DAVID RUBENSTEIN BIOGRAPHY

“David Rubenstein, who is sixty-six [2016], grew up in Baltimore, in a two-bedroom row house in the city’s northwestern corner, which was then predominantly Jewish. His father sorted mail for the postal service, and his mother was a homemaker. As a student at City College, a premier, boys-only public high school, Rubenstein was serious-minded and kept to himself. ‘He was very, very quiet’his fellow-student Kurt Schmoke, who, in 1987, became the city’s first elected black mayor, told me. ‘He liked to talk about government and politics — not so much about business.’

“In 1975, after graduating from Duke [University] and then the University of Chicago law school, and spending two years at the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, in New York, Rubenstein served as the counsel to Senator Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, on the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. A year later, at the age of twenty-six, he joined Jimmy Carter’s Presidential campaign as a policy aide and was subsequently hired as a deputy to Stuart Eizenstat, President Carter’s domestic-policy adviser. Rubenstein helped write memos for Carter, prepare him for press conferences, and draft State of the Union addresses.

“At the White House, Rubenstein subsisted on vending-machine snacks, staying late enough to get his briefing papers at the top of Carter’s stack. ‘He was almost painfully shy,’ Eizenstat told me. ‘He almost never spoke to the press. He kept his head down. He almost never spoke in meetings.’ On his late shifts, Rubenstein got to know Alice Rogoff, an assistant to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, when she came by to drop off memos. They married in 1983; Rogoff is now an arts philanthropist and the owner of the Alaska Dispatch News, the state’s largest newspaper. (She lives part time in Anchorage.)

Alec MacGillis, “The Billionaires’ Loophole,” New Yorker, March 14, 2016, pp: 64-73.