individual book galleries

Blue Bloods

In 2005, Morgan Stanley fired chairman and CEO Philip Purcell (with a $24 million golden parachute), as a result of the efforts of the “Group of Eight” retired executives. The group included a former chairman, a former president and the former heads of the firm’s major divisions.

When Pulitzer-Prize winner Ron Chernow wrote The House of Morgan, the firm’s then-chairman, Parker Gilbert, instructed employee not to talk to the author. During the fight for to oust Purcell, Gilbert and the members of the “Group of Eight” reversed the firm’s policy. A constant stream of newspaper and magazine articles kept the story alive, and pressured the board to oust Purcell.

During the battle, the Irish betting site InTrade gave the Group of Eight a single digit chance of winning. (InTrade closed in 2012.)

In 2016 Morgan Stanley has 60,000 employees in 42 countries, and more than 1300 offices.

After the Ball

Good Daughters

Newsmaker

A self-made boy from a poor family in Indiana, Roy Howard started his newspaper career at the turn of the 20th century when he was still in high school, and didn’t stop until the day he died in 1964. A publisher, editor and journalist, he was the first head of the fledgling United Press. In his thirties E.W. Scripps renamed his newspaper empire—one of the two largest newspaper concerns in the United States—Scripps-Howard. The confidante of the famous, Howard advised every U.S. president from Hoover to Eisenhower, and in 1930, was named one of the “59 men who ‘rule’ America” in a front-page story in the New York Times. His fifty years of diaries and thousands of pages of “Strictly Confidential” memoranda are no less than the background to the history of the first half of the century.

Certain Summer?