The Generals by W.E.B. Griffin Read Free Book Online

business partners, and that included entertaining them.
    There was an extraordinary amount of personal relations in upper-echelon banking. This had at first really surprised John H. Denn as he had begun to work his way up in the hierarchy of CONTBANK. He had naively believed as a young man, fresh from Northwestern (AB) and then Pennsylvania (MBA, the Wharton School of Business), that after he had done his ritual internship service in the trenches as a teller and moved into the executive offices, the personal element would disappear. Business would be transacted based upon the pure facts and upon a rational analysis of the business circumstances. The personal element would play, at best, a minor part.
    He had realized quickly that he was wrong; that bankers were no different from car salesman; that a deal had a better chance of going through when the participants were on a first-name basis and when each side thought of the other side as friends. More importantly, he had quickly learned that many deals that met every criteria for a mutually beneficial profit could and did fail because someone had taken a dislike to somebody else.
    Denn had been even more surprised to realize that he was quite good as a back-slapper and hand-shaker. He was called “corporate relations” in banking; but of course it was public relations. He had become an account executive, and then an assistant vice president and then a vice president much sooner than he had expected he would. And he was well aware that his rapid promotion had as much to do with his “corporate relations” skills as with his knowledge of banking.
    He had earned the reputation at CONTBANK as the man to send on difficult or unusual assignments when potential customers were likely to be difficult. He could, he thought wryly, calm the natives when they were restless. People thought they saw in him someone like themselves, who understood the problem; and they would therefore listen to his suggestions.
    And then there were situations like the case in hand, where his mission was simply on behalf of the bank as the bank to repay services or courtesies rendered, or to cause others to feel obliged to the bank—or at least to think kindly of it.
    Shooting pheasant with customers had never been mentioned at the Wharton School of Business Administration, but it should have been. Pheasant shooting was, in the real world of banking, at least as important as providing bank officers with antique-furnished offices or any other expense that could only be justified as “corporate relations.”
    Pheasant shooting was so important that CONTBANK, as part of a deal with American Maize & Land Corporation (in which CONTBANK had made available $6.3 million on a ten-year 6.75% note for the acquisition by AM&L of the Herman Shoerr Estate) had insisted on reserving for itself exclusive hunting rights on the 6,400 acres involved. Long before Denn had joined CONTBANK, “the South Dakota Farm” had been organized for the entertainment of CONTBANK customers:
    The largest and nicest of the farmhouses had been retained (AM&L had bulldozed the others flat) for use as a hunting lodge. A full-time caretaker had been engaged, who had very little else to do during the year except maintain the farmhouse (he and his family were furnished with a cottage a half mile away) and make sure that whatever AM&L was up to did not interfere with the pheasant population. During hunting season, however, he was expected to make himself available twenty-four hours a day to insure the comfort of CONTBANK’s guests. His wife was pressed into duty then as cook for the guests.
    All this was expensive, of course, but a justified expense, which satisfied not only the Internal Revenue Service but the bank’s own internal auditors, who often took an even more critical view of entertainment expenses.
    John H. Denn had not been surprised that CONTBANK wanted to entertain Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes at the South Dakota Farm. But the