BARUCH
A clever woman magazine writer once asked Bernard M. Baruch for
some information about the peace treaty. The question was not in
his special field, the economic sections of the treaty, and he told
her so.
"It took him one sentence to say that he could not tell me what I
wanted to know," she described the interview afterward. "And then
he talked to me for two hours about himself. He told me of his
start in life as a three-dollar-a-week clerk, how rich he was, his
philosophy of life; how you should recognize defeat when it was
coming, accept it before it was complete and overwhelming and start
out afresh, how liberal and advanced were his social views, how
with all his wealth he was ready to accept a capital tax as perhaps
the best way out of the bog in which the war had left the world,
how democratic he was in his relations with his employees and his
servants. It all seemed as amazing to him as if he were describing
someone else, or as if it had just happened the day before."
Perhaps it is only to women and to journalists that men talk so
frankly about themselves, to the most romantic and best trained
listening sex and profession, who perforce survey the heights from
below. But this young woman's experience was, I have reason to
believe, a common one.
Is it vanity? You say that a man who talks so much about himself
must be vain.
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