My Father, the Negotiator
IN THE MID-’70S, MY PARENTS STARTED A BUSINESS CALLED POWER Negotiations. My mom, Ellen, designed the logo: two men shaking hands, each with his thumb up. Win-win. This company sold a single product and derived its revenue from a single source: Herbie, my dad. Seminars, keynotes, negotiations. He described his mediation fee as “a minuscule percentage of an astronomical sum.” He did not like to speak at colleges, he said, because colleges gave an honorarium, which means “more honor, less arium.”
Ellen booked the jobs and the travel from a suite in the Ron of Japan building in Northbrook that overlooked the Edens Expressway and the Chicago Botanic Garden. The business grew by word of mouth. Herbie, who had climbed the ranks at Allstate before becoming a kind of hired gun, was soon putting on seminars for the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, where he taught conflict resolution and terrorist negotiation. He went on to advise the Departments of State and Justice, as well as the CIA. He helped design the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, famed for the elaborate personality profiles it uses to catch serial killers. In explaining the point of this work, he’d paraphrase Arthur Miller’s play , saying, “You can’t know the price if you don’t know the player.” This had been his position since his childhood in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where he was constantly talking his way into parties and
