Steve Kornacki discusses House of Cards. (Photo via Salon).

Last week, OTR found ourselves at a “salon” hosted by the pioneering webmag, Salon. The conceit of a “salon” harks back either to French wits gathering to amuse nobility (and one another) or to Viennese coffeehouses where intellectuals would debate philosophy and gossip. In modern-day New York, however, a “salon” is more often a euphemism for “panel discussion.” And Salon’s salon was no exception.

For this particular panel, the soft-spoken Iranian director Ramin Bahrani and Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir sat on stools at the Soho House, the semi-exclusive clubhouse in the Meatpacking District, where a wall of bookshelves and artfully arranged hardbacks whispered rather than screamed “library room.” Sans microphone, the panel members discussed all the recent films about politics. And sure, there have been a few: Lincoln, Argo, Django, Zero Dark Thirty. Steve Kornacki moderated.

Of course, the panel was set against Mr. Kornacki’s recent job announcement. The day before, MSNBC announced that Mr. Kornacki, a co-host on The Cycle and a senior political writer at Salon (not to mention an alum of these salmon-colored pages), would succeed Chris Hayes on MSNBC’s weekend morning show Up, formerly Up With Chris Hayes.

Mr. Kornacki, who looked nerdy rather than nerdy-chic in a sweater over a collared plaid shirt, jeans and sneakers, became particularly enthusiastic when the topic of House of Cards came up. Understandably, a political writer might see more inaccuracies than the rest of us in such a show. Not only are some of the delegate counts and the ways in which state politics actually work not accurately depicted, he explained, but perhaps most egregiously, the details of an education bill is not actually a major scoop.

“I will cover education on the show I have, I will write about education politics, but I guarantee you that you are not going to go from being a 22-year-old junior reporter in Washington to being the next Bob Woodward by getting the details of an education bill,” Mr. Kornacki said.

“The way that movies portray journalism is always so hilarious,” Mr. O’Hehir agreed. And nobody in the room was going to argue with that.

We caught up with Mr. Kornacki to ask him about his new gig. After apologizing profusely for telling us to go through MSNBC’s PR machine, Mr. Kornacki decided to throw caution to the wind, taking pity on a reporter from his old alma mater.

“The idea of getting up that early and changing my weekend routine dramatically will be an adjustment,” Mr. Kornacki said, adding that he had only found out that he had been tapped for hosting duties the week before the announcement. “It was funny. Generally, I’m the one speculating, so it was very interesting being one of the few people who knew. I just kept quiet and didn’t say anything.”

Mr. Kornacki said he had not yet had a tête-à-tête with Mr. Hayes—partly because of how quickly and unexpectedly the announcement came—but was planning to sit down with his predecessor in the coming days.

“They told me that it’s the first time that MSNBC has kept the name and the franchise alive,” he said. “It’s a tribute to what Chris has done and how much MSNBC believes in it. So to me, it’s take the template they created and use it.”

When asked how the show will change, if at all, Mr. Kornacki was vague. “Obviously, Chris is Chris and I’m me. If I try to be exactly like him, it’s going to fail, so inevitably there are going to be differences,” he said.

Kevin Spacey (Getty Images)

Never let it be said that Netflix doesn't understand how its users watch TV shows--all at once, in a binge-y, snack-filled fugue state. The online video service is launching all thirteen episodes of its new original series produced by Media Rights Capital, House of Cards, on February 1, 2013. Recap culture is to be thrown into chaos by the method that will allow for, presumably, at least a few marathon sessions. Kevin Spacey plays a powerful Congressman in the series, produced and with the first two episodes directed by David Fincher. Hold our calls for the weekend of 02/01/13 (yep, it's a Friday)--we'll be indoors, huddled in front of our laptop!

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
By William D. Cohan
Doubleday, 468pp, $27.95

Four years ago, on a grayish morning in late May, I left my Brooklyn home and made my way to Central Synagogue on Manhattan’s East Side. I came thither to pay my last respects to an old friend, Mickey Tarnopol, whose life had finally been claimed by a long and valiantly resisted cancer. He and I went back some 40-plus years by then, to when we were young associates, then young partners, at Lehman Brothers. We had both left Lehman: Mickey for Bear Stearns, where he became a key figure in that ill-starred firm’s corporate-finance effort, and myself for a series of false starts that culminated in the short and precarious vocation of writer. In the way of a world in which those whose circumstances increase tend to move rapidly away from those whose circumstances are reduced, it had been a number of years since Mickey and I had seen much of each other, but there was a spot in my heart filled with pleasant memories of him and his family: to miss his funeral would have been unthinkable.

It was a splendid occasion. The temple was packed, the congregation murmurous and self-congratulatory, the speakers vying with one another to praise Mickey’s philanthropic generosity and his merits as father, spouse, colleague, friend. The great securitization boom, of which Bear Stearns was a vibrant nexus, was then building toward its crest, and every now and then a figure would rise from a pew, scuttle to the back of the synagogue, and conduct an intense and hopefully lucrative cell phone conversation. It was all, you might say, very Bear Stearns.

I left Central Synagogue mournful and vaguely troubled. One eulogist after another had spoken, with the confident optimism verging on arrogance that is peculiar to Wall Street in boom times, of the “culture” of the “Bear” as if it were the elder Morgan being praised. And yet nothing I heard could disabuse me of an opinion formed way back when, in my Lehman days—back when “the Bear’s” then-patriarch, Cy Lewis, played willing butt-boy to Goldman’s Gus Levy, another titan of finance who never saw an ethical corner that wasn’t worth cutting, and the relationship between those two firms was, to coin a word, catamitic.

That opinion, quite simply, was that “the Bear” was still, had always been and ever would be a second-rate firm, no matter how much money it appeared to be making; that its core DNA remained Class B; and that if character is indeed destiny, it must someday come to grief.

YOU WON'T FIND Mickey Tarnopol in William D. Cohan’s generally splendid, dauntingly thorough House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, which in a way says it all, but you’ll find everything you need to know, possibly more than the general reader will easily absorb, about how and why “the Bear” stumbled, fell and died. It is, to put it directly, one of the best Wall Street accounts I have ever read, right up there with Barbarians at the Gate (and, for those who know the game, infinitely more useful). I do not see it leaving my shelves until the time comes for my heirs to dispute my meager belongings.

It is a dense book, one that needs to be closely read, because the pieces that fit together to fill out the puzzle are numerous and, in many instances, subtly carved. Mr. Cohan divides his account into four sections. The first takes the reader through the tumultuous weekend in May 2008, when “the Bear” teetered on the brink and was finally, in a manner of speaking, bailed out by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury through the agency of JPMorgan Chase. The second recites the history of the firm, principally as embodied in its three dominant figures: Cy Lewis; “Ace” Greenberg; and the man in the saddle on the gallop to self-destruction, Jimmy Cayne. The third covers the firm’s entry into mortgage securitization around 2002 and the subsequent run-up to the Cioffi-Tannin hedge fund scandal and the slow-drip self-immolation that culminated in the JPMorgan Chase buyout. Finally, there is a shortish coda about the collapse 16 months later of Lehman Brothers, in which Mr. Cohan makes a point that I have long held and proclaimed: that Bear was saved, so to speak, and Lehman allowed to fail because the two firms were completely different kettles of rotted fish and presented crucially different problems of public financing.

This book is so rich, so flavorful, so instructive, and so fully and compellingly cast that a reviewer hardly knows where to begin—and so I won’t. Mr. Cohan is a good, deft writer, and never more so than in his treatment of Jimmy Cayne, who was obviously (as the author admits) a principal, if not the principal, source for accounts of who said/did-what-to-whom that have the resonance of accuracy and authenticity. Mr. Cohan is generous to Mr. Cayne in the acknowledgements, but his mastery of the show-don’t-tell approach to narrative is such that Mr. Cayne comes off, largely through his own words and actions (and inactions), as a perfectly dreadful fellow with one presumptively redemptive aspect: an impeccable card sense, at least at the bridge table, where he plays—obsessively, to the neglect of much else—at Life Master level.

To repeat myself, character is destiny. Students of institutional genetics cannot fail to conclude that what begins on a dubious genomic note must end on a dubious genomic note, that a firm whose path to greatness was laid out by the likes of Cy Lewis was odds-on to be set on the road to extinction by a Jimmy Cayne, with “[h]is lifelong flair for hucksterism.” Sooner or later, the Eumenides’ll getcha! Never fails.

There is only one point—not a small one—where I would take issue with Mr. Cohan. The “Ace” Greenberg he depicts isn’t the “Ace” Greenberg I remember, and those who know me will testify that, even with the onset of dotage, my mnemonic tendency remains less than benevolent. “Ace” was always tough, always an edge-taker, but he played pretty much within the rules. When he was running Bear Stearns, the firm came closest to what it was likely to be at its best: a rough street fighter, skilled at working the dark corners and fringes, now and then getting lucky with the occasional piece of choice business (Larry Tisch). “The Bear” really was what the Goldman Sachs depicted in Charles D. Ellis’ The Partnership claimed to be but wasn’t: a rank outsider, no matter how big its footings got, with that adjective “rank” being applicable in various connotations at various times.

In the end, “the Bear” got to be mainly about its bad guys, with its good guys (final CEO Alan Schwartz, for one) relegated to clean-up detail. Connoisseurs of schadenfreude will have a field day; I personally got a big kick out of Mr. Cohan’s account of the great and boastful law firm Wachtell Lipton’s screw-up on the JPMorgan Chase contract. Good anecdotes pepper these pages, but the larger thread, the headlong hurtle toward oblivion, is never lost. And oblivion it turns out to be: This past weekend, the newspapers reported that various rooms and public spaces at JPMorgan’s Manhattan headquarters are named for the banks it took over on its implacable march to oligopoly, but that you will not find Bear Stearns.

I guess the biggest Wall Street home truth that those of us who are footing the bill for a mess in which “the Bear” was a key player might take to heart is one that Mr. Cohan lays out near the end of his engrossing account, and that is confirmed by nearly every sentence in this fine book. It’s simply this: On “the Street,” honorable equals stupid. Too bad for our lot.

Longtime Midas Watch columnist Michael M. Thomas’ eighth novel, Love & Money, will be published in June by Melville House. He can be reached at books@observer.com

Ms. Kelly had already sacrificed some advantage to Mr. Cohan by allowing his book to come out months before hers. She wasn’t finished, was her reasoning, and there was no point in rushing it and doing a bad job. Still, if it turned out that Mr. Cohan, the former investment banker and award-winning author of The Last Tycoons, had written an airtight, definitive account of Bear’s demise, Ms. Kelly’s contribution to the field could very well be ignored upon publication and quickly forgotten regardless of its merits. 

Which is to say there was rather something at stake for Ms. Kelly, a onetime Observer writer, as she flipped to the back of House of Cards and looked up her name in the index.

Of the four entries she found there, it was the second one, where she is called a “cunt ... whose capability is zero,” that really got Ms. Kelly’s attention.

The reference comes as part of a quote from former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, whose downfall Ms. Kelly arguably helped expedite by writing a devastating A1 Journal story in November 2007 that depicted him as an erratic, dotty pot-smoker. Mr. Cohan had interviewed Mr. Cayne extensively for his book, and the man’s blustery, often obscene mini-monologues are peppered throughout the narrative. (Among the others clobbered are Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whom Mr. Cayne says is gay, in the pejorative sense.)

Mr. Cayne’s full quote about Ms. Kelly, as it appears on page 403 of House of Cards, also casts aspersions on Ms. Kelly’s editor at The Journal, Michael Siconolfi, and characterizes her former colleague, CNBC commentator Charlie Gasparino, as a “snake of massive proportions.” The lot of them, a very angry Mr. Cayne is quoted as saying, were out to get him, inserting biased hooey into their stories about him and even printing quotes from a lunchtime conversation that was supposed to be off the record.

Ms. Kelly and Mr. Siconolfi were surprised to read Mr. Cayne’s remarks. Why hadn’t Mr. Cohan warned them that he was going to include such things in his book, so they could at least respond to him? 
 
“Mr. Cayne’s reckless allegations about the Journal’s reporting of the Bear Stearns collapse is utterly false,” said Wall Street Journal spokesman Robert Christie said in a statement Friday. “If someone had asked us to comment about Mr. Cayne’s crude and reckless assertions, the Journal would have immediately done so.”

Portfolio publisher Adrian Zackheim, meanwhile, who acquired Ms. Kelly’s book after reading her three-part series on Bear last spring, said Mr. Cohan had committed a “journalistic faux pas” by not calling ahead.

Mr. Cohan defended himself on Friday, telling The Observer that he tried several times to get on the same page with the Journal people by emailing Mr. Siconolfi and asking to interview him.

“I tried him twice, and he blew me off twice,” Mr. Cohan said. “The lawyers at Random House felt that was a sufficient number of attempts. I was on deadline and deadline came.”

Mr. Cohan’s interview requests—copies of which were provided to The Observer by both The Wall Street Journal and Mr. Cohan’s publisher, Doubleday—were short and deliberately general, never mentioning Bear Stearns by name or making specific reference to Mr. Cayne’s remarks (in his first email, he referred to his book "on the financial crisis"). Though Mr. Cohan did say in one of his emails that there had “been some statements made" that he wanted to give Mr. Siconolfi "the chance to comment on," his exact purpose was left murky. 

“Mr. Cohan failed to disclose to our editors the nature of his reporting,” the statement from The Journal said. “He neither informed us that he was reporting about Bear Stearns or was quoting Mr. Cayne’s comments about the Journal’s reporting and its news staff in his book.”

Mr. Cohan said Mr. Siconolfi could have surmised that his emails were about Bear—after all, he noted, it was The Journal that reported news of his book deal with Doubleday—and argued that he should not have been expected to provide so many details to his potential interview subject.

“I would have disclosed the entire nature of my questions if he’d agreed to get on the phone with me, but he wasn’t gonna do it,” Mr. Cohan said. “What reporter was gonna lay it all out in an email?"

He acknowledged freely that he’d never tried to contact Ms. Kelly directly.

“What was I going to say, ‘Hey, Kate, I don’t know know you and you don’t know me, but, Jimmy has called you this name. … Do you have a reaction to that?’” Mr. Cohan said.

He went on: “I don’t know Kate Kelly from Adam. And I have tremendous respect for her reporting and writing, and I think I pointed that out about 15 times in the book. She’s mentioned in the index and her work is quoted throughout the book. I think she’s a fabulous reporter.”

Reached by phone this morning in the Journal newsroom, Ms. Kelly said, "I would have appreciated a call," and declined to comment further.