From a Bloomberg Businessweek article about Robert Rubin, President Clinton's former Treasury Secretary:
In October 2007, as Citigroup was imploding, Rubin went to South Beach to visit his father, who died a year later at 101. In line at an upscale grocery, he met Iris Mack. One of the first African American women to get a Harvard Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Mack also worked at Enron and the Harvard Management Co. Over the next 14 months, Rubin pursued her romantically. They would meet, according to Mack, in his Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite, where he would stay after flying in on the Citigroup corporate jet. "It's one of the perks," Mack says Rubin told her.
This is not news, but it does call into question how hard Rubin was working for his $15 million annual salary. Mack, who is single and 46, wrote about her relationship with Rubin in an April 2010 Huffington Post article. She decided to go public after watching Rubin testify before the FCIC. ...
Mack enjoyed Rubin's company. "But the more I talked to him, I realized he was a good liar," she says. "I point-blank asked the guy if he was married. He never did answer a simple damn question. He would say stuff like, 'Well, are you married? Have you ever been married?' So it got to the point where I would still talk to him, but eventually I started ignoring him, or he would come down [and] I would lie and tell him I was out of town. I just felt like the guy had a double personality."
If it's "not news," why is Businessweek writing about it? And how is Iris Mack's race relevant to the story? The idea that a person can't work hard while also pursuing a romantic relationship seems odd. If it were Mr. Rubin's wife, or someone his own age, that he was with, no one would care. The "call into question" formulation is a classic journalistic device. The journalist is the one asking the question, and using it to cast an aspersion. I am not a fan of Mr. Rubin, but this seems like a cheap shot. Whatever Mr. Rubin's failings at Citigroup, and there were plenty of them, the accusation that he wasn't working hard enough seems like a stretch, or at least an accusation that needs stronger support than the word of a former Enron employee who says she was the object of Mr. Rubin's romantic pursuit.
