Trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. He was a member of the Columbia Journalism School Task Force assembled by incoming college President Lee Bollinger to help reshape the curriculum. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror and a Trustee of the Nightingale-Bamford School. He was twice a Trustee of PEN, the international writers organization. He is a member of the New York Public Library's Emergency Committee for the Research Libraries, of the Author's Guild, PEN, and of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Auletta grew up on Coney Island in Brooklyn, where he attended public schools. He graduated with a B.S. from the State University College at Oswego, N.Y., and received an M.A. in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Auletta has won numerous journalism honors. He has been chosen a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and one of the 20th Century's top 100 business journalists by a distinguished national panel of peers.
For two decades Auletta has been a national judge of the Livingston Awards for journalists under thirty-five. He has been a Trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. He was a member of the Columbia Journalism School Task Force assembled by incoming college President Lee Bollinger to help reshape the curriculum. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror and a Trustee of the Nightingale-Bamford School. He was twice a Trustee of PEN, the international writers organization. He is a member of the New York Public Library's Emergency Committee for the Research Libraries, of the Author's Guild, PEN, and of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Auletta grew up on Coney Island in Brooklyn, where he attended public schools. He graduated with a B.S. from the State University College at Oswego, N.Y., and received an M.A. in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 12, 2016
Great book.
Learned a lot about the Lehman Brothers. Cotton trading of Lehman brothers in Montgomery, Alabama to 55 Water street in Manhattan to Shearson/American Express buyout in 1985. Egotistical, greedy millionaires. Read about the final couple years that ended in 2008 with bankruptcy. Now I know how they started.
Learned a lot about the Lehman Brothers. Cotton trading of Lehman brothers in Montgomery, Alabama to 55 Water street in Manhattan to Shearson/American Express buyout in 1985. Egotistical, greedy millionaires. Read about the final couple years that ended in 2008 with bankruptcy. Now I know how they started.
July 4, 2020
It was my own fault that I didn't more closely read this book's description - I thought it was going to be about BOTH times Lehman Brothers *fell*, once in the 80's and again during the 2008/2009 recession when they finally went under - so I was a little surprised when the book ended in the 80's.
With that said, I did learn a lot, but I learned a bit too much... many times during the book, I thought there was just too darn much detail; and I felt some sections were not accessible at all to anyone who doesn't have knowledge of the financial industry (contrasted with, say, "The smartest guys in the room" about Enron, where the authors explained the financial mumbo jumbo in layman's terms).
With that said, I did learn a lot, but I learned a bit too much... many times during the book, I thought there was just too darn much detail; and I felt some sections were not accessible at all to anyone who doesn't have knowledge of the financial industry (contrasted with, say, "The smartest guys in the room" about Enron, where the authors explained the financial mumbo jumbo in layman's terms).
December 4, 2021
Good reporting of bad behavior on Wall Street. Lehman Brothers crashed and burned like other firms during the subprime mortgage crisis.
November 23, 2024
This volume -- documenting the absorption of Lehman Brothers into Shearson/American Express -- represents some of Ken Auletta's career-best reporting. I was impressed by how many people he managed to get on record -- including the wildly mercantile Lewis Glucksman. Auletta is often best when he gets people in power to trust him and reveals just what they surrender to contribute to a major institutional shift. And Auletta's insights into Glucksman in particular are vital. While Auletta is right to point to the cultural shift away from helping people and more into the venal position of hording capital under Reagan, what he doesn't really get in this book -- and what he seems to be striving for -- is how and why this happened so eagerly. It's clear that, while Glucksman was very concerned by money, it wasn't just greed or the lust for power that motivated him (although these were obviously primary factors). So this book falls short on the holiistic front even if it is a solid work of journalism.
December 18, 2018
In 1983, Lew Glucksman, co-CEO of Lehman Brothers, demanded the resignation of chairman Pete Peterson. Shockingly, Peterson agreed to step down. This book details the turmoil, infighting, and power struggles that brought about Peterson’s departure and the sale of one of Wall Street’s oldest firms. While the book starts out as interesting, it quickly falls into the mundane and hard to follow story of greed. Skip it and find a better book on Wall Street bank demises.
March 2, 2016
Inside story of greed, power and dirty politics within Lehman Brothers in the 1980's. Details dealings for Lehman to merge with Shearson/American Express. Focus of the book was on the CEO battle for Lehman between Pete Peterson and Lewis Glucksman. Upper management and the Board were concentrated on their bonuses and benefits.
April 8, 2007
A great description of how a wall street firm tears itself apart from personality politics and ego.
August 14, 2023
The 1980s on was a transformative era for Wall Street. Where once there had been genteel bankers who conducted the businesses while dining and smoking in glitzy New York hotels (or playing golf in the Hamptons), the business was rapidly transforming thanks to the adoption of Quotron terminals and a surge in proprietary trading. The business was thus evolving from one in which well-heeled suave corporate finance bankers were in conflict with and risk being eclipsed by their brash barbaric trader brethren. This is a book that details one such conflict – between the “banker” Pete Petersen and the “trader” Lewis Gluckman.
While the first half of the book details these two personalities, their conflict over the leadership of Lehman and the subsequent ouster of Petersen, the second half of the book details how Gluckman lost the trust of his board and had to sell Lehman Brothers to Shearson-American Express after just 10 months of taking over as the CEO. In the middle, we get a nice history of Lehman Brothers – how it was founded by Germans who settled in Southern United States as slaveowners and then moved to New York in the late 19th century and how investment banking evolved in the first half of the 20th century. This is something that I wished the author had expanded more upon and I will need to find a book that covers this aspect of US financial history.
However, what really opened my eyes was just how powerful many of the characters in Lehman became and continue to affect the global financial system to this day. For instance, Pete Petersen after being ousted from Lehman, together with Steve Schwarzman (also at Lehman) subsequently founded Blackstone – a 1 trillion-dollar behemoth. Schwarzman is worth over 32 billion today, went on to serve as an advisor to Donald Trump during his presidency and is a leading Republican donor. Richard Fuld, then an up coming trader, went on to become Lehman’s CEO after it re-emerged from Shearson-American Express in 1993 only to be humiliated when Lehman collapsed in the 2006 sub-prime mortgage crisis. Other characters like Peter Cohen (heavily involved in the RJR Nabisco LBO in 1988), Sheldon Gordon, Peter Solomon (founder of Solomon Partners), etc. also feature prominently.
All these characters (and many more) feature prominently in the second half of the book, makes the narrative quick and compelling, but at the same complicated. It is also a much more important part of the book because it serves as an excellent case study on corporate governance gone to hell. It should be a recommended reading to whoever want to get into the nitty-gritty of how partnerships function. As I write this in August 2023, there is a war brewing in one of the last surviving Wall Street partnerships, Goldman Sachs, between its CEO – David Solomon and his partners. Let’s see how that one goes. I’ll get the popcorn ready.
While the first half of the book details these two personalities, their conflict over the leadership of Lehman and the subsequent ouster of Petersen, the second half of the book details how Gluckman lost the trust of his board and had to sell Lehman Brothers to Shearson-American Express after just 10 months of taking over as the CEO. In the middle, we get a nice history of Lehman Brothers – how it was founded by Germans who settled in Southern United States as slaveowners and then moved to New York in the late 19th century and how investment banking evolved in the first half of the 20th century. This is something that I wished the author had expanded more upon and I will need to find a book that covers this aspect of US financial history.
However, what really opened my eyes was just how powerful many of the characters in Lehman became and continue to affect the global financial system to this day. For instance, Pete Petersen after being ousted from Lehman, together with Steve Schwarzman (also at Lehman) subsequently founded Blackstone – a 1 trillion-dollar behemoth. Schwarzman is worth over 32 billion today, went on to serve as an advisor to Donald Trump during his presidency and is a leading Republican donor. Richard Fuld, then an up coming trader, went on to become Lehman’s CEO after it re-emerged from Shearson-American Express in 1993 only to be humiliated when Lehman collapsed in the 2006 sub-prime mortgage crisis. Other characters like Peter Cohen (heavily involved in the RJR Nabisco LBO in 1988), Sheldon Gordon, Peter Solomon (founder of Solomon Partners), etc. also feature prominently.
All these characters (and many more) feature prominently in the second half of the book, makes the narrative quick and compelling, but at the same complicated. It is also a much more important part of the book because it serves as an excellent case study on corporate governance gone to hell. It should be a recommended reading to whoever want to get into the nitty-gritty of how partnerships function. As I write this in August 2023, there is a war brewing in one of the last surviving Wall Street partnerships, Goldman Sachs, between its CEO – David Solomon and his partners. Let’s see how that one goes. I’ll get the popcorn ready.
April 25, 2023
Some of the language in this book is dated and not in a good way. That being said the level of detail and research made me feel as if I was truly in the room and I appreciated the nuanced reflections and thoughts at the end.
May 11, 2022
I have read a lot of books on this type of topic. This is the first one I couldn’t finish. Barely started it. Dry, dull, very boring
September 27, 2025
In-depth and dense reporting, but it left me wondering what happened afterwards, because 30 years later, Lehman fell a final time.
September 24, 2025
BOOK REVIEW - Greed and Glory on Wall Street, by Ken Auletta (1988)
My first job out of law school was in a Denver investment. During that period top graduates from the top law schools were being swept up by Wall Street banks. I decided to send my resume to a couple of respected firms in Salt Lake City and Denver. I worked on a number of big deals that involved syndicate a multiple firms because no one firm could handle the size of the financing. In that process I met a lot of Wall Street and was recruited by two of them. I read this book when I was being recruited and saw some of the behaviors.
The book is a gripping narrative about the rise and fall of one of Wall Street’s most storied firms, Lehman Brothers. Written with a journalist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s instinct for character, the book explores both the cultural excesses of the investment banking world in the 1970s and 1980s and the personal rivalries that brought down a venerable institution.
Auletta paints a vivid picture of Lehman’s bankers as hard-living, hard-drinking, and deeply competitive men who embraced the high-octane culture of Wall Street. Deals were often pursued not only for financial gain but also for prestige and dominance over rivals. The firm’s leadership tolerated and at times celebrated this culture of bravado, creating an atmosphere where aggressive risk-taking blurred into recklessness.
At the core of Lehman’s demise, were bitter internal divisions, often over dividing up the pie. The partnership structure that had once been a source of strength—binding together a small, elite group of partners—degenerated into factional warfare. Management became consumed by infighting, generational divides, and personality clashes. The firm’s top executives, more interested in asserting personal power and defending turf, allowed strategic opportunities to slip away.
This dysfunction was compounded by the broader transformation of Wall Street during the 1970s and 1980s, when investment banks increasingly relied on risky trading, leveraged buyouts, and fee-driven deals rather than long-term client relationships. Lehman Brothers, already weakened by internal strife, could not keep pace with more aggressive competitors like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In the end, the firm’s culture—once its greatest asset—became its fatal liability.
What makes the book interesting is not just the story of a single firm but the window it opens into the broader evolution of finance. He demonstrates how greed, ambition, and hubris are not incidental traits on Wall Street but structural forces that shape institutions. The book captures the swagger of the Lehman bankers, the glamour of their social lives, and the hollow core that ultimately led to ruin.
Greed and Glory on Wall Street is both a cautionary tale and a work of financial history. It shows how a company undone by arrogance and internecine conflict can stand as a metaphor for Wall Street itself. For readers interested in the cultural DNA of modern finance, Auletta’s book remains essential.
After being recruited by the NYC banks a law school friend who was in a NY law firm asked me to send him my resume to interview with his firm. I did, not thinking seriously about it. Nearly 40 years later I am so glad I did. Every single firm I interviewed with and had offers from dissolved within the following year. For exactly the reasons as Lehman.
Quotes:
“Lehman men worked as hard as they played. It was not uncommon for a partner to leave a late-night dinner at ‘21,’ having consumed heroic quantities of wine, whiskey, and cigars, only to return to his desk by dawn, ready to push through another deal. Hard living was not a vice but a badge of honor. The young associates who tried to keep up were both dazzled and broken by the spectacle, for at Lehman excess was not merely permitted—it was expected.”
“The firm that once prided itself on cohesion and family had become a house divided against itself. Partners plotted against partners, and the corridors buzzed with rumor and resentment. Decisions were not made on the basis of strategy or client service but on whether a rival faction might be deprived of victory. It was as if the gladiatorial ethos that animated Lehman’s deal-making had turned inward, consuming the firm from within. Greed and glory, once the twin engines of ambition, had become the instruments of destruction.”
My first job out of law school was in a Denver investment. During that period top graduates from the top law schools were being swept up by Wall Street banks. I decided to send my resume to a couple of respected firms in Salt Lake City and Denver. I worked on a number of big deals that involved syndicate a multiple firms because no one firm could handle the size of the financing. In that process I met a lot of Wall Street and was recruited by two of them. I read this book when I was being recruited and saw some of the behaviors.
The book is a gripping narrative about the rise and fall of one of Wall Street’s most storied firms, Lehman Brothers. Written with a journalist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s instinct for character, the book explores both the cultural excesses of the investment banking world in the 1970s and 1980s and the personal rivalries that brought down a venerable institution.
Auletta paints a vivid picture of Lehman’s bankers as hard-living, hard-drinking, and deeply competitive men who embraced the high-octane culture of Wall Street. Deals were often pursued not only for financial gain but also for prestige and dominance over rivals. The firm’s leadership tolerated and at times celebrated this culture of bravado, creating an atmosphere where aggressive risk-taking blurred into recklessness.
At the core of Lehman’s demise, were bitter internal divisions, often over dividing up the pie. The partnership structure that had once been a source of strength—binding together a small, elite group of partners—degenerated into factional warfare. Management became consumed by infighting, generational divides, and personality clashes. The firm’s top executives, more interested in asserting personal power and defending turf, allowed strategic opportunities to slip away.
This dysfunction was compounded by the broader transformation of Wall Street during the 1970s and 1980s, when investment banks increasingly relied on risky trading, leveraged buyouts, and fee-driven deals rather than long-term client relationships. Lehman Brothers, already weakened by internal strife, could not keep pace with more aggressive competitors like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In the end, the firm’s culture—once its greatest asset—became its fatal liability.
What makes the book interesting is not just the story of a single firm but the window it opens into the broader evolution of finance. He demonstrates how greed, ambition, and hubris are not incidental traits on Wall Street but structural forces that shape institutions. The book captures the swagger of the Lehman bankers, the glamour of their social lives, and the hollow core that ultimately led to ruin.
Greed and Glory on Wall Street is both a cautionary tale and a work of financial history. It shows how a company undone by arrogance and internecine conflict can stand as a metaphor for Wall Street itself. For readers interested in the cultural DNA of modern finance, Auletta’s book remains essential.
After being recruited by the NYC banks a law school friend who was in a NY law firm asked me to send him my resume to interview with his firm. I did, not thinking seriously about it. Nearly 40 years later I am so glad I did. Every single firm I interviewed with and had offers from dissolved within the following year. For exactly the reasons as Lehman.
Quotes:
“Lehman men worked as hard as they played. It was not uncommon for a partner to leave a late-night dinner at ‘21,’ having consumed heroic quantities of wine, whiskey, and cigars, only to return to his desk by dawn, ready to push through another deal. Hard living was not a vice but a badge of honor. The young associates who tried to keep up were both dazzled and broken by the spectacle, for at Lehman excess was not merely permitted—it was expected.”
“The firm that once prided itself on cohesion and family had become a house divided against itself. Partners plotted against partners, and the corridors buzzed with rumor and resentment. Decisions were not made on the basis of strategy or client service but on whether a rival faction might be deprived of victory. It was as if the gladiatorial ethos that animated Lehman’s deal-making had turned inward, consuming the firm from within. Greed and glory, once the twin engines of ambition, had become the instruments of destruction.”
June 20, 2020
Wow just fantastic. I went into this book pretty blind and assumed it was about 2008 Lehman, rather than the lead up to the AMEX takeover in 1984. The drama and tension post-Bobby Lehman’s death, Glucksman the usurper vs the company’s one-time savior Peterson, and the power struggle between the bankers and traders made for an incredibly entertaining story.
October 16, 2007
I came across this in a pile of donated books that formed the "library" of the church basement homeless shelter I volunteered in overnight a couple years ago. The person who gave this to the church sure was well-meaning and thoughtful--I'm sure there's nothing a recovering methadone addict would rather read about than the struggles for the soul of a Wall Street investment house. I couldn't sleep, though, so I stayed up all night reading it. The one star is for the subject matter and where I found the book, but it's actually an okay piece of journalism about Lehman Brothers in the 1980s; an engaging enough story of the aloof old-guard executive (a former Nixon Cabinet member and pompous ass who would sign documents and then toss them over his shoulder, assuming, correctly, that someone would be there to pick them up) pitted against the rough and gruff outer-borough Number 2 guy, a rags-to-riches sad sack who passed on the executive suite and kept his charmless office down in the trenches with the grunts (well, i-banker grunts) leading, ultimately, to the public offering of Lehman Brothers and the loss of its Gilded Age, chummy old-boys club private culture.
April 28, 2016
This book details the collapse of Lehman Brothers. No, not that time—the other collapse of Lehman. It's a weirdly compact story about social climbing and boardroom politics (you will get maybe one paragraph every fifty pages about the actual business of Wall Street).
It would be hard to make a movie from this book. The two main characters are easy to typecast: Peterson, the lean, well-dressed DC insider, and Glucksman, the overweight cigar-chomping trader who really likes boats. But an honest filmmaker would point out that both Peterson and Glucksman grew up poor—it just took him less than a generation to start acting like he'd been born into what he earned.
In the book, Lehman faces the two crises that seem to destroy many partnerships: making a lot of money and trying to distribute the wealth, and losing a lot of money and trying to distribute the blame. Maybe the real reason banks turned from partnerships to corporations, or stayed small, is that running a democracy with 80 or so voters is just no way to manage a trading desk.
It would be hard to make a movie from this book. The two main characters are easy to typecast: Peterson, the lean, well-dressed DC insider, and Glucksman, the overweight cigar-chomping trader who really likes boats. But an honest filmmaker would point out that both Peterson and Glucksman grew up poor—it just took him less than a generation to start acting like he'd been born into what he earned.
In the book, Lehman faces the two crises that seem to destroy many partnerships: making a lot of money and trying to distribute the wealth, and losing a lot of money and trying to distribute the blame. Maybe the real reason banks turned from partnerships to corporations, or stayed small, is that running a democracy with 80 or so voters is just no way to manage a trading desk.
Want to read
July 3, 2007Larry Rosen highly recommended this book.
July 6, 2012
Great book! Good case study of business gone bad.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews