And Just Like That, The Traders Were In Charge [At Lehman]
The conflict came to a head in 1983, when Glucksman walked into the office of Lehman CEO Pete Peterson, a distinguished old-school investment banker who’d served in the Nixon administration and, in his spare time, wrote for the New York Review of Books, and told him to leave. “I’m talking about running the business now,” Glucksman said. Peterson, who’d made Glucksman his co-CEO only eight weeks earlier, knew that his partners understood that the power had tilted—at Lehman, money had talked. Peterson didn’t put up a fight. And just like that, the traders were in charge.