CHAPTER 9
Opportunity of a Lifetime
Indonesia was a test for me in so many ways, and still more tests awaited me in Boston.
I went to the Prudential Center headquarters first thing in the morning, and while I was standing with dozens of other employees at the elevator, I learned that Mac Hall, MAIN’s enigmatic, octogenarian chairman and CEO, had promoted Einar to president of the Portland, Oregon, office. As a result, I now officially reported to Bruno Zambotti.
Nicknamed “the silver fox” because of the color of his hair and his uncanny ability to outmaneuver everyone who challenged him, Bruno had the dapper good looks of Cary Grant. He was eloquent and he held both an engineering degree and an MBA. He understood econometrics and was vice president in charge of MAIN’s electrical power division and most of our international projects. He also was the obvious choice to take over as president of the corporation when his mentor, the aging Jake Dauber, retired. Like most MAIN employees, I was awed and terrified by Bruno Zambotti.
Just before lunch, I was summoned to Bruno’s office. Following a cordial discussion about Indonesia, he said something that made me jump to the edge of my seat.
“I’m firing Howard Parker. We don’t need to go into the details, except to say that he’s lost touch with reality.” His smile was disconcertingly pleasant as he tapped his finger against a sheaf of papers on his desk. “Eight percent a year. That’s his load forecast. Can you believe it? In a country with the potential of Indonesia!”
His smile faded and he looked me squarely in the eye. “Charlie Illingworth tells me that your economic forecast is right on target and will justify load growth of between seventeen and twenty percent. Is that right?”
I assured him it was.
He stood up and offered me his hand. “Congratulations. You’ve just been promoted.”
Perhaps I should have gone out and celebrated at a fancy restaurant with other MAIN employees — or even by myself. However, my mind was on Claudine. I was dying to tell her about my promotion, all my experiences in Indonesia, and my time with Ann.
She had warned me not to call her from abroad, and I had not. Now I was dismayed to find that her phone was disconnected, with no forwarding number. I went looking for her.
A young couple had moved into her apartment. It was lunch-time but I believe I roused them from their bed; obviously annoyed, they professed to know nothing about Claudine. I paid a visit to the real estate agency, pretending to be a cousin. Their files indicated they had never rented to anyone with her name; the previous lease had been issued to a man who would remain anonymous by his request. Back at the Prudential Center, MAIN’s employment office also claimed to have no record of Claudine. They admitted only to a “special consultants” file that was not available for my scrutiny.
By late afternoon I was exhausted and emotionally drained. On top of everything else, a bad case of jet lag had set in. Returning to my empty apartment, I felt desperately lonely and abandoned. My promotion seemed meaningless or, even worse, a badge of my willingness to sell out. I threw myself onto the bed, overwhelmed with despair. I had been used by Claudine and then discarded. Determined not to give in to my anguish, I shut down my emotions. I lay there on my bed, staring at the bare walls for what seemed like hours.
Finally I managed to pull myself together. I got up, swallowed a beer, and smashed the empty bottle against a table. Then I stared out the window. Looking down a distant street, I thought I saw Claudine walking toward me. I started for the door and then returned to the window for another look.
The woman had come closer. I could see that she was dressed in that same sophisticated style and that her confident walk was reminiscent of Claudine’s, but it was not Claudine. My heart sank, and my feelings changed from anger and loathing to fear. I wondered if she had died — or been killed. I took a couple Valium and drank myself to sleep.
The next morning, a call from MAIN’s personnel department woke me from my stupor. Its chief, Paul Mormino, assured me that he understood my need for rest, but he urged me to come in that afternoon.
“Good news,” he said. “The best thing for catching up with yourself.”
I obeyed the summons and learned that Bruno had been more than true to his word. I not only had been promoted to Howard’s old job; I also had been given the title of Chief Economist and a raise. It did cheer me up a bit.
I took the afternoon off and wandered down along the Charles River with a quart of beer. As I sat there, watching the sailboats and nursing combined jet lag and vicious hangover, I convinced myself that Claudine had done her job and had moved on to her next assignment. She had always emphasized the need for secrecy. She would call me. Mormino had been right. My jet lag — and my anxiety — dissipated.
During the next weeks, I tried to put all thoughts of Claudine aside. I focused on writing my report on the Indonesian economy and on revising Howard’s load forecasts. I came up with the type of study my bosses wanted to see: a growth in electric demand averaging 19 percent per annum for twelve years after the new system was completed, tapering down to 17 percent for eight more years, and then holding at 15 percent for the remainder of the twenty-five-year projection.
I presented my conclusions at formal meetings with the international lending agencies. Their teams of experts questioned me extensively and mercilessly. By then, my emotions had turned into a sort of grim determination, not unlike those that had driven me to excel rather than to rebel during my prep school days. Nonetheless, Claudine’s memory always hovered close. When a sassy young economist out to make a name for himself at the Asian Development Bank grilled me relentlessly for an entire afternoon, I recalled the advice Claudine had given me as we sat in her Beacon Street apartment those many months before.
“Who can see twenty-five years into the future?” she had asked. “Your guess is as good as theirs. Confidence is everything.”
I convinced myself I was an expert, reminding myself that I had experienced more of life in economically developing countries than many of the men — some of them twice my age — who now sat in judgment of my work. I had lived in the Amazon and had traveled to parts of Java no one else wanted to visit. I had taken a couple of intensive courses aimed at teaching executives the finer points of econometrics, and I told myself that I was part of the new breed of statistically oriented, econometric-worshipping whiz kids that appealed to Robert McNamara, the buttoned-down president of the World Bank, former president of Ford Motor Company, and John Kennedy’s secretary of defense. Here was a man who had built his reputation on numbers, on probability theory, on mathematical models, and — I suspected — on the bravado of a very large ego.
I tried to emulate both McNamara and my boss, Bruno. I adopted manners of speech that imitated the former, and I took to walking with the swagger of the latter, attaché case swinging at my side. Looking back, I have to wonder at my gall. In truth, my expertise was extremely limited, but what I lacked in training and knowledge I made up for in audacity.
And it worked. Eventually the team of experts stamped my reports with their seals of approval.
During the ensuing months, I attended meetings in Tehran, Caracas, Guatemala City, London, Vienna, and Washington, DC. I met famous personalities, including the shah of Iran, the former presidents of several countries, and Robert McNamara himself. Like prep school, it was a world of men. I was amazed at how my new title and the accounts of my recent successes before the international lending agencies affected other people’s attitudes toward me.
At first, all the attention went to my head. I began to think of myself as a Merlin who could wave his wand over a country, causing it suddenly to light up, industries sprouting like flowers. Then I became disillusioned. I questioned my own motives and those of all the people I worked with. It seemed that a glorified title or a PhD did little to help a person understand the plight of a leper living beside a cesspool in Jakarta, and I doubted that a knack for manipulating statistics enabled a person to see into the future. The better I came to know those who made the decisions that shape the world, the more skeptical I became about their abilities and their goals.
I doubted whether limited resources would allow the whole world to live the opulent life of the United States, when even the United States had millions of citizens living in poverty. In addition, it wasn’t entirely clear to me that people in other nations actually wanted to live like us. Our own statistics about violence, depression, drug abuse, divorce, and crime indicated that although ours was one of the wealthiest societies in history, it might also be one of the least happy societies. Why would we want others to emulate us? Looking at the faces in the meetings I attended, my skepticism often turned to silent anger at the hypocrisy.
Eventually, however, this also changed. I came to understand that most of those men believed they were doing the right thing. Like Charlie, they were convinced that communism and terrorism were evil forces — rather than the predictable reactions to decisions they and their predecessors had made — and that they had a duty to their country, to their offspring, and to God to convert the world to capitalism. They also clung to the principle of survival of the fittest; if they happened to enjoy the good fortune to have been born into a privileged class instead of inside a cardboard shack, then they saw it as an obligation to pass this heritage on to their progeny.
I vacillated between viewing such people as an actual conspiracy and simply seeing them as a tight-knit fraternity bent on dominating the world. Nonetheless, over time I began to liken them to the plantation owners of the pre–Civil War South. They were men drawn together in a loose association by common beliefs and shared self-interest, rather than an exclusive group meeting in clandestine hideaways with focused and sinister intent. The plantation autocrats had grown up with servants and slaves, and had been educated to believe that it was their right and even their duty to take care of the “heathens” and to convert them to the owners’ religion and way of life. Even if slavery repulsed them philosophically, they could, like Thomas Jefferson, justify it as a necessity, the collapse of which would result in social and economic chaos. The leaders of the modern oligarchies, what I now thought of as the corporatocracy, seemed to fit the same mold.
I also began to wonder who benefits from war and the mass production of weapons, from the damming of rivers and the destruction of indigenous environments and cultures. I began to look at who benefits when hundreds of thousands of people die from insufficient food, polluted water, or curable diseases. Slowly, I came to realize that in the long run no one benefits, but in the short term those at the top of the pyramid — my bosses and me — appear to benefit, at least materially.
This raised several other questions: Why does this situation persist? Why has it endured for so long? Does the answer lie simply in the old adage that “might makes right,” that those with the power perpetuate the system?
It seemed insufficient to say that power alone allows this situation to persist. Although the proposition that might makes right explained a great deal, I felt there must be a more compelling force at work here. I recalled an economics professor from my business school days, a man from northern India, who lectured about limited resources, about man’s need to grow continually, and about the principle of slave labor. According to this professor, all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves. Ultimately, then, I became convinced that we encourage this system because the corporatocracy has convinced us that God has given us the right to place a few of our people at the very top of this capitalist pyramid and to export our system to the entire world.
Of course, we are not the first to do this. The list of practitioners stretches back to the ancient empires of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and works its way up through Persia, Greece, Rome, the Christian Crusades, and all the European empire builders of the post-Columbian era. This imperialist drive has been and continues to be the cause of most wars, pollution, starvation, species extinctions, and genocides. And it has always taken a serious toll on the conscience and well-being of the citizens of those empires, contributing to social malaise and resulting in a situation where the wealthiest cultures in human history are plagued with the highest rates of suicide, drug abuse, and violence.
I thought extensively on these questions, but I avoided considering the nature of my own role in all of this. I tried to think of myself not as an EHM but as a chief economist. It sounded so very legitimate, and if I needed any confirmation, I could look at my pay stubs: all were from MAIN, a private corporation. I didn’t earn a penny from the NSA or any government agency. And so I became convinced. Almost.
One afternoon Bruno called me into his office. He walked behind my chair and patted me on the shoulder. “You’ve done an excellent job,” he purred. “To show our appreciation, we’re giving you the opportunity of a lifetime, something few men ever receive, even at twice your age.”