Word: goldsmith
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...People in America were willing to work much harder than in Britain," Goldsmith says, rubbing a lemon-size piece of amber as he paces up and down in an almost bare penthouse office, which overlooks the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. "Most people forget that America's strength is not its culture but its ideology, and that ideology is freedom...
...Goldsmith's takeover strategy was simple. His targets were almost invariably old companies that had strayed from their original purpose through diversification, acquired too many senior managers, and were selling at a good deal below their breakup value. He would break them up, sell off the odds and ends, streamline the core and move on to the next project. Goodyear, which Goldsmith tried to acquire last year, provides a good example. The company's original purpose, he told a congressional committee, "was to build better tires, cheaper, and sell them harder," but it diversified into oil and gas, started building...
...Goldsmith can be ruthless in his pursuit of profits. "There is a lot of internal rage in Jimmy," says John Train, a New York financier who knows him well, and Goldsmith himself acknowledges, "When I fight, I fight with a knife." Yet he is rather different from the standard buccaneer. When Ivan Boesky moved uptown from Wall Street in 1985, he rented a suite of offices in the same building that housed Goldsmith's New York headquarters, 630 Fifth Avenue, and then asked for a meeting. "He spent most of his time telling me about all the contributions...
...Goldsmith is fiercely anti-Communist, extravagantly so. "Jimmy believes," says an old friend, "that the KGB is using the global media to destabilize public opinion and spread lies." Goldsmith is just as fiercely critical of the business establishment, which he calls corpocracy. Big companies, he says, are in league with big government and big unions to stifle change and progress. "With the return of the Democrats to power over both houses of Congress," he says, "you are once more suffering the outrages of that triangular alliance...
...then there is AIDS. Goldsmith repeatedly brings it up in conversations. He believes it threatens to kill most of the human race -- "it could be up to 98% of mankind." This champion of individual enterprise urges that the U.S. join with the despised Soviets and "pool their resources in a massive research effort to find a way to prevent the spread of AIDS." "The thing about Jimmy," says Olivier Todd, whom Goldsmith fired as editor of L'Express for favoring the Socialists in the 1981 election, "is that he's an English eccentric in the best sense of the term...