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Been There, Done That
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Business New Haven
10/23/1995
By: Catharine A. Henningsen
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In the words of a former colleague, Blackstone Group Senior Advisor Daniel Burstein, Jeffrey Garten is “a three-for-one play.
“He's a real strategic thinker,” Burstein says, “ and he combines hands-on experience in the business and financial world that very few academics have with an academic background and expensive government experience. He has terrific global experience. He's written extensively, and I think he's provided very important insights on the global environment, both in his writing and what he's been doing in the Commerce Department.
“With his emerging markets projects, he's actually been creating something new,” Burstein adds. “And, for my money, he's been one of the most positive and important forces in the whole [Clinton] administration.”
One might say that Jeffrey Garten is a been-there-done-that kind of guy. Beyond his most recent experience as undersecretary for international trade and a rocket ride of a career in investment banking, he's held senior posts on the White House staff and at the State Department in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. He's the author of A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany and the Struggle for Supremacy, which analyzes past and future relationships between and among Washington, Berlin and Tokyo.
A captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces from 1968-72 and with a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Garten began his business career in 1979 when he joined the investment banking house of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. By 1984, Garten was a managing director of Shearson Lehman Brothers, where his responsibilities included providing investment banking advice to finance ministers and central bank governors in Latin America. He directed Shearson Lehman's Tokyo office as well as the firm's banking activities in Asia, heading an advisory team which structured two of the world's leading Hong Kong-based shipping concerns.
In 1987, at the age of 40, Garten founded the Eliot Group Inc., an investment bank that provided financial advisory services to companies in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Latin America. In 1991 he joined the Blackstone Group as a managing director specializing in international financial advisory work and mergers and acquisitions.
In academia, he was a highly respected professor of finance and economics at Columbia University's Grate School of Business. Its dean, Meyer Feldberg, predicts that “Yale's School of Management will enjoy a renaissance under Garten's leadership. He exemplifies a leader with a foot in both the private and public sectors, and he will bring both substance and style to the deanship.”
Leaving Columbia for the Commerce Department, Garten was confirmed as Undersecretary for International Trade by the U.S. Senate on November 8, 1993. As one of the two lead negotiators in the automobile trade dispute with Japan that ended with the Geneva accord last June, Garten became one of the Clinton administration's most visible figures. Moving aggressively to gain contracts and business opportunities for American companies in overseas markets, Garten leaves as a legacy the “war room” he established at Commerce, where more than 150 global contracts are monitored daily.
Blackstone Group Chairman Peter G. Peterson refers to Garten's “remarkable set of qualities. In the first place, he has very substantive policy interests which will result, I think, in his having excellent rapport with the faculty. At the same time he has done a brilliant job at the Commerce Department in terms of relating that department to some major opportunities in emerging markets along with leaders of the business community. Third, he has excellent marketing communications skills which will do a lot to project the school onto the screen of important Americans all over the country.”
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