At the age of 69, on the threshold of the biblical life-span of threescore years and ten, L. (for Lewis) William Seidman has reached the enviable state of not having to prove anything to anybody. He does not need to make a lot of money because he's already a millionaire, with houses in Georgetown and on Nantucket and a 15,000-acre cattle ranch in New Mexico. He doesn't need to show he's fit because he still does 50 push-ups before work every morning. ("After you've done that, anything else for the rest of the day is a pleasure.") And as for his powerful position, just across the street from the White House, he can't be fired. President Bush very publicly tried to get rid of him last spring, but Seidman just as publicly stood his ground. This combination of confidence and courage is a very useful attribute because Seidman's main purposes are to sell off the charred debris of the S&L disaster and prevent any similar debacle from devastating the commercial banking system. About both problems he knows his own mind and freely speaks it.
As head of both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Resolution Trust Corporation, Seidman holds what he calls "the biggest damn lousy job in the country." Or to put it another way, it is "a combination of a garbage collector, an IRS agent and an undertaker." He was all those things last week as he took over the collapsing Bank of New England.
A risky venture, but Seidman (pronounced seed-man) is used to living dangerously. Just last June he was out riding on his ranch when his horse shied from an insect and started bucking. "Rather than get thrown off, I jumped off," Seidman later told a reporter. "I had a better chance to land right." The horse dragged him some distance, though, and Seidman had to undergo two operations to repair a fractured pelvis and hip. He still uses a cane but hopes to get rid of it soon.
Looking back, Seidman believes that probably the most important influence on his life was World War II. Fresh out of Dartmouth with his Phi Beta Kappa key in hand, he joined the Navy in 1943 and was assigned to a squadron of nine destroyers in the South Pacific; only two of the nine survived. "I thought I was really blessed to be alive when so many of my friends didn't come back," says Seidman. "The odds were pretty good that I wasn't coming back, so I thought I'd better enjoy myself and still do something for whoever it was that brought me back. I therefore had a somewhat different attitude than you would have if all you had done was gone to college and partied."
After earning a law degree from Harvard, Seidman returned to his native Michigan and got an M.B.A. at Ann Arbor. One focal point of youthful idealism in those days was Michigan's Governor George Romney, so Seidman served as his special assistant for financial affairs. After doing a turn in the family's accounting firm of Seidman & Seidman, he moved to Washington as President Ford's chief economic adviser. With the coming of Jimmy Carter, Seidman went back into business as vice chairman of the Phelps Dodge mining company, then headed the business school of Arizona State University at Tempe until he took over the FDIC in 1985. Of all his wanderings Seidman says with a wink, "I can't keep a job."