I am Rivlin, Hear Me Roar

I have just read your article on Lewis A. Rivlin (“Losing It,”). A few only very slightly disinterested comments about Rivlin:

1. He was never a patient of any of the amateur psychoanalysts who were his former partners at Peabody, Rivlin, Gore, Cladouhos & Lambert or Peabody, Rivlin, Lambert & Meyers and selected for interview. He did not show what some of them considered to be the irrationality of thinking that there was more to do in life than just practicing law as a result of his ex-wife Alice becoming well known and widely admired for being smart, organized, and effective. He always encouraged and supported her career and was unabashedly proud of her, not jealous. He showed strong symptoms of wanting to do everything available from the cafeteria table of life at an early age, and emphatically and irretrievably announced when there were just three partners his irrevocable intention to leave the firm he had founded after it would hire its fiftieth lawyer. His activities in the world of dealmaking and entrepreneurship go back to when Rivlin was a Justice Department senior trial attorney and continued when he was the second resident partner at what is now called O’Connor & Hannon and Alice was still a mere Harvard/Radcliffe Ph.D. making her way through the Brookings version of academe. Under his leadership, the Octopus Flying Club grew from one aircraft and eight owning pilots to three planes and 24 pilots, which some interviewed for your article would surely attribute to the jealousy of knowing that Alice was going to become well known as an assistant secretary of HEW [Health, Education and Welfare], the founding director of the congressional budget office, the director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, the president of the American Economic Association, the head of Office of Management and Budget and the vice-chair of the Fed. Incidentally, Mr. Rivlin had absolutely nothing to do with Alice Rivlin’s selection as head of the congressional budget office, contrary to what some of your expert interviewees may have surmised and stated as fact. The former references to Alice in his resume to which your article refers became short and very matter-of-fact when he realized that some intermediaries were urging people to go to Rivlin because of the implied Alice/Fed connection. There are a number of factual inaccuracies in your article: