When shots rang out at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend, Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t scared. He asked his tablemate, Coleman Hughes, if he was going to finish his salad.
After the key players in the administration were hustled out by their security detail, “a new litmus for status among the gov’t elite,” Blankfein later quipped on X, he turned to the communications official who had proudly told Blankfein earlier in the evening that she was 57th in line for the presidency. “I guess when you’re number 57, you’re just left here to die with me,” he told her.
“I was mostly trying to see what was going on,” Blankfein, in a light blue sweater and jeans, says. He and I are both safely back in New York, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table in Blankfein’s Manhattan spread which he shares with his wife, Laura. I’m sipping an Arnold Palmer-flavored Swoon—Blankfein offered me the run of the fridge, while he drinks “four-hour-old coffee” from a C-SPAN mug. Back to the chaos at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “I saw a guy in a tuxedo holding this Uzi-looking thing and I thought, ‘Where did he keep this before he took it out?’ ”
Wryness and dryness are par for the course for Mr. Blankfein, 71, who ran the behemoth investment bank Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2018. He steered the firm through the 2008 financial crisis, and a million other smaller storms, which he details in his new memoir Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs. In other words, he knows a thing or two about keeping his head when everyone else is losing theirs. “People joked about it at the firm: ‘Lloyd’s good in a crisis, and if there wasn’t one, he’d cause it.’ ” He is currently the senior chairman of Goldman Sachs, which employs more than 45,000 people and manages $3.61 trillion in assets. Just as distinguishing: He was an early investor, and believer, in The Free Press.
But before he was the chairman and CEO of one of the largest investment banks in the world, before he got sick with cancer and worked through his chemo treatments, before the housing crisis and the dot-com bubble and Y2K—“I sent people around the world to be there when everything broke down. I wanted people on site”—Blankfein was a kid languishing in public housing in East New York. “I had a stressful upbringing,” he says when I ask him where he learned to keep calm. “There was always fighting and I was trying to be the leaven in it.”
