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Continued from previous page
Vise, W'82, WG'83
After his breakthrough at The
Tennessean, Vise spent another
summer there, then two at The
Washington Post, all while getting his
Wharton bachelor's and MBA in five
years. A year working in mergers for
Goldman Sachs rounded out his education
by giving Vise the opportunity
to view the business world from the
inside. Answering the office phone
late one evening, he found himself
talking to a Saudi Arabian official
interested in arranging the purchase
of Getty Oil. Vise says he looked
around for "someone who had gray
hair" to field the call, only to
discover—at age 24—that
it was up to him.
But after just a year, Vise did
something many would consider
shocking. He left Goldman Sachs to
return to journalism. During a job
interview at the Post, then-Managing
Editor Howard Simon actually leaned
across the table with a paternalistic
look and said: "Do your mother and
father know you're here?"
That was 1984. Corporate mergers
and acquisitions were soaring. Junk
bonds were on the rise. By the late
part of the decade, Vise was working
in the Post business department when
he teamed up with a features writer-turned
Wall Street correspondent in
the Post's New York office. The two
coordinated daily and long-term coverage
on the intricate link of business,
politics and regulation between the
two East Cost metropolises.
After the stock market crash of
October 1987, Vise and his partner,
Steve Coll, took on the daunting
task of explaining what went wrong.
They latched on to the idea of using
former Security and Exchanges
Commissioner John Shad's tenure as
the vehicle. In four stories published
in 1990, Vise and Coll detailed Shad's
professional style and goals, his battle
to stop big investment firms from
being prosecuted for the misdeeds
of individual brokers, and a deal he
struck to put the Commodities
Futures Trading Commission in charge
of regulating stock index futures. The
series won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for
explanatory journalism.
"After thousands of hours of interviews,
review of thousands of pages of
documents, and much solid advise
from our editors, we put the series
together, but only after a memorable
all-night editing session," Vise and
Coll wrote in their introduction to
the stories for a book containing the
1990 Pulitzer articles. "When the
series appeared in the newspaper, the
era at the SEC and on Wall Street
that had inspired our collaboration
was nearly over. There was a new
President, George Bush, who talked
about moderating the excesses that
had gone before him."
The stories about Shad were not
complimentary, but Shad's reaction
says something interesting about
Vise's work. The former SEC chief,
who is now deceased, remained an
important source for Vise's work on
a book called Eagle on the Street.
"I think that it's not the way he
would have written it, but he respected
it," Vise said of Shad's reaction to
the series.
After the Pulitzer, Vise went on to
write about the Washington, DC,
financial crisis of the 1990s, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the Justice Department. The latter
assignment spurred another book,
this one called The Bureau and the
Mole, about former FBI agent Robert
Philip Hanssen's life as a double agent
selling U.S. secrets to the Russians.
Hanssen was arrested in February
of 2001 after he left a garbage bag
filled with U.S. intelligence in a
Virginia park. In exchange, he was
to pick up $50,000 in cash left by
his Russian contacts.
He had been doing it for years. As
far back as 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law and fellow FBI agent Mark
Wauck had reported to superiors that
he suspected Hanssen was spying
for the Russians, in part because he
spent far beyond his salary and had
thousands of dollars in cash hidden
in his home.
Vise's book not only charts
Hanssen's career and treachery, but
also serves as a partial professional
biography of former FBI Director
Louis Freeh.
Even with all this, Vise found time
along the way to author a book about
the University of Maryland's basketball
team and remain active with both
Wharton and Penn. He interviews
potential candidates for admission
and makes regular trips back to campus
for basketball games attended by
friends and family. He married college
sweetheart Lori Vise, W'82, and
together they have three children.
"The best thing about going to
Wharton for me was I met my wife.
Wharton was a great matchmaker,"
he says.
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