Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash
The horrible news spread quickly, thanks to morning radio. I was preparing to take my daughter to the orthodontist when someone reached me with the news that our acting CFO, David Kellerman, was found dead from an apparent suicide. The date was April 21, 2009.
I stood there woodenly and leaned on the kitchen counter for support. Kellerman was “old Freddie.” He’d given the company sixteen years. He was smart, well-liked and friendly to everyone. Exuding confidence, he could carry off outrageous outfits, like yellow slacks, navy blazer and a bow tie. When [CFO Buddy] Pizel was ousted [after the government takeover in September 2008], Kellerman was named interim CFO. It was a big job for such a young man. Maybe too big.
My first thought was that Kellerman was the ultimate victim of our tragic tale. Into his lap had fallen all the business and accounting decisions of the past five years. The whole mess was his to sort through and make sense of. It was his to put our losses in neat columns, his to tally the billions we’d need from Treasury, his to personally attest to the accuracy of a 300-page financial disclosure.
It was his to deal with the regulator and the myriad and unrelenting requests, reports and outstanding issues…It was his to figure out how to account for all the non-economic initiatives we were required to do to help stabilize the housing market.
Kellerman’s death captured, in a way, all the little deaths we all were suffering, and caught them all up in a great shroud. Our hearts left us that day. I wondered if Freddie Mac could take much more.
An all-employee town hall was called for later that morning. These town hall meetings were becoming our form of group therapy.
That day, as we trudged once again over Jones Branch Drive, cameramen pointed large TV cameras at our sad, downturned faces. Passing them, I noticed that an official from FHFA had caught up to our group and was walking next to me. I thought morbidly of death as the great leveler–probably the only thing that can destroy Washington’s attitude that “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
“How are you doing?” he asked extremely quietly.
“Not so well,” I answered, staring at the tips of my shoes. “We’re just people, all of us.”
And maybe that’s what it comes down to in the end: people. Weak, greedy, insecure, short-sighted–but at times capable of deep insight and great moral courage. Men and women working in the boxes and layers of organizations that orbit other boxes and other organizations in the intertwining and complex systems of money and power.
Perhaps things could have turned out differently for Freddie Mac — and for David Kellerman — if the men and women in the boxes, in the layers and in the jagged planetary system of Washington had all played their cards differently.
Excerpted from Chapter 14, Sad Goodbyes, from Days of Slaughter, Inside the Fall of Freddie Mac and Why It Could Happen Again, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017