Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken

IN A much-needed rebuttal to James Stewart's Den of Thieves, Jesse Kornbluth attempts to explicate the Michael Milken affair once and for all. Kornbluth sympathizes with Milken, whom he portrays as a largely innocent creature of the financial forest, hunted to the death by Rudolph Giuliani and the Feds.

A sound argument can be made for this view. But this reader came away un* certain that Kornbluth himself understands what Milken was up to that got him ten years in prison for securities-law violations, and quite certain that he has failed to explain it for the rest of us. Kornbluth is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and takes that slick magazine's approach to journalism--which is to recount piquant details from his subject's personal life, while paying inadequate attention to less sexy matters. Such as money. "In finance, as in any other enterprise, character is destiny; motivation, relationships, and personality are perhaps even more important than numbers and dollars," he writes. This simply isn't true of Michael Milken, whose name first became a household word, not: because of his tortured relationships with everyone from his father to Ivan Boesky, but because of the magnitude of the effect of his activities on the U.S. economy.

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