Famous Coup Quotes

It was in describing these early bargaining tactics by the British oil company that Dean Acheson, the U.S. secretary of state, made his famous statement: “Never had so few lost so much so stupidly in so short a time.

Much of the public was convinced that the CIA was capable and willing to do so. Thus began the famous 444-day American hostage crisis. Americans who knew little of the events of 1953 were mystified; Iranians were not. The specter of coup had come to haunt U.S.-Iranian relations. Similarly, on March 5, 1981, when more than 100,000 gathered at Tehran University to commemorate Mossadeq’s death and call for the establishment of a democratic rather than an Islamic republic, Hojjat al-Islam Ali Khamenie—Khomeini’s future successor—declared ominously: “We are not liberals, like Allende, willing to be snuffed out by the CIA.

On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood." He then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he fished in his pockets for his glasses. "Gentlemen," he said, "you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension payment equivalent to five years' full pay.

Some of the famous warriors of the Western Plains earned more coup feathers in their lifetime than were required for a full-sized headdress. These warriors were allowed by tribal law to make and wear a war bonnet having either a single or double row of eagle feathers hanging down the back. Originally these bonnets were only knee length, but when the Indian started to ride horses, the tails were extended to the wearer’s heels.

Apollo had become a trailblazer in the so-called “distress for control” market where it could buy up loans and bonds at steep discounts. When a troubled company restructured its debt, the paper that creditors had accumulated could then be swapped for stock in the reorganized company. If the company then turned around and improved, those credit investors who took on the risk could then make a windfall.

Crucially, most of the existing Harrah’s debt did not have to be refinanced. Because it was not secured by any collateral, suddenly Harrah’s could issue senior debt backed by the company’s assets. It would do so in the LBO deal, pushing $4.5 billion of existing debt to the bottom of the totem pole in a $25 billion debt stack. This was cruel. Those existing unsecured bonds crashed in price as they were last in line to be repaid. But the maneuver allowed Apollo and TPG to issue new debt more cheaply. And it illustrated one of the key legal principles that would echo through this case: Debtholders’ relationship with the company remains strictly contractual. Any rights they have must be bargained for and embedded in documents. The management and board of a company, in contrast, have fiduciary duties which dictate that they maximize shareholder value.

The leader of the Drexel refugees was Leon Black, a husky, brash, Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate in his 30s who was running the Drexel merger group out of New York. Black was a native New Yorker born into privilege. But his world shattered in 1975 when his father, Eli Black, then the chief executive of Chiquita banana importer United Brands, leaped to his death from his office in the Pan Am building above Grand Central Terminal. In the days after his death, United Brands was discovered to have made millions in bribes to Honduran officials in order to reduce taxes on banana exports.

Years later, Rowan recalled that when he had joined Drexel, he believed that he was five years too late—all the money had been made and all the fun had. What he said he had learned from the Drexel blow-up and the subsequent birth of Apollo was that, “you want chaos, you want things to be shaken up, you want the system to be brought down and built up again. Just when you think the world is coming to an end and things are never going to get better, that is the time to build a career and build the next great fortune.

In 1993, on the strength of the Continental turnaround, Bonderman, his younger colleague Coulter, and William Price, an executive with experience at GE Capital and Bain & Co., would together form Texas Pacific Group, a private equity firm jointly headquartered in Fort Worth and San Francisco (in the early days, the founders would joke that they had to explain the company was not a railroad).

Unlike Millstein, the teams from Oaktree and Appaloosa believed there were higher stakes at play. Private equity firms, they believed—best exemplified by Apollo—had become far too abusive of creditors, wielding legal documents and hardball negotiating tactics as swords to take value from loan and bondholders that simply did not belong to them. To Oaktree and Appaloosa, nothing less than the sanctity of the US capital markets was at stake in this room. The

Jon Huntsman’s 2015 autobiography devoted a full chapter to the Apollo saga, entitling it simply “The Double Cross.” It offered such lines as, “Our earlier experiences with Bain and Blackstone proved there is no honor among thieves or among Wall Street shops. Apollo was no exception…Matlin [a Huntsman board member] had warned us Apollo would attempt to shaft us and Apollo did not disappoint…the route Apollo chose for saving itself was duplicity.

Harrah’s had committed to finishing the new Octavius hotel tower at Caesars Palace and spent $1.1 billion in capital investments in 2008. By 2010, capital investments had dropped to just $160 million. One bellman at The Paris described the years after the Apollo/TPG takeover: “It felt ugly after the buyout. Before you could service the guest, it was a great place to work before those private equity guys took over.” Attrition and hiring freezes meant that employees were often forced to do the work of two people. Customers were suddenly facing longer lines to check in and have their luggage delivered, which proved stressful both for guests and the remaining staff. Holes in the wall weren’t fixed because maintenance crews were let go, and there was no money for repairs anyway. Duct-taped carpet was evident everywhere. The system for delivering and bussing room service orders broke down, leaving carts of food scraps next to elevators and guest rooms, leading customers to complain and forcing the union to intervene.

Rowan liked to point out that Norwegian Cruise Lines, another Apollo company, had 600 subsidiaries. “Did each one of those entities require independent directors?” he would ask rhetorically.

Apollo was having a difficult time finding candidates for the top spot, and Frissora would have had a hard time finding any job at any other public company. In September 2014, he had left as CEO at Hertz Global citing “personal reasons.” In fact, Hertz was in the middle of a massive accounting scandal where the rental car and equipment company was facing accusations of inflating profits. Carl Icahn had taken a near 10 percent stake and was making noise. Another hedge fund said Frissora had “lost all credibility.” To his surprise, Frissora got a call from an executive search firm just two weeks after leaving Hertz. They asked if he had interest in the Caesars job. He met with Rowan, Sambur, and Bonderman. Apollo claimed it would be a brief six-month bankruptcy, and the job would be fun. Frissora had been the CEO of two public companies, Hertz and auto parts maker Tenneco, and was new to gaming. But Hertz had gone private in a $15 billion LBO in 2006, so he had experience working with private equity. Until the accounting scandal, Hertz had prospered under Frissora. Rowan and Sambur were hoping an experienced operator could impose business discipline they believed Loveman had not.

you want chaos, you want things to be shaken up, you want the system to be brought down and built up again. Just when you think the world is coming to an end and things are never going to get better, that is the time to build a career and build the next great fortune.

One of their most famous coups was underwriting a $10 million loan for a growing mail-order house called Sears, Roebuck, headed by Goldman's distant relative. It was the first time a mail-order security had ever been on the market-a calculated risk, but one that paid off.

There was no real suggestion in 2010 that policy principle might be at stake, or even policy or political competence. Julia Gillard told us that the government had lost its way. A Labor frontbencher famously summed up the depth of thought that went into it when he said to the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann on the afternoon of the coup, “So, do you think we can win with Julia?” Much later, she and many of her colleagues said it was because Kevin Rudd was out of control. It was about personal hatred and about the polls.

Amanollah Khan had tried to assert rights for women in the 1920s, together with his queen Soraya, who famously cast off her veil in public. The royal couple also began promoting the education of girls, banned the selling of them for marriage, and put restrictions on polygyny. The backlash was severe. To many Afghans, and particularly to the majority who did not live in Kabul, the reforms seemed outrageous: Tribal men would lose future income if daughters could no longer be sold or traded as wives. In 1929, under threat of a coup, the king was forced to abdicate.

He experimented with pulleys, by which he demonstrated his famous leverage principle, “that with any given force it was possible to lift any given weight.” This enabled him to stage one of his most famous coups de théâtre in front of King Hiero and the entire city of Syracuse. Archimedes tied a series of pulleys to a dry-docked three-masted ship loaded with cargo and passengers, and then, to the crowd’s stunned amazement, he lifted it into the harbor by himself. This led Hiero to declare, “From this day forward, Archimedes is believed no matter what he says,” which led Archimedes to reply in the full flush of triumph, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the earth.