Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Carol J. Loomis for FORTUNE magazine, published in 2005. She has stood toe-to-toe with imperial CEOs, exposed major frauds, and played some serious bridge with Buffett. Now FORTUNE’s intrepid reporter takes on her toughest subject yet: herself and her career.
To read the complete article, please click here.
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(FORTUNE Magazine) – “A poet writes one haiku in a lifetime,” the 17th-century Japanese poet Basho said. “A master writes ten.” A similar rule prevails in journalism, where even the best reporters are lucky to produce a handful of truly classic tales. How, then, to categorize Carol Junge Loomis? In her half-century career at FORTUNE, Carol has written so many critically important articles that her peers have honored her with not one, but three “lifetime achievement awards.” If you press Carol on the secret of her success, she will allow that it has something to do with “hard work.” There isn’t a document she won’t read, a footnote she won’t explore, a call she won’t make to get a story right. (For a recent feature on the bankrupt Bethlehem Steel, she read 50 years’ worth of annual reports.) But her colleagues know where these business-changing, Congress-stirring stories really come from: her conscience. Carol is the soul of this magazine–and the extraordinary tale that follows shows why. Here, then, are a reporter’s notes. — The Editors
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The date was March 21, 1975, an anchoring, if incidental, fact I have unearthed from a half-century of files. My afternoon task that day was to interview the vaunted chairman of International Telephone & Telegraph, Harold Geneen, then 65, about the tumbling, embarrassing fortunes of his company’s subsidiary Hartford Fire Insurance. That morning, though, I was huddled for the umpteenth time over Hartford’s thick annual report to the state of Connecticut, a document nicknamed, because of its statistical density and the color of its cover, the “Yellow Peril.” Then came a phone call, from an ITT public relations man I knew. “I have a favor to ask,” he said. “Geneen figures you know all about him, but he knows almost nothing about you. So I’ve been told to dig up some information.” He slid to the point: “I decided the easiest way to get what I need–but don’t give me away–is just to ask you.”
I laughed and recited the details of my uncomplicated life: I’d grown up in a rural Missouri town called Cole Camp, population 1,000; earned a journalism degree at the University of Missouri; worked for two years at Maytag in Newton, Iowa, editing a magazine sent to the company’s dealers; and come to FORTUNE 21 years earlier, rising from an entry-level job to interviewing men like Geneen. The PR man went away happy, while I fell to wondering how Geneen, a lightning rod for controversy then but still widely acclaimed as a manager, would use his new knowledge. He’d go at it in a sophisticated way, I thought, finding some spot along the line to coolly drop in a reference to my background.
A few hours later, keyed up for the occasion, I walked with a FORTUNE reporter into Geneen’s Park Avenue office. The boss rose from a deep couch, wearing a too-large suit meant to disguise the fact that he was a small man. He shook hands jovially, and then kerboom! “Well, how are things in Cole Camp?” So much for sophistication, subtlety, nuance.
As we moved into the interview, with two PR men in tight formation around Geneen, I began to feel that another part of his image wasn’t standing up well. He was famous for knowing every detail of ITT’s businesses. But on the subject of Hartford, he warned that he might come up short: “Don’t get too technical,” he said, “or you’ll get me on the phone.”
Nonetheless, you can’t begin to comprehend property and casualty insurance without knowing how “reserves” for claims are booked and the managerial dangers of underestimating them. So I pushed Geneen about Hartford’s persistently poor reserving, as revealed in “Schedule P” in the Yellow Peril. He’d never heard of Schedule P; he didn’t know much about Hartford’s reserve insufficiencies at all. I left the interview knowing I had some news. Our story, “ITT’s Disaster in Hartford” (May 1975), laid out the intricacies of the insurer’s problems. An ITT auditor claimed that investors understood the complexities of reserves. Hardly, I thought, and wrote, in italics: “Harold Geneen does not really understand these matters himself.”
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Carol Loomis is at Editor-At-Large at FORTUNE magazine, where she has worked since 1954. She has written extensively on Warren Buffett since 1966 and is well known as the business journalist on closest terms with him. For the past 35 years she has edited Buffett’s famous and eagerly-awaited annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire-Hathaway. Loomis’ many honours include the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievment Award for business journalism and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Her most recent book, Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, was published by Portfolio/Penguin Group (November, 2012).
Here are video interviews of Buffett and Loomis to check out:
The Daily Show with John Stewart (Part 1), please click here
The Daily Show with John Stewart (Part 2), please click here
The Charlie Rose Show, please click here