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<\/a><\/p>\nAlan Greenspan testifies before the House Financial Services Committee, Feb. 19, 2015. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve under presidents of both parties for 18 years, died Monday, according to a statement by his widow, veteran NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlan passed away at our home this morning at the age of 100 from complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease,\u201d Mitchell said in a statement she shared with her employer. \u201cHe was a giant of a man who helped shape the U.S. economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cmistakes\u201d he acknowledged included first and foremost the housing bust in 2008, two years after he retired as Fed chairman.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, I\u2019ve found a flaw,\u201d he confessed in congressional testimony that year when Rep. Henry Waxman, the Jewish California Democrat, asked Greenspan if he regretted his laissez faire approach to keeping interest rates low. \u201cI don\u2019t know how significant or permanent it is. But I\u2019ve been very distressed by that fact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Greenspan\u2019s Jewish profile was low key: government He was a member of two predominantly Jewish clubs, Harmonie in New York and Hillcrest in Los Angeles. He rarely if ever headlined Jewish events, but he campaigned in the Jewish community for his favored candidates, including for Ronald Reagan in 1980, when the Republican ousted Jimmy Carter from office. <\/p>\n
He was among a coterie of Reagan advisers who assured Jewish leaders in a New York meeting that Reagan would be a better friend to Israel than Carter, who had clashed with the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin.<\/p>\n
Because of his prominence, Greenspan became an avatar of postwar Jewish success. When Sen. Joe Lieberman became in 2000 the Democratic vice presidential candidate, commentators reflexively named Greenspan as one of the prominent Jews who had helped create an environment that paved the way for Lieberman\u2019s ascent.<\/p>\n
Greenspan\u2019s successors as Fed chair, Ben Bernanke, and then Janet Yellen, were Jewish; by the time Yellen assumed the job in 2013, that fact seemed hardly worth mentioning.<\/p>\n
That didn\u2019t spare Greenspan from being fodder for antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Hutton Gibson, the extremist who shaped the views of his son, Hollywood megastar Mel Gibson, placed Greenspan at the center of his fantasies of Jewish malign influence and once said Greenspan should be hanged. <\/p>\n
By the time he assumed the Fed chairmanship in 1987, Greenspan was a prominent Republican deeply involved in economic politics. President Richard Nixon named him chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1974; he assumed the position just after the scandal-plagued Nixon resigned and then worked throughout President Gerald Ford\u2019s term. <\/p>\n
Greenspan, a prominent analyst and consultant since his early 20s, had in 1967 joined Nixon\u2019s presidential campaign as a top domestic affairs consultant. <\/p>\n
He came to Republican politics by way of his infatuation with the works of Ayn Rand, the Russian-born Jewish philosopher whose extreme libertarianism wrapped up in didactic, potboiler novels like \u201cThe Fountainhead\u201d shaped generations of post-World War II conservatism. He invited Rand to his swearing-in as chairman of the White House council.<\/p>\n