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Why (as in yaverbaum)
itself), took place during my command performance before an inquisi- tive, and enthusiastic, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Once he agreed, the program was launched and proved to be very successful. We sold 815 properties with a book value of $2 billion to twelve partner- ships, and one of the national publications covering the real estate industry called the Land Fund the real estate “Deal of the Year” in 1993. The idea of “equity financing” by the government then led to the devel- opment of what came to be known as the Multiple Investor Fund, which was also quite successful.
What it did not lead to was the adoption of the private-public part- nership by the United States armed forces. It did, however, lead to a somewhat silly memory: my second and final interaction with the Department of Defense. One or two months after the successful launch- ing of the Land Fund program, I received a call that our uniformed services wanted to talk to us about the Land Fund; perhaps we could help them with their very extensive base-closing program. Why not?
So it was that one week later, Louis Dubin, from the sales side of the RTC, and I walked through the multiple metal detectors at the Penta- gon and, led by a sergeant, walked for what seemed to be two miles until we were taken into a conference room where we were left alone for about five minutes while we awaited the arrival of the brass who were charged with hearing us out. In the ultimate talk, where we described our program and they described their problems, we were told that chief among them was—can you believe it?—the fact that they were tied up in regulations that would slow them down for years. It seems that—no surprise—military bases had more than a tad of environmental problems. And—believe it or not—the officers present could not stand the red tape.
In truth, that was not really the moment that stuck with me. Now, I had been in thousands of conference rooms over the years, but this one, in which we waited for the officers to arrive, struck even anal me as extraordinary. All I saw was that each of the, maybe twenty, identical and spotless side chairs was tucked tightly into its position, precisely equidistant from its neighbors to the right and the left. Each chair, in turn, had a brand-new lined white legal pad placed in front of it, with
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