I’ve been reading The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs by Charles D. Ellis. Goldman has been in the news quite a bit lately so I decided to get a bit of background, and Ellis is an investment consultant so the book is as close to an official history as has yet been written.

The major players from Goldman are pretty well known — Henry Paulson, Bob Rubin, Joshua Bolten, but it’s pretty interesting where some of the lesser known ones others turn up.

Take former Goldman partner Thomas L. “Dusty” Rhodes, president of National Review, chairman of the conservative Club for Growth, and one of the strategists behind Proposition 209, a California initiative that ended affirmative action. He shows up briefly in The Partnership:

“SAMA — the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority — had huge cash flows to invest in the late 1970s, and interest rates were not as important to SAMA as credit quality. Through the contacts of partner Thomas “Dusty” Rhodes, the utility group arrange two- to five-year private placements with SAMA for many of the highest grade U.S. utilities.”

I’ll be giving updates on other interesting Goldman alumni as I come across them in the book.