Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  Tisch is a philanthropist who was already warm to Walker’s call for fundamental change and a new conversation about justice—but who also struggled with how to get there. She was an heir to a family fortune that estimates put at $21 billion. Her late father, Preston Robert Tisch, was a founder of the Loews Corporation, where the family made most of its money. It was one of the more visibly generous families in America, especially in New York, where the Tisch name is ubiquitous on the edifices of good causes. Thanks to this giving, Laurie was cochair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art, vice chair of the board of trustees of Lincoln Center, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and former chair of the Center for Arts Education and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. She was also a co-owner of the New York Giants football team.

  By the standards of her fellow plutocrats, Tisch was ambivalent about her fortune. Late one morning not long ago, she sat in a banquette corner at the Regency Bar & Grill at a Loews hotel in New York, talking of why she had always seen herself as an “outlier” in her family. Maybe it was because she grew up the lone female in her generation of Tisches, encircled by two brothers and four male cousins. She was, she said proudly, the first woman born a Tisch, which was a watered-down version of a name too alien-sounding for the America of the early twentieth century, when her grandparents emigrated from Russia, setting down fresh roots in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

  Tisch, now in her middle sixties, recalled her days as a student at the University of Michigan in the final years of the Vietnam War. She was involved in what she hedgingly called “kind of radical politics”—think campus rallies, “no bomb throwing.” She and her comrades tried to bar ROTC from recruiting at Michigan. Although she came from one of the great new fortunes of the era, she says she thought capitalism “was a bad word.” One day midway through college, she informed her parents that she was planning to drive to Washington for a big protest march. “Let me just get this straight,” she recalled one of them answering. “So you’re going to go to Washington to yell ‘Smash the corporations’ in the car that we bought? Just sayin’.” A car bought thanks to the money from their growing corporation. She ended up not going.

  To be Laurie Tisch back then was to be both against the system and the embodiment of the system you were against, and, she said with a laugh, it meant “having a headache all the time.” And while her ideas and tactics have evolved over the years, that basic conflict and that headache have never left her.

  The conflict filled her with a guilt that grew over the years. It was a guilt that her rich friends seem not to feel or even understand when they tell her to get that facial, jet over to that spa, acquire that painting—“Of course you should do it. You deserve it,” she says they tell her. The guilt made her say to herself, “I deserve it because…? Because I inherited a lot of money?” She once mentioned the guilt to Darren Walker, who in fact thought such guilt was justified and had bet his career on the idea that giving isn’t enough, but he was too gallant to tell her that. “He kind of talked me down from it,” she said. To rebut her sense of complicity in injustice, he praised her generosity: “That’s ridiculous. Look at what you’re doing!” But even Walker wasn’t charming enough to wash the guilt away. Tisch said she has spent most of her life racked by it—“being at war with myself or being a little bit schizophrenic, a little bit tortured.” She likes to joke that nonprofits that want to raise money from her should track her credit card bills, because when her spending surges, her guilt rises in tandem, along with her inclination to give back.

  For Tisch, though, the guilt was not just an emotional problem to manage. It was also a spur to believe and do the right things, as she saw them. “When are you ever going to get rid of the guilt?” a friend of hers asked long ago. After all, she had given so much. “Hopefully, never,” Tisch replied. “It’s my compass.” The guilt doesn’t absolve her of benefiting from a system that she thinks unjust, but it does keep her from forgetting that fact, and it inspires her to do what she can. Among her reasons for starting her personal foundation was, she said, “taking it away from guilt and turning it into something more useful. But it will always be there a little bit.” It is there in part because she knows that the giving she does is “not institutional change or systemic change,” she said. “I’m going to leave that to my kids.”

  But if she was being honest, the guilt also gives her something she is reluctant to part with—a sense of superiority over rich people less guilty and more indulgent than she is. Tisch’s guilt and feelings of complicity could make her a good target for Walker’s new gospel—a gospel centered on a fairer, less guilt-inducing economic system, not just latter-day giving. But when actually confronted with what a different system might mean for her, her instincts of self-protection begin to overwhelm those of guilt.

  Does she believe that inheritances should be taxed more heavily than at present—as is the case in many other countries? She squirmed. “I mean, ideally, definitely, there shouldn’t be such a gap between the rich and the poor. There shouldn’t,” she said. But did she believe that the society would have been better off had she not been able to inherit as much as she had? That was harder for her. “I’m lucky that I can do what I can do,” she said of the philanthropy that her inheritance has allowed her to engage in. “But do I think it’s the most fair system? Probably not.”

  So, then, should she have been taxed more? Should her children’s inheritances be taxed more? “You’d have to be a better student of history than I am,” she said. “I mean, that’s kind of the aspirational dream.” What she seemed to be suggesting was that higher taxes on people like her family were the right idea in theory, but maybe only in theory. And sometimes she was unsure even of that: If rich people’s children didn’t inherit large fortunes, wouldn’t they continue chasing money, going to Wall Street or wherever, and having less time to spend on helping people?

  Did she believe that a society with less hereditary wealth would be better? “Would it be better?” she said. “I mean, it’s probably better not to be poor.”

  Could she, then, support such changes? “That’s why I said I’m not a student of history, because that’s kind of aspirational,” Tisch said. In other words, it is a utopian idea that perhaps sounded good, but she maintained that she didn’t know enough to embrace it. “But,” she added a moment later, “in countries where they’re closer to that, is that a better society? Probably.”

  But places like Scandinavia, where there is less poverty, had, it should be noted, less money lying around for people like Tisch to give away. “You don’t need to give away as much,” she said. You don’t need to treat so many symptoms when the diseases are fewer.

  Yet while we have the system we do, was there any way she saw to reconcile her abstract positions with the way she actually lived? She didn’t seem to think so. “I guess it’s the same, on some level, as our last president or any president being very pro–public education and sending their kids to private school. I don’t have an easy answer,” she says.

  Her life and ideals similarly collide over the question of the influence of wealthy people like her on politics. Does she believe such influence should be curbed? “You think it’s great in theory, but you don’t want to be the only schmuck doing it,” she says. She believed the campaign finance system to be unjust, and understood the link between that injustice and the drowned-out voices and social exclusion that she later seeks to alleviate through philanthropy. And yet when it came to supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, she said, “how many fund-raisers did I go to at $25,000 and $50,000?” Tisch’s ex-husband, Donald Sussman, has been very public in making the case for what may appear to be the twisted logic of the anti-mega-donor mega-donor. Sussman, a hedge fund manager, reportedly contributed $40 million to Democratic super PACs and other outside groups, making him by some accounts Clinton’s biggest supporter in 2016. He told the Washington Post he was inspired b
y his wish to remove the influence of big donors like himself. “It’s very odd to be giving millions when your objective is to actually get the money out of politics,” he told the Post. “I am a very strong supporter of publicly financed campaigns, and I think the only way to accomplish that is to get someone like Secretary Clinton, who is committed to cleaning up the unfortunate disaster created by the activist court in Citizens United.” In order to change the status quo, you have to give in to the status quo.

  This difficulty in escaping the status quo was especially evident in Tisch when it came to the aspect of her fortune that gave her the greatest guilt: her cigarette money. In 1968, Loews had “capitalized on growing public health concerns over smoking by buying a cigarette company at a bargain price,” as the New York Times put it. Its acquisition, Lorillard, produced Newport cigarettes, which were controversial for targeting African Americans with a product more alluring and more lethal than most: laced with a menthol flavor that made it easier to start smoking and a higher-than-average nicotine content that helped keep one hooked. When seven tobacco executives famously sat side by side in Congress in 1994 and denied cigarettes’ harmful effects, Laurie’s cousin Andrew was one of them. When asked if he thought that smoking and cancer were connected, he said, “I do not believe that.” The following year, Laurie’s uncle Laurence, then the chairman of CBS, aroused anger when his network killed a 60 Minutes segment about the tobacco industry whistleblower who would eventually be portrayed in the movie The Insider. (The segment ran only after Loews announced its intention to sell the network.)

  Laurie Tisch knew these things, and she had to know that people had died because of those cigarettes and those self-serving deceptions. She sometimes thought about the cigarettes when people thanked her for promoting the arts, or investing in young lives, or giving grants to support more healthy food in African American communities like Harlem. It was hard to know whether the debt would ever be repaid, whether the lives saved would ever catch up with the lives that were stolen. But Tisch said she had this guilty reaction when the people thanking her didn’t know about the cigarette money. On other occasions, she said, “they do know it, and I get defensive.” She wondered aloud, “Are cigarettes worse than alcohol? Is alcohol worse than sugar? So I also get defensive when I get criticized for it—that my family shouldn’t give to the hospital or do this or that.” It bothered her when she heard people say that tobacco money had no place in a hospital dedicated to saving lives. Why should her family be the only schmucks singled out for harmful products?

  Still, Tisch, outfitted with that compass of guilt, ventured past her own defensiveness. “I do think that good, solid people can generally rationalize taking advantage of the system,” she said. And how do they rationalize it? By telling themselves that this is the system we have. “That’s how it is,” she said. “Why should I be the only fool?”

  In her reluctance to be the only fool, Tisch was revealing the hold that the status quo had on her. Again and again, she had voiced an ideal for which in the end she was unwilling to sacrifice. It was important to her to feel superior to her rich friends, but she was unwilling to rush out in front of them and be the only one not to take advantage of a system she knew to be wrong. Her repeated confessions that she will not be the one to bring about the world that she swears she believes in sent a message to Darren Walker: If he wants a fairer system, he is going to have to seek it in spite of people like her, not with them at his side; he might have their moral support, but he could not count on them to make the decisions to change the system that made them everything that they are.

  “The people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it?” Tisch said at one point. “They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it.”

  Was there anything she could imagine that would convince them otherwise—that could inspire them to pursue a fairer system?

  “Revolution, maybe,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  At last, Walker’s limousine pulled up to 9 West 57th Street, and he was whisked upstairs. A cheerful receptionist took custody of his camel overcoat and furry hat. Janice Cook Roberts, who led investor relations at KKR and is the daughter of the legendary Washington power broker Vernon Jordan, exchanged pleasantries with Walker about her father. Then Walker ran into another executive, Ken Mehlman, who helped to advance the Republican Party’s antigay agenda as its chairman until he came out as gay a few years after stepping down and began to fight for gay rights. Like Carnegie, he had done what he had to do, and was now in the redemption phase, albeit one pursued while working at KKR.

  The session was held in a large room with a buffet off to one side. The room was filled with elegant white leather chairs. The crowd was young, mostly junior employees. They had the look of people who are living without rising to the level of being alive. Walker had said that in his experience, many such employees show up at these events because they nurse dreams of quitting and becoming doers of good. Yet for now they carried themselves with a boredom and alienation that was a high-end analog of what one detected in the workers at Walmart. You got into this room by making the right, careful choices over and over again. Like Kat Cole, you learned to zoom in and not ask questions about what larger things you were abetting. And because the firm knew at some level what psychological sacrifice all this demanded, it had the decency to put on a speaker series for you, where museum chieftains and health care experts and this foundation president—people living closer to their truths than you—could inspire you a little. Walker, visibly exuberant about his mission, offered a striking contrast to his audience.

  Was he going to tell them they were responsible for the rise of nationalism globally, that the world he wanted would lower them a few pegs? Was he going to say that their business practices were part of the problem, or that they needed to pay higher taxes? Would he “meet them where they were”? Was it possible to do all these things?

  On that day, at least, no. Walker, in his opening remarks, referred a few times to Henry Kravis, one of KKR’s founders, as “a philanthropist.” He was no longer a corporate raider, a pioneer of the kind of value extraction Walker deplored in the limo. Walker spoke highly of his own experience in the financial services industry. It had given him “skills”—some of which, presumably, were the protocols that he could now tell himself he had redeployed in service of the weak. It taught him how to multitask, manage a complex portfolio of projects, assimilate data and turn it into insight, have discipline. He wasn’t flattering his audience. He was reciting the reasons why so many people like Hilary Cohen, who aspired to help millions of people, went to places like KKR before embarking on their work of changing the world.

  Walker tried to keep the room comfortable by turning philanthropy into a relative concept. “If you say philanthropy in America, it means a lot of different things,” he said. “It means individual philanthropists like Henry, and many people who you know and many of you, because many of you are also philanthropists, even though you may not call yourself a philanthropist.”

  Eventually, he got to the subject at hand. “We have in America and in the world a level of extreme inequality that—I don’t mean to be hyperbolic—but I think really threatens our democracy. Because at the core of the American narrative, in our democracy, is a very simple idea of opportunity.” That’s how he did it: poking them with a thought that might not have been their favorite, and then quickly meeting them where they were, with the language of opportunity, that MarketWorld staple.

  And then, unsurprisingly, he told the story of the charity hospital in Lafayette and all the rest of it. He talked about how there “was a mobility escalator that I could get on,” about “the leverage of opportunity in American society.” In the car, he had said that the wealthy, believing that America has an opportunity problem but not an inequality one, “are allowed to live in a world where y
ou don’t have to deal with reality.” Now, in front of a new generation of the “barbarians at the gate,” he was meeting them where they were. “The more inequality we get in our system, the less opportunity there is,” he said. He closed in more personal terms:

  I challenge myself about my own privilege every day and say, “You know, you’re incredibly privileged. You have cousins who were definitely as smart as you and they ended up in prison. Why did that happen?” And so everything is a conversation in my own little head about privilege and about being in places like these with people like you, who are clearly smart, ambitious, and want to make a difference in the world and are privileged.

  It was not, in fact, evident that the people in the room wanted to “make a difference” in the way that Walker suggested. That became clear when question-and-answer time came. The first question was about his leadership style and how he motivated employees: a businessperson trying to learn from him how to be better at business. The second was about global security. The third was about whether there was too much charitable money chasing too few capable do-gooders. Walker had been subtle, verging on silent, about what he said in the car about private equity’s complicity in inequality, about what they needed to do less rather than more of. And his subtlety and their imperviousness had conspired to ensure that he was not really heard.