Professor Tevi Troy Speaks with The Commentator About His New Book, “The Power and the Money”: Part I
Professor Tevi Troy joined Yeshiva University’s faculty as a senior scholar for the Straus Center in fall 2023. Since then, he’s taught courses on both campuses on topics such as healthcare policy and the American presidency. Having served as a senior domestic policy advisor and deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush, Professor Troy is known for bringing both personal experience and historical expertise to the classroom. His previous books include “Fight House: Rivalries in the White House, from Truman to Trump” and “Shall We Wake the President?: Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office”. Recently, Professor Troy sat down with The Commentator to discuss his newest book, “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry,” dealing with the relationships between American presidents and CEOs.
Ayelet Friedman: Can you please give us a brief overview of your new book “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry”?
Tevi Troy: “The Power and the Money” is a look at the 150-year history between big corporate CEOs and American presidents. It starts with John D. Rockefeller, and it goes all the way up to today with people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. It looks at the question of why both Democrats and Republicans seem to dislike corporations and CEOs at this moment, why these corporations are more powerful than ever before and how big government and big business have grown over the last 150 years to the point where they both dominate our lives. They're also enmeshed together in ways that were, I think, unimaginable by the founders.
AF: What motivated you to write this book now, and how did you decide which stories to incorporate in it?
TT: Great question. I have written five books on the presidency. This is my fifth one. I'm not sure I realized this at the beginning of this journey, but in each I have addressed the question of the President and “blank.” And “blank” is always something that, first, nobody has done before. And second, speaks to our current moment in some way that perhaps I couldn't have anticipated when starting each journey. So I wrote a book about presidents and pop culture when Obama was the pop culture president. I wrote a book about presidents and disasters when people were talking about different types of disasters. I wrote a book about in-fighting in the White House when Trump was in power. And now today, when you have a lot of questions about corporate power, again, about corporations being disliked by both parties, and again, while they seem to be more powerful than ever before, it seemed like exploring the relationship between government and corporations was apt.
And I did some research and found that nobody had written a book about presidents and CEOs. Once I came to that decision, it gets to the second part of your question about the stories I chose. What I did was I made index cards of every big-name CEO you can imagine. I wrote on the index card, their name, their era, their industry,and the presidents they interacted with. I, and my daughter, Rina, who is in Touro, printed out and designed the index cards. I was moving them around on my basement floor, kind of like when I was a little kid, playing with baseball cards, trying to find the CEOs who would cover the key industries that I wanted to cover, who had multiple interactions with multiple presidents, (so if you just met one president, it wasn't gonna be interesting enough for the book) but also had some cache, some big star power themselves.
I think one of the interesting things about “The Power and The Money” is the fact that presidents are term-limited. Other than Franklin Roosevelt, everybody served only one or two terms. The CEOs can last a long time, and therefore get to interact with many presidents. Jack Wells, for example, interacted with ten presidents in the course of his lifetime. So sometimes there are CEOs who might be famous, who are not included in the book because they lacked relevant or interesting interactions with multiple presidents. So that's really how I designed the book, and I tried to do it sequentially so we had a narrative going forward from the 1870s when we have what I call “the blank slate,” where there is very little government regulation and very few government regulatory bodies, to today, where the administrative state is massive, and every CEO needs to take into account what government is doing pretty much at all times.
AF: How did your experience as a senior White House aide shape the insights and perspectives presented in “The Power and the Money”?
TT: Look, there are a lot of presidential historians out there. There's a lot of former White House aides out there, but there's not a lot of people who combine those two things. So I'm both a Ph.D.-trained presidential historian and someone who had senior West Wing jobs in the White House, and I try and bring both perspectives to bear when I write my book. So not only do I know how to go into the archives and find the relevant material and search for that juicy anecdote, but I also have a sense of how a memo or a snub might have landed in the halls of power, how presidents might have interpreted what a CEO was doing. I try to bring that extra lens, my knowledge and experience of working in government, to my understanding of history.
AF: Which relationship between a CEO and president do you feel had the most impact on America, and why? Which relationship do you believe was the most detrimental?
TT: Oh, well, it could be both in some ways, right?
So, I think everybody who asks me about the book always asks about Rockefeller and Roosevelt, and we're still talking about this a hundred-plus years later. I think maybe that was the most impactful…you had a president who said, “I have power and I can use it.” I'm talking specifically about Teddy Roosevelt. He used it to go after Rockefeller’s company. Now, Rockefeller was already retired at the time, but he was a convenient target. He was seen as a villain by many people across the country, and Roosevelt targeted Rockefeller as a way to go after Standard Oil. Then Standard Oil was broken up into many smaller companies. Interestingly, the breakup happened after Roosevelt was no longer president because they had to wait for the Supreme Court to rule on whether the government could even do this. That's how fresh and new this idea was.
Rockefeller is playing golf when he hears about the breakup, and he is talking to a priest with whom he's playing golf. He says three words to the priest: “buy Standard Oil.” And it was quite prescient advice because if you had bought Standard Oil at that low moment, when the company's being broken up, you would have had a piece of Chevron and Exxon and Mobil and British Petroleum, all these companies that Standard Oil broke up into.
So I think, in many ways, that was the most consequential because it set the paradigm for what these kinds of relationships could be.
AF: Do you have a favorite story or partnership from the book?
TT: I have a favorite one, and I think it's particularly apt for The Commentator, because Lew Wasserman was one of my favorite CEOs in the book. He grows up in an observant family in Cleveland. We don't know a lot about his background. We never even found his birth certificate. He gets into the agent game, moves to L.A., becomes a top agent, becomes the head of his agency and later he wants to get into the studio game.
Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department went after him, and he recognized that he had to get involved in politics if he wanted to achieve his business goals. So he befriends Lyndon Johnson. And one of the ways a CEO befriends the president is by doing fundraisers for them.
And he wanted to do a fundraiser for Johnson at the Coconut Grove, which is a fancy party room in L.A. The Oscars were held there many years ago back in the day when it was a smaller affair.
And the night on which Johnson is available, Wasserman calls and finds that the Coconut Grove is unavailable. He asks the Coconut Grove who had booked it for the night and apparently it’s booked for a bar mitzvah. So Wasserman, again, this guy doesn't like to hear the word no, he calls the father of the bar mitzvah boy, and he asks him if he can have the Coconut Grove instead, even though it's booked for the bar mitzvah. The father is initially unwilling to do this, but he asks why. He says, “Well, we want to do a fundraiser for the president.” So the father says, “Well, if you get my son and me to meet the president, then you can have it.” And that sounds fine, so they hung up, and they made this deal. But then a few minutes later, the bar mitzvah father calls Wasserman again, and he says, “The Rabbi is also going to have to meet the president,” and that's how he got the Coconut Grove.
AF: How have CEOs and Presidents faced rising conflicts when they may have misaligned objectives? Can you provide an example of how such challenges have been reconciled or worsened in the past?
TT: Look, the president and CEOs often have unaligned objectives. You think about someone like Henry Ford. He did not want the U.S. to enter World War One. He is a real pacifist. He goes to the White House to try and convince Woodrow Wilson to make sure the U.S. doesn't enter World War One. The meeting starts off okay, and he even warms up Wilson with some Henry Ford jokes, (Henry Ford jokes were a big thing). So Henry Ford is telling “Henry Ford jokes” to Woodrow Wilson in the White House, but Ford is a bit of a nag and the meeting ends poorly with Ford being escorted off the White House grounds. And as we all know, the U.S. did eventually end up in World War One, less than two years later. So I think that was a case of misaligned objectives.
Then Ford goes to New York, and there's this big press conference saying the U.S. shouldn't enter the war. And he goes on something called the “Peace Ship,” which is this ship filled with other pacifists, many somewhat famous pacifists. It goes across to Europe acting like they're somehow gonna end this very bloody, very intractable conflict, and it's a complete disaster. Henry Ford’s wife even tells him to get out of the situation. Ford was very successful in automobiles, but he was less successful in trying to convince presidents to do what he wanted.
Photo Caption: Professor Tevi Troy being sworn in as Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services by future Justice Brett Kavanaugh
