Nicholas Brady: Keen Eye for the Details

Nicholas Brady--the man chosen by President Reagan to lead an investigation of the devastating plunge in the stock market--is a Wall Street multimillionaire, former Republican senator and confidante of Vice President George Bush.

Chairman of Dillon, Read & Co., an investment banking firm, he is a veteran of the Wall Street wars. He pores over a balance sheet or an acquisition deal with the skeptical eye of an expert.

“I’ve spent my life looking at details,” he once told an interviewer. “The devil lies in the details. You have got to do the pick and shovel work to find out where the devil might be, and that gives you a tremendous advantage.”

Brady, 57, played squash at Yale, where he became friendly with a member of the baseball team, George Bush. He worked in the 1980 Bush presidential campaign and attended the Republican convention that picked Bush as Reagan’s running mate.

His work for Republican candidates and causes was rewarded in 1982, when he was chosen to fill the U.S. Senate seat of New Jersey Democrat Harrison A. Williams Jr., who resigned after the Abscam political influence peddling scandal. Brady served for a year and did not seek election.

Photographs of the vice president are prominently displayed in Brady’s New York office, along with an American flag. The two men chat frequently, and their friendship goes beyond the casual nature of political alliances. “If you would ask me who I would most like to spend the weekend with . . . I’d say George Bush,” Brady says. The special commission Brady is to head will survey the chaotic markets and determine whether restraints on trading practices are needed. It will be looking closely at program trading, in which computers direct the purchase and sale of huge blocks of stock in response to price discrepancies between securities and futures markets. These trades generate tremendous volatility.

Brady has been a director of various companies; chairman of the New York Jockey Club, which oversees racing in that state, and is an accomplished golfer and tennis player. He has also been chairman of Purolator, Inc., which was founded in 1923 with financial help from the Brady family.

The Brady home is located on a 4,300-acre New Jersey estate. Brady likes to ride a motorcycle around the property and often commutes to work on Wall Street in a helicopter. He and his wife, the former Katherine Douglas, have four children.