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Big Deal by Bruce Wasserstein
Warner Books, $30
Review by Richard Wexler
Web posted on: Wednesday, May 13, 1998 1:56:54 PM EDT
(CNN) -- A recent issue of "The New Yorker" includes a cartoon depicting two not very happy, not very well-dressed men. They seem to hear something. "There -- there it is again," one says to the other. "The invisible hand of the marketplace giving us the finger."
Readers who do not have incomes at least in the high six figures are likely to come away with the same feeling after plowing through Bruce Wasserstein's "Big Deal: The Battle for Control of America's Leading Corporations."
Wasserstein heads a firm that advises companies that want to eat up other companies or avoid being eaten. According to the book jacket, he has been involved in more than a thousand deals, including the one that created Time- Warner, parent company of both CNN and his publisher, Warner Books. But it only seems like he describes the minutiae of every blessed one of them here.
Rarely does this book go beyond minutiae. And never does it consider the morality of taking over huge corporations by saddling them with gigantic debts, then selling them off piece by piece or otherwise ransacking them to pay off that debt. There is no entry in the index for "downsizing." There is hardly a word about all the Americans who labored loyally for decades, only to find themselves suddenly with no job and no hope. It seemed as though Wasserstein might get around to this on page 417, when he writes that "selling a company also has a human side." Turns out he was talking only about how painful such a sale can be for the CEO.
And there is little more about the consequences for society as a whole. His section on media mergers offers no discussion of concentrating the power to shape ideas in fewer and fewer hands. Those who complained about the decimation of CBS News after Larry Tisch took over are dismissed as "self- anointed visionaries." And in his chapter about health care mergers, the issue of impact on quality of care gets only a few paragraphs, and no specifics.
Even a spirited defense of the goodness of greed and its putative benefits for society somehow would be less offensive than Wasserstein's dismissal of anyone who exists outside his rarefied circles as barely worthy of mention. But then, to Wasserstein, no justification is needed, since he deems it virtually self-evident that "the merger process" is the virtual linchpin of America's current prosperity (though he acknowledges not everyone has noticed).
If a book is going to have no moral center, one would at least hope for some good gossip. But Wasserstein doesn't dish. In his hands greed is good -- but it's also mighty boring. The reader is treated to nearly 800 pages of scintillating prose like this: "The only way Ross could keep his prized cable assets was to exercise Warner's right of first refusal to buy American Express out. However, Ross was hemmed in as a result of the defensive measures he had taken in response to Murdoch's earlier bid. Herb Siegel of Chris-Craft didn't like the idea of purchasing more cable. Ross eventually agreed to sell off Showtime and MTV as a way to get the cable deal through. Viacom picked up control of those hot properties for roughly $700 million."
Rarely has a book so amoral been so dull.
Richard Wexler is a news writer and copy editor in the CNN Washington Bureau. He is author of "Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse" (Prometheus Books)
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