Pete Peterson with then-President Bill Clinton at the Council on
Foreign Relations.
feet during much of that time. As a child, I can remember the
varicose veins in his legs. So he was the model of work or,
more accurately, a workaholic. I started working in the
restaurant taking cash at the age of eight. So I had early
training in working for a living. The other thing he did, aside
from establishing the notion of work and achievement, was to
always emphasize “economia”—saving money. For example,
he had a sign in the washroom which said to the customers:
“Why use two paper towels when one will do?”
HP: Give me some examples of your economizing and
saving.
PGP: Like many, I suppose, who were brought up in the
Depression with the tradition of saving and economizing, I
just can’t stop doing it. My wife accuses me today of neurotic
economizing, where I will buy something on sale that I
probably don’t even need, just to save the money. My father
also generously gave back, not only to his family in Greece,
but also to the community. In the middle of the Depression,
I remember he would never turn away what they used to call
bums—homeless, unemployed workers—who were looking
for something to eat. He would have them do some
work around the restaurant in exchange for the meal, his
own version of work-for-welfare. So from him I learned
philanthropy, I learned giving back, I learned savings and I
learned hard work. And I’ve tried to apply those lessons every
day of my adult life.
HP: So, if I had you as an example, how come I never
learned any of these things, or applied them in any way in
my own adult life?!
PGP: Well, I didn’t say I was a great father, or that you were
even trainable.
HP: On the career front, I’m always fascinated with people
who rise to the top rather quickly. I was in television for a
long time. Jeff Zucker and I were both production assistants
making $24,000 a year at network news divisions. He is now
running all of NBC Universal, making millions, and we’re the
same age and started at the same time. What did he have that
got him to the top? And what do you have that has always got
you to the top? Whether it was advertising, marketing,
becoming C.E.O. of Bell and Howell at age 36 and one of the
youngest C.E.O.s of a Fortune 300 company or going to the
Nixon cabinet at 45. Why did you leapfrog over people?
There are a lot of confident, hard-working, really smart
people who don’t go above a certain level, and watch the
Pete Petersons and Jeff Zuckers and ask, “What the hell are
they doing that I’m not?”
PGP: I have had some psychotherapy in order to gain some
understanding of what drives me. We determined that one of
the things that drove me was a tragedy in our family when I
was four years old. For my mother, being a Greek wife with a
workaholic husband wasn’t easy. She derived enormous
pleasure from her little girl named Elaine, who died at the age
of one from the sudden onset of croup.
My mother then descended into a deep melancholia. I had
been used to being the number one son, the prince, and all of
a sudden my mother descended into loneliness and depression,
which I interpreted as abandonment of me or perhaps
even caused by me. I had to figure out how to get my mother’s
attention. I decided on a strategy to overachieve, and to be the
perfect son. So I had to get more gold stars than anybody, I had
Pete Peterson with then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986.
