John Brooks (writer)
Brooks's best-known New Yorker two-part Annals of Business[5][6] article was about Henry Ford II and the ill-fated introduction of the most famous failed automotive gambit in history, the Edsel.
Brooks also wrote widely on other subjects as well, including the government-guaranteed loans to Chrysler Corporation, the public television show Wall Street Week and its creator Louis Rukeyser, an examination of supply-side economics, the banking behemoth Citibank, economist Arthur Laffer and his Laffer curve, the development of New Jersey's Meadowlands, New York City urban planner Robert Moses, and even the Southern grocery store chain Piggly Wiggly.
Unlike journalists for more narrowly focused business publications, Brooks realized early on that it was storytelling – and not financial jargon – that would propel readers through his pieces.
[11] "Mr. Brooks has convinced me, absolutely, that Richard Whitney ranks in the highest pantheon of American symbols – like Lincoln and Bryan and Melville and Hemingway and Yellow Kid Weil, Buffalo Bill, Horatio Alger, and even Babe Ruth," wrote TK in Harper's magazine, "In him, the upper-class con crested – and America's last chance to do it right the first time ended.
"[12] Brooks's tale of easy credit, inflated egos, financial greed and the end of an era – symbolized by broker Whitney – came to be seen as one of the best accounts of the conditions which led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Brooks's account of the bull market of the 1960s in The Go-Go Years similarly delineated the personalities at the center of the action, like high-flying portfolio manager Gerald Tsai.
"But now that mutual funds are hemorrhaging cash and conglomerate has become a dirty word", opined Time reviewer George Church on October 29, 1973, "the story of the 1960s on Wall Street has the faraway quality of tales from 1929.
As New Yorker writer John Brooks points out, the speculative excesses of the decade bore a haunting resemblance to those of the '20s, and they, too, led to a resounding market crash (in 1970) that wiped out fortunes and nearly destroyed Wall Street itself by threatening to bankrupt its biggest brokerage houses.
With his facile explanations of complex financial terms and invigorating portraits of market speculators, The Takeover Game "argues that the investment banks, motivated by huge fees, are the driving force behind the current merger mania – usually to the detriment of the commonweal.
In describing Ford's Edsel, for instance, Brooks wrote in his best-known New Yorker essay that the newly engineered vehicle was "clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning – a deKooning woman.
"[16] In a field starved for vigorous writing, colorful characters and invigorating plot lines, Brooks's prose was seen by contemporary critics as a long-overdue tonic.
"[17] In his New Yorker portrait of public television's groundbreaking business host Louis Rukeyser, Brooks paid tribute to another gimlet-eyed observer of Wall Street's follies.
"His airy and adroit handling of his big-shot guests is a pleasure to watch", wrote Brooks in his revealing portrait of Rukeyser, who had a "knack for providing entertainment unrivaled by any other television commentator on economic matters, past or present.
"Science was curtly discarded at the last minute and the Edsel was named for the father of the Company's president, like a nineteenth-century brand of cough drops or saddle soap.
"[23] In his interviews of his subjects, and in his writing, Brooks sometimes dropped in passages from Virginia Woolf, or alluded to paintings by Marcel Duchamp or theater reviews by English critic Kenneth Tynan.
[26] Thanks to his wide-ranging style and eclectic mind, Brooks emerged as "the only writer of business books and articles with a large and assured readership of nonprofessionals.
