On January 4, 1944, Clarkson decided to have the board make official what had been in effect for eight years: F. P. Small, age seventy, was retired and Ralph Thomas Reed, fifty-four, was elected president, beginning one of the most eventful periods in the company’s history.

1944年1月4日，克拉克森决定由董事会正式确认过去八年来实际上的安排：年满七十岁的F.P.斯莫尔退休，五十四岁的拉尔夫·托马斯·里德当选为总裁，开启了公司历史上最为多事的一个时期。

Extraordinarily enough, the succession came as a surprise to most people at American Express. Employees, including senior executives, had speculated on who would succeed Small and had all believed the board would choose J. K. Livingston. How such a misperception came about is a mystery. Those who remembered that event insisted merely that “Livingston was senior,” in other words, he had been in the company longer than Reed and therefore was entitled to the presidency. But as the lone executive VP, Reed was higher on the company ladder; he socialized with Clarkson, the chief executive, and had played a noticeably larger role in decision making than Livingston had from the mid-1930s on. Every important memo passed through his hands; only selected bits of information went to “Jake” Livingston.\*

令人惊讶的是，这次接班在美国运通内部大多数人看来是个意外。包括高层管理人员在内的员工们早已私下猜测谁会接替斯莫尔，几乎一致认为董事会会选择J.K.利文斯顿。至于为何大家产生了这种误解，至今仍是个谜。回忆起当时情况的人们只是坚持说：“利文斯顿资历更老”，换句话说，他在公司的年头比里德长，因此理应继任总裁。但作为唯一的执行副总裁，里德在公司等级上更高；他常与首席执行官克拉克森交往，并且自20世纪30年代中期起，在决策中扮演了比利文斯顿更为重要的角色。所有重要的备忘录都经他手处理；而“杰克”利文斯顿则只能接触到一些筛选过的信息。

The reason so many employees had figured wrong must have had a great deal to do with the way Clarkson and Wiggin (who was still influential in company affairs) conducted business in the years after the Pecora hearings. Because of the horrendous publicity they received during the hearings, they both became extremely secretive; they kept their plans and ideas to themselves, confiding in few others in the company, and seldom putting anything on paper. (Both men were known around 65 Broadway as “no file” people.) As a result, not even company executives seemed to know that, by 1936, Clarkson and Wiggin had decided to make Reed the next president of American Express.

员工们误判的主要原因，极可能与克拉克森和威金在佩科拉听证会之后行事的方式有关。由于当年听证会带来的极其负面的舆论影响，这两人变得极为缄默。他们将计划与想法紧锁在心，仅向极少数公司内部人士透露，几乎不留下任何书面记录。（在百老汇65号，公司内部都称他们是“无档案”人士。）因此，甚至连一些高管也不知道，其实早在1936年，克拉克森与威金就已决定由里德继任美国运通总裁。

Staff members were wrong about the succession, but not generally disappointed. They knew Reed had his faults: he could be tyrannical and imperious, a “Little Caesar” who never admitted fallibility and who, according to one secretary, could fly into a rage “over a paper clip.” But he had a softhearted streak. Like Small, he believed that Amexco was not just a company but a family, and he forgave everything except disloyalty. He seldom fired anyone, not even people who clearly could not do their jobs. During his presidency, for example, at least three of his senior managers had serious drinking problems, but he never fired or demoted any of them. “You smell too bad,” he would say to one. “Go stand in the corner.” Incompetents also stayed at their desks; the thought of getting rid of them never seemed to occur to Ralph Reed. The important thing was that they had stood by the company, and now he was standing by them.

员工们虽然在接班人选上看走了眼，但总体上并未失望。他们知道里德也有缺点：他专横跋扈，是个从不承认自己有错的“小凯撒”，据一位秘书回忆，他甚至会因为一枚回形针而大发雷霆。但他也有柔软的一面。像斯莫尔一样，他坚信运通不仅是一家公司，更是一个家庭；除了对背叛绝不容忍外，他对其他问题多能包容。他极少解雇员工，即使是那些明显不胜任工作的人也一样。例如在他任内，至少有三位高管有严重酗酒问题，但他从未开除或降职其中任何一位。他会对其中一人说：“你身上味太重了，去角落站一会儿。”无能者仍可保留岗位——对里德来说，解雇他们似乎从未成为选项。关键在于，他们曾经支持公司，而现在他选择支持他们。

Reed had also shown himself a highly competent manager who had straightened out the books and had guided the company through difficult times. He had demonstrated, too, the kind of drive, forcefulness, and dedication needed to run the company (he routinely put in fourteen-hour work days). After the war, Amexco would have a massive rebuilding job to do, and the company needed a man who could grasp the details of a problem, make a decision quickly, and then implement it effectively. Whatever people thought of Ralph Reed, they believed he would get the job done.

此外，里德也展现出他是一位极有能力的管理者，曾整顿账目，并带领公司度过难关。他还体现了经营公司所需的干劲、魄力与投入（他经常每天工作14小时）。战后，运通将面临大规模重建，需要一个能够掌握问题细节、迅速决策、有效执行的领导者。无论人们如何评价拉尔夫·里德，他们都相信他能完成任务。

Clarkson gave Reed equal powers with himself, and they divided the company into two areas. Clarkson held authority over the moneymaking part of the company, the investment department, but it was isolated from the rest of Amexco. Reed, on the other hand, controlled operations. So while the two men theoretically shared power, the arrangement allowed Reed to dominate Amexco, to become the sole chief executive, in fact, if not in name. He eventually became the single most autocratic chief executive in the company’s history. He reserved for himself the right and the duty to make every decision, no matter how trivial. A director once said of Reed that if the company bought a “broom in Cairo,” Reed had to know about it and approve it. He had to endorse every merit pay increase, and he even oversaw the window displays for the travel office on Fifth Avenue.

克拉克森给予里德与自己同等的权力，并将公司划分为两个部分。克拉克森掌管公司的赚钱业务——投资部门，但这一部分与运通的其他部门相对隔离。而里德则全面掌控运营事务。因此，虽然两人理论上权力对等，但此安排实际上让里德主导了整个运通，成为事实上的总负责人。最终，他成为公司历史上最具独裁色彩的总裁。他将所有决策权，无论大小，都集中在自己手中。一位董事曾说，哪怕公司要在开罗买一把扫帚，里德都必须知情并批准。他要签署每一次绩效加薪，甚至还亲自监督位于第五大道旅行部的橱窗陈列。

And like another company autocrat, J. C. Fargo, Reed presided over one of the most productive periods in the company’s history. Reed also made two fateful decisions: to resurrect banking and to create the American Express Credit Card. Reed’s decisions, like those of J. C. Fargo, would have as much or more to do with the character of the man who made them than they would with the business of American Express.

和另一位公司专制掌门J.C.法戈一样，里德主政时期是美国运通历史上最富成效的时期之一。他还作出了两个具有深远影响的决策：重启银行业务，并创办美国运通信用卡。这些决策，和法戈当年的决定一样，其动因更多地源于决策者个人性格，而非公司业务本身。

For the first three years of his presidency, Reed was notably receptive to new ideas. Even before he took office, he began the company’s first active planning process in more than a decade, looking for new business opportunities. In the early autumn of 1943, Reed assigned assistant VP Dennis Harmon, formerly head of the Zurich office, to investigate possible ventures for the postwar period. On October 19, Harmon brought Reed a suggestion for a new business that seemed promising: an obscure enterprise called field warehousing.

在担任总裁的最初三年中，里德对新想法表现出格外开放的态度。甚至在他正式就任之前，他就启动了公司十多年来首次主动的业务规划，着手寻找新的业务机会。1943年初秋，他指派助理副总裁、曾任苏黎世办事处主管的丹尼斯·哈蒙调查战后可能的业务方向。10月19日，哈蒙向里德提出一个看似前景不错的新业务建议：一种鲜为人知的业务——“场地仓储”。

Field warehousing permitted companies with poor credit ratings to borrow against their inventory: a company needing credit would contact a field warehouser and sign a “storage contract.” This contract would give the warehouser control over the portion of inventory the company wanted to borrow against. After the warehouser took control, it would certify that the inventory existed and that it was of a certain value, and would write out a receipt for that value. The company needing credit could take this receipt to a bank as a guarantee of inventory and get a loan. Field warehousing was peculiar in that the warehousing company did not take actual possession of the inventory. Instead, the warehouser segregated inventory on the borrower’s own property and then hired a “trustworthy employee” of the borrower’s company to act as custodian; the warehouser made its profit simply through “storage fees” paid by the borrowing company on its own inventory. A warehouser carried one risk: it guaranteed a quantity of inventory and was liable if the actual inventory was less than the amount certified.

场地仓储允许信用评级较低的公司以其库存为抵押借贷：需要融资的公司会与场地仓储商签订一份“仓储合同”。该合同赋予仓储商对拟抵押部分库存的控制权。仓储商接手后会出具一份证明文件，确认这些库存的存在并评估其价值，随后开具相应金额的收据。该公司可凭此收据作为库存担保向银行申请贷款。场地仓储的独特之处在于，仓储公司并不实际接管这些库存，而是直接在借款公司的场地内划出专区，再雇用借款公司的一名“可信员工”担任保管人；仓储公司从借款公司支付的“仓储费”中获取利润。仓储商唯一的风险在于，它要为所认证的库存数量承担担保责任——若实际库存低于认证数额，则要承担赔偿责任。

Reed discussed the idea with his men for several months and finally gave a go-ahead. Despite the lengthy discussion, the business seemed likely to become only a small sideline. But it was to play a major role in the history of American Express, because as the company would learn, the business was notably susceptible to fraud. Because the warehouser left everything in the borrower’s hands, the inventory might be removed or wrongly declared, especially if the “trustworthy employee” was more loyal to the creditor firm than to the warehouser who hired him.

里德与团队就此讨论了几个月，最终决定批准这项业务。尽管讨论颇为详尽，但这一业务起初仍被视为仅为公司的一个小型副业。然而，事实证明它在美国运通历史上扮演了关键角色，因为公司很快发现这一业务极易发生欺诈。由于仓储商将一切控制权交给借款方，库存很容易被调走或虚报，尤其当所谓“可信员工”对借款公司忠诚高于雇佣他的仓储公司时，这种风险尤为明显。

This susceptibility was a fact neither Reed nor his men fully appreciated. For the most part, they saw in field warehousing a low-risk operation that might enhance Amexco’s goodwill with the banks. As the new treasurer Olaf Ravndal noted, through a warehouse’s services, a bank could take on loans it otherwise would avoid. In other words, if Amexco took on this business, Ravndal suggested, bankers would make some money, and their goodwill would benefit American Express.

对于这种风险，无论是里德还是其团队都未能充分认识。在他们看来，场地仓储是一项低风险业务，还能增强美国运通与银行之间的关系。正如新任财务主管奥拉夫·拉文达尔所指出的，通过仓储服务，银行可以承接原本不敢放贷的业务。换句话说，如果运通涉足此业务，银行可以获利，而他们的好感也将反哺美国运通。

This argument sold Reed because, by the 1940s, nothing was more important to Amexco than the goodwill of the banks. The company depended on the banks to provide retail outlets for the TC, still by far the company’s most profitable business. Over the years, the TC’s competition had dwindled, and the company felt enough faith in the public’s loyalty to cut advertising to a minimum. But the banks were under no obligation to market the Amexco TC. The company’s preoccupation with cultivating the banks’ goodwill persuaded Reed to announce, in the summer of 1944, the formation of the American Express Field Warehousing Corporation, a wholly owned incorporated subsidiary, with capital of \$1 million.

这个观点说服了里德，因为到了20世纪40年代，没有什么比银行的好感对美国运通更重要。公司严重依赖银行作为旅行支票（TC）最主要的零售渠道——TC仍是公司利润最高的业务。多年来，TC的竞争对手已大幅减少，公司对公众的忠诚度充满信心，以至于将广告预算降至最低。但银行并没有义务推广运通的TC。正是这种对维护银行好感的高度重视，促使里德在1944年夏天宣布设立美国运通场地仓储公司——一家注册资本100万美元的全资子公司。

But field warehousing was only a small part of Reed’s post–World War II plans, and he waited until Allied troops invaded Europe in June 1944 to begin his most intensive planning effort. At almost the same time the Allies were landing on the beaches of Normandy, Reed held a conference at 65 Broadway attended by all current and some former officials. The conference ended with general agreement that the company’s prospects, once the war ended, were bright, especially in travel. Reed and his men based their assumptions on their experiences after World War I. There had been a boom in travel in the 1920s and Reed and his men guessed it would happen again. They anticipated growth in air and business travel, and they plotted a strategy to meet that growth, mainly through a rapid resurrection and a vast expansion of Amexco’s office network, as well as an expansion of travel services. In an August issue of the company house organ Reed said: “In truth we can look forward with confidence to Post-War success in all our activities. The opportunities will be worldwide. . . .”

不过，场地仓储只是里德在战后计划中的一个小部分。他等到1944年6月盟军登陆欧洲之后，才开始启动最密集的业务规划。几乎就在盟军登陆诺曼底的同时，里德在百老汇65号召开了一场会议，参会者包括公司所有在任及部分前任高管。会议结束时，与会者普遍认为战争结束后公司的前景十分光明，尤其是在旅游方面。里德和团队基于一战后的经验作出判断：1920年代曾出现过旅游热潮，他们预测这种情况将重演。他们预期航空和商务旅行将迅速增长，并为此制定战略，主要是迅速恢复并大规模扩展美国运通的办事处网络，同时扩大旅游服务业务。里德在公司内刊8月刊中写道：“我们确实可以满怀信心地展望战后在所有业务上的成功，机会将遍布全球……”

The expansion came even sooner than expected, only a couple of months after the Allied landing, when the U.S. military gave Amexco the chance to establish a base of operations in Europe. That base provided Amexco with two opportunities. First, it allowed the company to develop businesses with the military itself. And more importantly, the military helped put Amexco in a position to take advantage of the travel boom Reed and his men had accurately foreseen.

这场扩张来得比预期更早——就在盟军登陆数月之后，美国军方给予运通在欧洲建立运营基地的机会。这个基地带来两方面机遇：其一，公司得以直接拓展军方相关业务；更重要的是，这一基地让美国运通占据了有利位置，能够充分把握里德与其团队准确预见的旅游热潮。

In August 1944, the military asked Amexco, along with a few other companies, to open offices in Europe in order to act as a “depository” of U.S. military funds. But by the time R. E. Bergeron put 11 Rue Scribe back in business in January 1945, the armed services wanted American Express, instead, to set up a program of sight-seeing tours in Europe for American service men and women on leave.\* B. E. “Bert” White, an Amexco executive who at the time was a major in the army, handled the negotiations for a military travel service and concluded an agreement “in principle” in late 1944. (The final agreement was delayed by the Battle of the Bulge and was only completed, according to company legend, after a personal meeting between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Reed.) By the winter of 1945, Bergeron traveled to the south of France and opened offices in Nice and Marseilles to serve troops in what the military had designated the United States Riviera Recreation Area.

1944年8月，美军邀请美国运通与其他几家公司在欧洲设立办事处，以作为美军资金的“保管点”。但到了1945年1月，R.E.伯热龙在巴黎鲁斯克里布街11号恢复营业时，军方的要求已转变为希望美国运通为休假的美国军人组织欧洲观光旅游项目。美国运通高管、当时仍在服役的陆军少校B.E.（“伯特”）怀特负责与军方就军旅旅游服务进行谈判，并在1944年底达成“原则性协议”。（据公司传说，由于突出部战役，该协议最终敲定被推迟，直到德怀特·D·艾森豪威尔将军与里德进行了一次私人会面后才最终完成。）1945年冬季，伯热龙前往法国南部，在尼斯和马赛设立办事处，为驻扎在美军“里维埃拉休养区”的士兵提供服务。

At the same time, Bergeron took advantage of his presence on the Continent to pursue the plan developed at 65 Broadway. In early 1945, he opened an office in Stockholm, and by early summer, a couple of months after the German surrender, he had Amexco operating in Holland and Belgium as well. Soon, Reed sent freight-forwarding executive Gerald K. Berkey to Europe to continue the job that Bergeron had started. Over the next ten months, Berkey not only reopened old offices, but also tracked down former staff members, and prepared for a renewed freight-forwarding business. Before the end of 1945, Amexco had almost fully reestablished its Continental network. The company even had offices inside Germany, at the request of the military, to extend its R and R services to the occupying forces.

与此同时，伯热龙也借助他在欧洲大陆的驻留机会，推进百老汇65号拟定的重建计划。1945年初，他在斯德哥尔摩设立办事处；到了初夏，在德国投降仅两个月后，美国运通已在荷兰和比利时恢复运营。随后，里德派遣货运业务主管杰拉尔德·K·伯基前往欧洲，继续伯热龙未竟之业。在接下来的十个月中，伯基不仅重开旧办事处，还找回了一些前员工，并为恢复货运业务做准备。到1945年底，美国运通几乎已全面恢复其欧洲大陆网络。应美军要求，公司甚至在德国境内也设立了办事处，以便为驻军提供休养服务。

In the Far East, too, Amexco worked to rebuild the network. In February 1945, an emaciated Frank Groves emerged from internment camp in the Philippines. A few months later, he was huddling with Reed in New York, making plans for a new office in Hong Kong, and by December, he was already back in the Far East overseeing reconstruction efforts throughout the region. Reed was the catalyst in the effort both in Europe and the Far East. He made decisions quickly, authorized spending large sums of money, and even absorbed losses to put the network back into operation.\*

在远东地区，美国运通也在努力重建网络。1945年2月，体弱消瘦的弗兰克·格罗夫斯从菲律宾的拘留营中获释。几个月后，他便与里德在纽约会面，共同策划在香港开设新办事处的计划。到了12月，他已返回远东，全面负责当地的重建工作。无论是在欧洲还是远东，里德始终是推动重建的核心人物。他果断决策，批准投入巨资，甚至不惜承担亏损，也要使网络重新运转起来。

By 1946, Amexco had rebuilt its worldwide system, although it remained eager to find something to do besides entertaining the troops. While overseas civilian travel was still restricted, the company’s presence in Europe and the Far East allowed it to take advantage of a different kind of opportunity that it had not considered—banking for the military.

到了1946年，美国运通已经重建起其全球系统，尽管公司仍急切寻求除服务军人外的其他业务机会。尽管海外民间旅行仍受限制，公司在欧洲和远东的布局却让其捕捉到一个此前未曾设想的新机会——为军队提供银行服务。

Although military banking would prove to be Amexco’s most important new activity, the company probably would never have gotten into it were it not for one individual, John Dowrick. In January 1946, Reed appointed Dowrick head of operations in Germany. Dowrick was an imaginative individual who intended to make the most of his promotion. Even before he left for Germany, he wrote a memo listing five ideas for new business: to create a German express business; to manage an air transport service; to ship souvenir pistols home for service men; to open banking offices for American civilian personnel and German businesses; and finally, to act as chief railroad-ticket agent for the army.

尽管军队银行业务最终成为美国运通最重要的新业务之一，但若不是因为一个人——约翰·道里克——公司或许永远不会涉足此领域。1946年1月，里德任命道里克为德国业务主管。道里克是一位富有想象力的人，决心充分发挥这次晋升的价值。甚至在动身前往德国之前，他就撰写了一份备忘录，列出了五项新业务设想：创建德国快递业务；管理航空运输服务；帮助士兵将纪念手枪邮寄回国；为驻欧美籍文职人员和德国企业开设银行网点；最后，为军方担任铁路票务总代理。

After two months in Frankfurt, however, Dowrick had decided to focus on banking for the troops. He saw enormous potential in TCs for R and R activities, in money orders, in deposits and loans—in a full banking service for the hundreds of thousands of Americans stationed abroad. On June 7, 1946, he proposed a military banking operation to Reed. Because of the still unsettled condition of Germany, the letter took three weeks to get to 65 Broadway.

但到了法兰克福两个月后，道里克决定专注于为驻军提供银行服务。他看到了旅行支票在军人休养活动中的巨大潜力，以及汇款、存款和贷款等方面的广阔前景——即为数十万驻外美军提供全方位银行服务。1946年6月7日，他正式向里德提出设立军队银行业务的建议。由于当时德国局势尚不稳定，这封信花了三周时间才送达百老汇65号。

Reed was not convinced at first. Like his predecessor F. P. Small, Reed feared risk and seemed to live still in the shadow of the Glass Eye Era, acting as though anything to do with banking was doomed to catastrophe. (Under Small, Reed had charge of auditing the branch offices, making sure they kept to the strict limits Small had established.) Now faced with a proposal to get into military banking, Reed seemed initially to be torn by his desire for development and his wariness of banking, and for a few weeks he pestered Dowrick with questions. Reed’s final decision both was and was not a departure from Small’s policies. He decided to undertake a banking business, he told Dowrick, but only if he could hold risks to a minimum. In his mind, that meant Amexco had to obtain what was in effect a government subsidy: the right to invest money in special high-yielding Treasury bonds—the high yield then was a grand 2 percent—and a promise from the military to place some of its funds on deposit. By early September, the government agreed in principle to Reed’s demands that a military bank would be conducted on very safe terms—if and when the U.S. officials agreed to license one. The government had not made that decision yet, but since the probable terms suited him, Reed backed the idea for American Express.

起初，里德并未被打动。像他的前任F.P.斯莫尔一样，里德惧怕风险，似乎仍活在“玻璃眼时代”的阴影之下，仿佛一切与银行业务相关的事务都注定会以灾难告终。（在斯莫尔任内，里德负责审核分支机构，确保它们严格遵循斯莫尔设定的业务范围。）面对涉足军队银行的建议，里德在发展冲动与银行警惕之间左右为难，连续几周不断向道里克追问细节。最终，里德的决定既延续又突破了斯莫尔的政策。他告诉道里克，公司可以开展银行业务，但前提是风险必须控制到最低。在他看来，这意味着美国运通必须获得某种形式上的政府补贴：即获得将资金投资于特定高收益国债的权利（当时所谓“高收益”也不过是2%），并获得军方承诺，将部分资金存入银行。到9月初，政府原则上同意了里德提出的这些要求，即只要美国官方最终批准设立该银行，军队银行就可在极其安全的条款下运营。政府虽尚未作出最终决定，但由于这些预期条件已令他满意，里德遂决定支持美国运通进入这一新领域。

Creating a bank, however, was not going to be easy. Amexco needed a license from four different government organizations: the departments of the Treasury, War, and State, and the U.S. Forces European Theater (USFET). Reed launched an intense lobbying effort on two continents to win the necessary approvals. Reed, Howard Smith, and Dennis Harmon handled the lobbying in the U.S., and Reed traveled to Europe to join Dowrick in lobbying the generals overseas. It proved a frustrating battle against red tape, competing governmental departments, and bureaucracy. In Washington, Harmon and Smith had to cope with the peculiar bureaucratic logic that found Amexco’s proposal “timely” but decided “nothing further could be done at this time.”

然而，创办银行并非易事。美国运通需要从四个政府机构——财政部、战争部、国务院以及驻欧美军司令部（USFET）——获得营业许可。为赢得批准，里德在两大洲展开了激烈的游说工作。在美国，由里德、霍华德·史密斯和丹尼斯·哈蒙负责游说；里德本人还前往欧洲，与道里克一起游说海外的将军们。这是一场充满挫折的斗争，阻力来自繁文缛节、各部门间的利益竞争以及官僚主义。在华盛顿，哈蒙和史密斯必须应对一种荒谬的官僚逻辑：一方面认定美国运通的提案“时机成熟”，另一方面却表示“此时不能采取进一步行动”。

Despite the contradictory signals, Amexco officials pressed ahead. By early December, Reed thought Amexco had won its license, only to have the War Department send the idea back to USFET for another review. As Reed lamented to Dowrick, “We now feel that the matter is right back where we started the first part of September.” But then the outlook improved. Reed called on General William Draper, director of the Economic Division of the military government of Germany, and came away feeling reassured. “Based on the tone of the discussion,” he reported, “I feel the American Express is being favorably considered.”

尽管信号矛盾重重，美国运通的高层仍坚持推进计划。到12月初，里德一度认为公司已获得许可，然而战争部却又将申请退回驻欧美军司令部重新审核。正如他向道里克抱怨的那样：“我们现在感觉，一切又回到了九月初的起点。”但随后形势有所改善。里德拜访了驻德军事政府经济处处长威廉·德雷珀将军，并在会后感到安心。他报告说：“从谈话语气来看，我觉得美国运通的申请正受到积极考虑。”

His reading was correct. After another two months of dickering with the various bureaucracies, Amexco obtained a license to operate banking facilities for military personnel in Germany and Austria. In March 1947, the first office opened in Frankfurt, and later others appeared in the occupied areas. By the following November, Amexco had 34 million in deposits, and by 1949 was reporting banking profits of \$100,000 per quarter. And its growth continued. Over the next several years, Amexco gained a large percentage of military banking business throughout the world—from Germany and Austria to England, France, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Okinawa. From modest beginnings—some early offices were located in Quonset huts—military banking became a major activity in the 1950s and made a significant contribution to the company’s income throughout Reed’s years as president.

他的判断是正确的。又经过两个月与各政府机构的拉锯谈判，美国运通终于获得了在德国和奥地利为军人提供银行服务的营业许可。1947年3月，第一家办事处在法兰克福开业，随后在被占领区设立了更多网点。到当年11月，公司吸收了3400万美元的存款；到1949年，每季度的银行利润达到10万美元。而且业务仍在持续增长。此后几年，美国运通迅速在全球范围内扩大其军队银行业务——从德国和奥地利扩展至英国、法国、摩洛哥、沙特阿拉伯和冲绳等地。虽然起步时条件简陋（部分早期网点甚至设在弯顶铁皮屋中），但到1950年代，军队银行已成为公司核心业务之一，并在里德任职总裁期间为公司收入作出重要贡献。

For all the interest Reed showed at the end of the war in developing new activities, it was an old one that engaged most of his attention—travel. There was a tremendous, pent-up demand for travel, civilian as well as military, and by 1945, Reed went all out in pushing tourism to the public and preparing the company to meet the demand. First, he began an expansion of the office network—from fifty foreign offices during the war, to 139 soon after it ended. Simultaneously, he set into motion a massive publicity campaign. In January 1946, although overseas travel restrictions were still in effect, Reed sought to whet that appetite for travel in an article he had published under his own name in the American Magazine, entitled “Now You Can Go Places.” Once restrictions on European travel were lifted, Amexco took out full-page ads in major newspapers across the country. Later, the company sold foreign travel as an extension of the Marshall Plan, as a way in which ordinary Americans could help the economy of the Western world. Travel, the company maintained, was “a social, political and economic force... a powerful instrument of helping foreign nations gain needed dollars...”

尽管战后里德在开发新业务上表现出极大兴趣，但最吸引他注意力的仍是老本行——旅行。战后无论军民，都积压着巨大的出行需求。早在1945年，里德便开始全力推动旅游业务，积极筹备应对激增的需求。他首先扩大海外办事处网络——从战时的50家迅速扩张至战后不久的139家。同时，他还发起大规模宣传攻势。1946年1月，尽管海外旅行限制尚未解除，里德就以自己名义在《美国杂志》上发表题为《现在你可以出发了》的文章，激发公众的出游欲望。一旦欧洲旅行禁令解除，美国运通即在全国主要报纸刊登整版广告。后来，公司将出境游定位为“马歇尔计划”的延伸，宣称普通美国人出国旅行是帮助西方经济复苏的一种方式。公司主张，旅行是一种“社会、政治和经济力量……是帮助外国获取急需美元的有力工具……”

The travel business expanded more quickly than even Reed had predicted. Millions of Americans were going abroad for the first time. The wartime creation of fast, safe transatlantic aircraft suddenly opened Europe to anyone with a week’s vacation and a middle-class income. For these travelers, as for Americans of previous generations, Amexco’s offices became a gathering point and a refuge. Tourists overwhelmed some of the offices. In Paris, sometimes 12,000 people a day showed up at 11 Rue Scribe, and the company hired fifteen people just to staff its free information service.

旅游业的增长速度甚至超过了里德的预期。数以百万计的美国人首次踏出国门。战时开发出的快捷安全的跨大西洋飞机，使任何拥有一周假期和中产收入的人都能轻松前往欧洲。对这些游客而言，如同早年美国人一样，美国运通的办事处既是落脚点也是避风港。部分办事处一度人满为患。在巴黎，每天最多有1.2万人涌入鲁斯克里布街11号，公司专门雇佣了15人负责免费的信息服务。

Amexco profited enormously from the travel boom—not through travel itself, a business still burdened by high costs and low profit margins, but as always, through the TC. The TC sales explosion began in 1945, the last year of the war. That year, Amexco sold a record 522 million in cheques, and sales just kept rising thereafter. In 1947, Amexco sold over 800 million; 900 million in 1951; 1.1 billion in 1952. The float expanded as well; average outstandings passed the quarter-billion dollar mark early in the 1950s and grew rapidly for the rest of the decade.

美国运通从旅游热潮中获利颇丰——并非直接来自旅游业务（该业务成本高、利润低），而仍是依赖旅行支票（TC）。TC销售在战争最后一年——1945年——迎来爆炸式增长。当年，公司售出创纪录的5.22亿美元支票，此后销量持续上升：1947年超8亿美元，1951年9亿美元，1952年达11亿美元。浮动资金也迅速扩张：1950年代初，平均未清支票余额已突破2.5亿美元，并在整个十年内持续快速增长。

Increasingly, there was a split between what the company seemed to be, and what it actually was. In the public eye, Amexco appeared to be a giant travel agency. Reed fostered that image. He always told reporters the company had one main business, travel, and two other important operations, freight forwarding and field warehousing. In fact, none of these businesses made money. The profit came primarily from the Investment Department, which Clarkson had turned into a professional organization run by skilled money managers and experienced securities analysts. Investment was, however, a small operation; during Reed’s era the department never employed more than a handful of professionals and it remained largely hidden from the public.\* In 1950, Reed commissioned a book on the company to mark its one hundredth anniversary. Only one paragraph out of almost 280 pages discussed the Investment Department. Of course, it lacked the glamor of travel. It made its money primarily through safe investments in tax-free municipal bonds and short-term government and commercial paper. For his part, Reed kept a respectful distance from the investment people. Occasionally, he would call up the money managers with a request: he might ask them to increase capital gains in a quarter, for example. But typically, he kept hands off and let the department go about its money-making business.

公司表象与实质之间的差异日益显著。在公众眼中，美国运通似乎是一家庞大的旅行社，里德也刻意强化这一印象。他经常对记者表示，公司有一项主营业务：旅行；以及两项重要业务：货运和仓储。然而，实际上这些业务都不盈利。真正的利润来源是投资部门。克拉克森早已将其打造为由资深证券分析师和专业基金经理组成的团队。然而，这一部门规模很小，在里德任内从未雇佣超过几位专业人士，并在公众面前几乎隐形。1950年，为纪念公司成立百年，里德委托撰写了一本公司史，结果在近280页中，仅用一段话提及投资部门。当然，这一业务缺乏旅游那般光鲜亮丽。它的收益主要来自稳健投资，如免税市政债券、短期国债及商业票据。至于里德本人，对投资团队保持尊重且克制的距离。他偶尔会打电话提出一些请求，比如要求在某个季度提高资本收益。但通常情况下，他不会干预，让团队自主管理创收事务。

Reed’s approach to the rest of the organization was exactly the opposite. He controlled everything and everyone. In the one hundredth anniversary book, he told author Alden Hatch that he was developing “a whole group of leaders at American Express, not just one,” but he was not telling the truth. Indeed, he had hired several competent managers, but (with the exception of the investment people) he allowed them, no matter how senior, little authority. Not even Chairman Clarkson had much say. Clarkson’s office was on the thirteenth floor, only one above Reed’s, but he was in effect miles away from the decision-making process concerning operations. Reed monitored every piece of information going up to the thirteenth floor and made sure the chairman received only what Reed wanted him to receive. Clarkson had previously exercised most of his power through the board of directors, but in a skillful bit of political maneuvering, Reed won the support of the board for himself, guaranteeing his own control of the company. Reed had cultivated and developed the board, beginning in the 1940s, and then in 1949, he saw a crisis brewing and he turned it into an opportunity.

里德对公司其他部门的管理方式却截然不同：他事无巨细，亲自掌控一切。在百年纪念出版物中，他曾对作者奥尔登·哈奇声称自己正在培养“一整个领导团队，而不是一个单一领袖”，但这并非事实。确实，他确实招聘了一些有能力的管理者，但（除了投资部门的人之外）他几乎不给任何人真正的权力，即使是资深高管也不例外。甚至连董事长克拉克森的影响力也非常有限。克拉克森的办公室位于13层，虽然只比里德的12层高出一层，但在实际运营决策中却仿佛远在天涯。里德掌控着所有流向13层的信息，确保董事长只能看到他希望其看到的内容。克拉克森原本主要通过董事会行使权力，但里德通过高超的政治手腕赢得了董事会的支持，从而确保了自己对公司的控制权。从20世纪40年代起，里德便开始经营并培养董事会关系，直到1949年，他察觉到一场危机的出现，并成功将其转化为契机。

The crisis developed because Albert Wiggin was old and dying. He owned 24 percent of American Express and he, Clarkson, and Reed all feared that, when he died, his stock would wind up in the wrong hands. The Chase National Bank had made it clear that it wanted to buy the stock back, but Amexco’s leaders opposed a Chase bid. They wanted, instead, to place the stock with investors who would keep Amexco independent, and it was Reed who personally found buyers—two investment men, Brownlee Curry of Equitable Securities and Joseph King of Union Securities. Curry and King had a better idea than most people of how Amexco made its money because Equitable and Union sold and underwrote municipal bonds. In 1949, after a round at the Augusta National Golf Club with Reed, the two men agreed to bid on Wiggin’s stock. There were a few other parties, besides Chase, interested in bidding on the shares, and King and Curry actually offered Wiggin less for the stock than anyone else. But they alone accepted the conditions Wiggin set down: namely that they would not break up the company. With the stock in friendly hands, Clarkson and Reed dissolved the Amerex Holding Company and distributed Amexco’s stock to Amerex shareholders, a total of 2.5 million shares at an initial price of \$10 per share.\* American Express once again became an actively traded stock, listed on the over-the-counter market.†

这场危机的起因是阿尔伯特·威金年事已高，病重垂危。他持有美国运通24%的股份，克拉克森、里德和他本人都担心其去世后股票可能落入“错误的人”手中。大通国家银行明确表示有意回购这些股份，但美国运通的领导层反对大通入主。他们希望把股份转让给那些会保持公司独立性的投资者。而最终找到买家的人正是里德——他找到了两位投资界人士：公正证券的布朗利·柯里以及联合证券的约瑟夫·金。柯里和金比多数人更了解美国运通的盈利模式，因为他们的公司主要从事市政债券的承销与销售。1949年，在与里德于奥古斯塔国家高尔夫俱乐部打一轮球后，两人决定竞购威金手中的股份。除了大通之外，还有其他几方也表达了收购兴趣，甚至他们给出的报价都高于柯里和金。但只有柯里和金接受了威金设定的条件：不得拆分公司。股份落入“友好人士”手中后，克拉克森与里德便解散了Amerex控股公司，将美国运通的股份按每股10美元的初始价格分配给Amerex股东，总计250万股。\* 美国运通再次成为活跃交易的股票，并在场外市场挂牌。

Reed’s sponsorship of the deal proved a great personal victory. Curry and King became enormously influential members of the board of Amexco (although Curry died soon after and was replaced by his brother-in-law Ralph “Peck” Owen, who also played in that fateful golf game in 1949). They agreed with Reed that only he could run the company, and they even believed that he had somehow saved it. “I doubt \[Amexco] could have survived \[without Reed] the first six or seven years after we bought it,” Owen said in later years. “It took a strong arm and Mr. Reed was a very strong armed man.” Just what he thought threatened Amexco is a mystery, but such support from key board members clearly gave Reed a mandate to be as “strong armed” as he wanted to be. Actually, Reed increased his support on the board in the years immediately after King and Curry joined. Reed recruited outsiders, including General Lucius Clay, who became Reed backers, and the chief executive added loyalists from within the company such as senior VP and secretary N. F. Page. In the early 1950s, the majority of the board backed Reed; his grip on the company was unassailable.

里德主导这笔交易，堪称他个人的重大胜利。柯里和金成为美国运通董事会中极具影响力的人物（尽管柯里不久后去世，由他的姐夫拉尔夫“派克”欧文接替，他也是1949年那场关键高尔夫球赛的参与者）。他们认为只有里德能够领导公司，甚至坚信是他拯救了美国运通。多年后，欧文曾表示：“我怀疑如果没有里德，美国运通在我们买入股份后头六七年能否存活下来。他手腕强硬，而里德先生正是这样的人。”至于他当年认定的“威胁”究竟是什么，至今仍是谜团。但这种来自关键董事的坚定支持，无疑为里德大权独揽提供了正当性。事实上，在金和柯里加入董事会后数年间，里德继续巩固对董事会的掌控。他招募了包括陆军上将卢修斯·克雷在内的外部人士作为支持者，同时也从公司内部提拔忠诚者，如高级副总裁兼公司秘书N.F. 佩奇。到了1950年代初，董事会多数成员支持里德，他对公司的控制已牢不可破。

Reed became more authoritarian and autocratic in his style of management. On his desk in his twelfth floor corner office, he had a panel of push buttons connected to buzzers in the office of every senior official at 65 Broadway. When he pushed a button, executives were expected to come running, even if they were meeting with important clients at the time. One senior manager began to stutter as soon as his buzzer went off. Others reacted to the sound as if it were a fire alarm, bolting out of their offices and fighting into their suit jackets, as they raced through the corridors to the twelfth floor.

里德的管理风格也愈发专横和独裁。他在百老汇65号大楼12层角落办公室的办公桌上安装了一排按钮，连通着每位高管办公室内的蜂鸣器。一旦按下按钮，无论高管当时是否正与重要客户会谈，都必须立刻赶来。有位高管甚至一听到蜂鸣声便开始口吃；其他人更是如同火警来袭一般，从办公室里冲出，边奔跑边穿西装外套，飞奔至12楼报到。

When they arrived at Reed’s office they might well find themselves facing a furious chief executive. Reed sometimes ranted, bellowed, and cursed at them, but he expressed his anger most often with what one executive called “the glassy eyeball,” a cold hostility that left subordinates shaken and convinced they had performed badly. Reed blew up at subordinates mostly in the privacy of his office, but occasionally he exploded at meetings. One branch manager recalled with deep embarrassment a dressing-down he received from Reed in front of a client. When he was not chastising his men, Reed frequently behaved like a drill sergeant. He lined his subordinates up outside his office door and called them in two to six at a time for ten-minute sessions to give them their marching orders. His more routine Monday Officers’ Conferences were less demeaning but resembled orchestrated recitations more than genuine exchanges of ideas.

当他们赶到里德的办公室时，往往会面对一位怒火中烧的首席执行官。里德有时会怒骂、咆哮甚至口出恶言，但他最常见的表达愤怒方式是某位高管所称的“冰冷眼神”——一种令人心惊的冷漠敌意，让下属心生畏惧，并深信自己犯了大错。里德多数时候在办公室私下对属下发火，但偶尔也会在会议上爆发。曾有一位分公司经理尴尬地回忆，自己曾在客户面前被里德当众训斥。当不在责备手下时，里德常表现得像个操练军官。他常让属下在他办公室门口排队，然后每次叫进两到六人，进行十分钟的“布置任务”。他惯常举行的周一高管会议虽不至于如此羞辱人，但更像是被精心编排的背诵表演，而非真正的思想交流。

Reed not only assumed the role of absolute ruler in the business of the company, he also used his position to surround himself with the trappings of kingship. This was particularly evident on his yearly tour of Europe, an event popularly known around Amexco as the Reed Circus. Each year, he set sail for Europe—he never flew—with an entourage including his wife, daughter, and devoted secretary, Eleanor Williams. On the Continent, they traveled superdeluxe for a time in a private railroad car built for Hermann Göring, and through Egypt, they traveled on a train built for King Farouk. Reed threw lavish parties and once booked the whole first floor of London’s Savoy Hotel to hold a cocktail reception for 500 people. The Circus was mainly an occasion for Reed to hold a major conference for European office managers in one or another European city or resort area, and a time, too, for Reed to visit some of the branch offices, where he would poke through the records and greet the staff.

里德不仅在公司事务中扮演绝对统治者的角色，还借此职位将自己包围在“帝王仪仗”之中。这在他每年赴欧洲巡访时体现得最为明显，这一活动在美国运通内部被戏称为“里德马戏团”。每年他都会启程前往欧洲——他从不乘飞机——随行的还有他的妻子、女儿以及忠实的秘书埃莉诺·威廉姆斯。在欧洲大陆，他们曾一度乘坐为赫尔曼·戈林定制的私人火车车厢出行，在埃及则乘坐为法鲁克国王打造的专列。里德还会举办奢华宴会，有一次甚至包下了伦敦萨沃伊酒店整个一楼，为500人举办鸡尾酒会。这趟“马戏团”之旅主要用于召开欧洲办公室经理大会，地点多在某个城市或度假胜地，同时也是里德巡视各分支机构的时机，他会查阅账目，亲切问候员工。

Reed, who was insecure enough to wear elevator shoes, relished his role as king of travel. With the help of his European staff, he received perks that fit the role and that he especially craved: medals from European governments, including the Cross of the Legion of Honor in France, which he often displayed on his lapel. He was also awarded honorary degrees, and he dined with the kings of England and Greece and other titled figures on the Continent. His personal ascendency over the travel business was capped in 1956 when he appeared on the cover of *Time*, dubbed by the magazine the “Grand Pooh-Bah” of travel.

里德不够自信，甚至穿着增高鞋，但他却非常享受自己“旅行之王”的身份。在欧洲员工的协助下，他获得了与这个角色相称、且他尤为渴望的种种荣誉：来自欧洲各国政府的勋章（其中包括法国荣誉军团勋章，他常佩戴在西装翻领上）、荣誉学位，甚至与英王、希腊国王及其他贵族人物共进晚餐。1956年，《时代》杂志将他誉为“旅行界的大人物”（Grand Pooh-Bah），并将他登上封面，这标志着他在旅游业的“登顶”。

But Reed’s kingly style, along with his autocratic management practices, frustrated the younger generation of executives who had come into Amexco after 1945 (most were war veterans). In many cases, they had trained at top business schools in modern concepts of marketing and management, and they found Reed’s company a corporate dinosaur. While some businesses like the First National City Bank (later Citicorp) created “think tanks,” pioneered long-range planning, and developed sophisticated marketing strategies, Reed increasingly discouraged real planning, discouraged individual initiative, and discouraged new ideas. After the burst of postwar development that led to field warehousing and military banking, Reed rejected most new ideas out of hand; even when staff members presented ideas for increasing travel, he reacted warily. He wanted no tampering with his system or his authority.

然而，里德这套“帝王风格”连同其独裁的管理方式，却令战后进入美国运通的新一代高管（其中多数为退伍军人）倍感沮丧。他们许多人在顶级商学院接受过现代市场营销与管理理念的训练，却发现美国运通仍像一只“公司恐龙”。当时如第一国家城市银行（后来的花旗银行）等机构已建立“智库”、探索长期规划、制定复杂的营销战略，而里德却越来越反对真正的规划、压制个人主动性，并抗拒新点子。在战后发展带来实地仓储和军用银行业务的短暂繁荣之后，里德几乎对所有新建议都一概否决；即便是关于增加旅游业务的提案，他也持谨慎态度。他不容许任何人动摇他的体制或权威。

Reed reverted more and more to being the bean counter of old. He reasserted Small’s policies from the 1920s and took the company away from making money to saving money; he started deflecting new ideas with the comment, “we have to live within our means.” The nation was in the midst of a period of sustained economic growth, but the thinking of the Glass Eye Era and the Depression dominated at 65 Broadway after 1948.

里德愈发回归到他早年的“账房先生”角色。他重新奉行小董事长（Small）1920年代的那一套政策，将公司的重心从“创收”转向“节支”；他常用一句话来打发新提案：“我们必须量入为出。”当时美国正处于持续的经济增长时期，但1948年之后，百老汇65号的思想氛围却仍被“玻璃眼时代”与大萧条的阴影所笼罩。

This kind of attitude inevitably discouraged more than a few staffers, and some of the more able young men left. Others stayed because they felt that Reed, who turned sixty in 1950, would not be around much longer, and that when he left, they could develop the company’s great potential. But he showed no inclination to leave and continued to block innovation.

这种观念不可避免地打击了不少员工的积极性，一些有能力的年轻人选择了离开。另一些人则留下来，因为他们认为1950年已年满六十岁的里德应该不会再待多久，到那时他们就能推动公司释放巨大的潜力。然而，里德毫无退休的意愿，并继续压制创新。

At the same time, Reed hired and kept in the top ranks of the company a few men of imagination.\* They also proposed innovations, and Reed opposed them. But these men had ideas they believed in and the will to fight to put their ideas into effect despite the resistance of the chief executive. They had a considerable impact on the history of American Express from 1955 on.

与此同时，里德也在公司高层任用了少数具有远见的人才。\* 他们也提出过一系列创新构想，尽管里德一如既往地反对，但这些人坚持信念，愿意与这位首席执行官抗争，将自己的理念付诸实践。从1955年开始，他们对美国运通的历史产生了深远的影响。

Three individuals played especially important roles in the company: Paul Whipple (“Pete”) Bradford, Howard L. Clark, and Robert C. Townsend. All three were chief executive material.\* Two, Bradford and Clark, expected at one time or another to succeed Reed; Townsend apparently believed he should succeed Reed. But all were strong-willed enough to fight Reed’s autocracy and find ways to influence the major issues of the 1950s.

其中有三位人物在公司发展中发挥了尤其重要的作用：保罗·惠普尔（“皮特”）·布拉德福德、霍华德·L·克拉克和罗伯特·C·汤森德。他们都是具备首席执行官资质的人物。\* 布拉德福德和克拉克都曾在某个阶段期待能接替里德，汤森德则似乎坚信那应该是他的位置。但他们都意志坚定，敢于对抗里德的专断，并在1950年代找到途径影响公司的重大事务。

Howard Clark had a good deal of influence throughout the company though actually of the three had the least influence with Reed. He had come to Amexco in 1945 with outstanding credentials—both law and accounting degrees—but Reed’s rigid system and Clark’s own slow promotion drove him to join W. R. Grace four years later. He was wooed back in 1952 by Amexco company directors; Clarkson, vice chairman Lynde Selden, and finally Reed himself called and asked the thirty-six-year-old Clark to return. Clark was named a senior VP, given a 10,000-share stock option, and had the real expectation that he would one day be chief executive of the company. But Clark had committed the ultimate sin: disloyalty. Once back at 65 Broadway, he did not find Reed happy to see him. He found instead an angry Pooh-Bah with no intention of turning his office over to Clark. Because of his strained relations with Reed, Clark tended to work toward his goals quietly; if he could not persuade Reed, he influenced others, including his allies on the board, to keep important issues alive.

霍华德·克拉克在公司中有相当大的影响力，尽管在三人中他对里德的影响最小。他于1945年加入美国运通，拥有法律和会计双学位的杰出资历，但里德僵化的体制和他自身升迁缓慢，促使他在四年后跳槽至W\.R.格雷斯公司。1952年，美国运通的董事们极力劝说他回归；克拉克森、副董事长林德·塞尔登，甚至里德本人都致电邀请这位36岁的克拉克重新加入。克拉克被任命为高级副总裁，获得一万股期权，并真切期望有朝一日能成为公司首席执行官。但克拉克犯下了最不可饶恕的罪过：不忠。重返百老汇65号后，他并未迎来热情欢迎，而是面对一个愤怒的“总头目”（Pooh-Bah），毫无交出权杖的打算。由于与里德关系紧张，克拉克倾向于悄然推进自己的目标；当无法说服里德时，他便影响他在董事会中的盟友，使重要议题不致夭折。

Bradford also had some expectation of becoming chief executive, in part, some believed, because he had dramatically proven his loyalty to Reed. In the late 1940s, Reed set sail for Europe, but before the ship docked in Southampton, England, Reed was struck with an attack of acute appendicitis. Bradford, manager of English operations after 1945, received a message about Reed’s illness and had an ambulance waiting at the dock and the royal surgeon standing by ready to perform the operation. In China and India in the 1920s and 1930s, Bradford had demonstrated that he was a highly competent executive, but after this show of loyalty, Reed insisted he come to the U.S. Bradford left England reluctantly; he liked his job and his authority in England. But Reed led Bradford to believe he would succeed to the presidency after Reed retired, probably in 1955. Reed remained grateful and supportive of Bradford, made him a senior VP, and treated him as well as, or better than, anyone else. But before 1955, Reed had changed his mind about retiring, and Bradford, then fifty-five, may have felt he would be too old ever to become Amexco’s president.

布拉德福德也曾期望接任首席执行官，一部分原因是他向里德表现出了极高的忠诚。据说在1940年代末，里德乘船前往欧洲，但在船抵达英国南安普敦之前突发急性阑尾炎。自1945年起担任英国业务主管的布拉德福德得知消息后，安排好码头救护车，并请皇家御医待命手术。布拉德福德早在20世纪20至30年代在中国和印度就展现出其卓越的执行力，而这次忠诚之举更让里德坚持要他调任美国。布拉德福德虽不情愿离开英国——他喜欢自己的职务与权力——但里德让他相信，自己退休后，他将接任总裁职位，时间大概是1955年。里德始终对布拉德福德心存感激与支持，任命他为高级副总裁，并给予他最优待遇。但到了1955年前，里德改变了退休打算，而当时年已55岁的布拉德福德可能已觉得自己再无机会成为总裁。

Robert Townsend, on the other hand, probably never expected he would make it to the top of American Express. He was a bright young man in the investment department, but also a brash nonconformist who disturbed some of the older executives. B. E. White, for example, remembered him disapprovingly for wearing pink shirts. Townsend was the kind of individualist who pushed his ideas with the tenacity, as one colleague described it, of “a dog with a bone,” and he did not mind antagonizing people, including board members, in the process. But Townsend exercised influence because he maintained a good relationship with the man who made the decisions. Reed appeared to have a special fondness for this accomplished scion of a prominent New York family, and his support gave Townsend an important role in the company’s affairs.

而罗伯特·汤森德或许从未真正期待过自己能登上美国运通的最高职位。他是投资部门一位聪明的年轻人，但也是个目中无人的非传统派，常常令老一辈高管感到不安。例如B.E.怀特就因他穿粉色衬衫而对他颇为不满。汤森德属于那种不达目的誓不罢休的个体主义者，一位同事曾形容他就像“一只叼住骨头不放的狗”，在推进自己观点时毫不避讳得罪人，包括董事会成员。但他之所以能发挥影响力，是因为他与真正掌权的那个人关系良好。里德似乎对这位出身显赫纽约家族的能干青年格外偏爱，而这种支持赋予了汤森德在公司事务中举足轻重的地位。

All three of these men were aggressive and talented and largely underused. But they were persistent, and on one issue, they all brought their influence to bear. The three men pushed Reed to make the company’s most important decision of the twentieth century: to create the American Express Credit Card.

这三人都极具进取心和才华，却普遍未被充分重用。但他们都很有毅力，在一个关键问题上发挥了各自的影响力。他们共同推动里德作出了美国运通20世纪最重要的决定：推出美国运通信用卡。

In the 1950s, Americans fell in love with credit cards. There were two kinds: charge cards for specific stores or companies, which had existed for years, and the universal travel and entertainment charge card, which was created in the fifties and had enormous importance in the history of American business.

20世纪50年代，美国人开始痴迷信用卡。当时主要有两种卡：一种是针对特定商店或公司的签账卡，已有多年历史；另一种则是50年代新创的“通用旅行与娱乐签账卡”，在美国商业史上具有极其重大的意义。

The idea of a travel and entertainment card had emerged in 1949 out of a moment’s panic in the life of New York businessman Frank McNamara. McNamara had just finished a meal at a restaurant when he realized to his dismay that he could not pay the check. At that instant, McNamara thought of a device that would have allowed him to cover the bill, and later he joined forces with lawyer Ralph E. Schneider to turn his idea into reality: a universal restaurant charge card that would be accepted in all major New York restaurants.

旅行与娱乐卡的构想起源于1949年纽约商人弗兰克·麦克纳马拉的一次惊慌时刻。当时他刚在一家餐馆吃完饭，才惊觉自己忘带钱。就在那一瞬间，麦克纳马拉想到了一种能帮他结账的工具。随后他联手律师拉尔夫·E·施奈德，将构想化为现实：打造一张可在所有纽约主流餐馆使用的通用签账卡。

When Schneider and McNamara tried out their idea on restaurateurs, they were almost universally turned down. Schneider wanted his card company to get a percentage of every charge. As one restaurant owner told him, “The people who’d use it come in here anyway and then we’d have to give you a share. What good is it to us?”

当施奈德与麦克纳马拉向餐厅老板推广这一构想时，几乎遭到一致拒绝。施奈德希望其信用卡公司能从每笔消费中分成。但正如一位餐厅老板所说：“那些会用卡的人本来也会来我们这里消费，现在我们还得分你一份。这对我们有什么好处？”

Schneider said later that if none of the first ten restaurateurs had encouraged him, he would have given up. But one loved the idea. So Schneider and McNamara pressed on and within weeks had signed up a hundred New York establishments. Schneider then borrowed \$30,000, and in March 1950, his company began operations under the name of The Diners’ Club\* with Schneider as chief executive.

施奈德后来表示，如果最初接洽的十家餐厅中没有任何一家支持他，他就会放弃。但有一家餐厅非常喜欢这个主意。因此，施奈德和麦克纳马拉继续推进，仅几周内就签下了一百家纽约商家。随后施奈德借来3万美元，于1950年3月以“Diners’ Club（大来俱乐部）”为名开始营业，施奈德担任首席执行官。

He and McNamara made up the business as they went along. Cardholders charged a meal, and the restaurant collected from the club, minus a discount of 5–10 percent. Diners’ Club guaranteed payment to the restaurant and took on itself the task of collecting from cardholders. In the card, club members had blank-check, interest-free charge privileges and a notable convenience. Cardholders received a single bill for all charges once a month. Schneider expected that most members would be individuals, such as sales people, who needed to keep track of expenses. In fact, he recruited the first club members from a mailing list of 5,000 sales managers.

他和麦克纳马拉在实践中逐步摸索业务模式。持卡人刷卡消费后，餐厅向俱乐部收款，但需扣除5%至10%的手续费。Diners’ Club向餐厅担保付款，并自行承担向持卡人收款的任务。该卡为会员提供了“空白支票”般的免息消费特权，以及显著的便利——会员每月仅需支付一次账单。施奈德预计，大多数会员将是需要记录开支的个人，比如销售人员。实际上，他最初通过一份包含5000名销售经理的邮寄名单招募了首批会员。

Since the concept seemed so simple, Schneider and McNamara had no inkling of the kind of trouble they were getting themselves into. Paperwork and billing procedures quickly overwhelmed the club’s offices in that precomputer age. As the club grew, so did the headaches.

由于这个概念看似简单，施奈德和麦克纳马拉完全没有意识到自己即将陷入的麻烦。在那个尚未普及计算机的时代，文书和账单处理流程迅速使俱乐部办公室不堪重负。随着俱乐部业务的扩大，麻烦也随之增加。

After losing only \$80 in its first year, Diners’ Club lost nearly \$60,000 its second. Worse, the company was gaining a bad reputation among restaurant owners. As paperwork backed up, so did payments. If it were not for the fact that an increasingly large number of people were using this new device, Diners’ Club might have lost all its service establishments. However, within only two years, many restaurateurs felt they had to honor this card or lose business to other establishments that did.

在创立的第一年，Diners’ Club仅亏损80美元，但第二年就亏损近6万美元。更糟的是，公司在餐饮业主中的口碑开始恶化。随着文书工作积压，付款也出现延迟。若不是使用这种新卡的用户不断增加，Diners’ Club可能早已失去所有合作商家。然而，仅过两年，许多餐馆经营者开始觉得他们必须接受这张卡，否则会把生意拱手让给那些愿意接受的同行。

Still, many people doubted that the company would survive—not because of the bookkeeping problems, but because of an inherent danger. A store or even a chain of stores could check previous purchase records before allowing a customer to continue using a charge plate. But the Diners’ Club card was honored in hundreds, later thousands, of unconnected establishments. That increased the risks enormously. If someone decided to abuse a card, there was no way the club could stop him until it was too late, and the club was committed to pay whether its cardholders did or not. A large number of card abuses would bankrupt the Diners’ Club.

尽管如此，许多人仍然怀疑这家公司能否存活——并非因为记账问题，而是因为一种内在的风险。商店或连锁店在允许客户继续使用签账卡前，可以查阅其过往消费记录。但Diners’ Club的卡可以在数百家、甚至后来数千家彼此毫无关联的商户中使用，这极大增加了风险。一旦有人决定滥用该卡，俱乐部在事发前无法阻止，而且无论持卡人是否付款，俱乐部都要向商家承担付款责任。大规模的卡片滥用将使Diners’ Club破产。

Those who saw disaster lurking in a universal card were of course far off the mark, primarily because the 1950s had become the age of the corporate expense account, and the universal entertainment card became an invaluable tool for business people. More and more businessmen signed up each year. Soon, ordinary consumers, too, were drawn to the convenience of the card. To take advantage of its broadening membership, Diners’ Club went beyond restaurants and signed up florists, gourmet shops, motel chains, and in a big coup, the Hertz Rent A Car company. Membership in the club grew rapidly. In year two of the club’s existence, members charged \$1.1 million on their cards, and over the next eight years volume increased a hundredfold. In year four, Schneider assessed a \$5-per-year membership fee, and Diners’ Club posted a profit for the first time.

那些预言通用卡将带来灾难的人显然大错特错，主要原因在于20世纪50年代进入了“公司报销时代”，而通用娱乐卡成为商务人士不可或缺的工具。每年都有越来越多的商人注册使用该卡。不久，普通消费者也被其便利性所吸引。为充分利用不断扩大的会员群体，Diners’ Club拓展至餐厅以外的领域，与花店、美食店、汽车旅馆连锁，甚至赫兹租车公司签约合作。俱乐部会员人数迅速增长。在成立第二年，会员使用该卡的消费额达110万美元；之后八年内交易量增长了一百倍。第四年，施奈德开始收取每年5美元的会员费，Diners’ Club首次实现盈利。

By that time, Diners’ Club had competition. Gourmet and Esquire magazines were among twenty different companies that launched restaurant cards, but most folded within a year or two. Diners’ Club bought out one competitor, Alfred Bloomingdale’s California-based Dine ’N Sign; Schneider not only added new cardholders through the purchase, but also made Bloomingdale the new president of the club.\*

此时，Diners’ Club迎来了竞争对手。包括《美食家》和《君子》杂志在内的二十多家公司推出了餐厅签账卡，但大多数在一到两年内就倒闭了。Diners’ Club收购了其中一家竞争者——阿尔弗雷德·布鲁明戴尔在加州创办的Dine ’N Sign。通过这笔收购，施奈德不仅扩展了持卡人群体，还任命布鲁明戴尔为俱乐部的新任总裁。

Other types of cards were growing in popularity as well. Just as Diners’ Club began to branch out into other areas, companies introduced cards for every aspect of travel and entertainment. By 1955, with a handful of cards, it was possible to charge meals, airline or train tickets, oil, gas, tires and every other gas-station service, and tickets to plays or movies. Credit cards had been a part of life for years, but by the mid-1950s, they were beginning to become a way of life.

与此同时，其他类型的信用卡也日益受到欢迎。就在Diners’ Club开始向其他领域扩展之时，各家公司纷纷推出涵盖旅游和娱乐各个方面的信用卡。到1955年，仅凭几张卡就可以刷卡支付餐费、机票或火车票、汽油、轮胎及加油站的各种服务，甚至是剧院或电影院的门票。信用卡虽然已在日常生活中存在多年，但到1950年代中期，它们正在转变为一种生活方式。

Amexco executives had noted the buy-now-pay-later trend in American life even before the birth of Diners’ Club. Various ideas to sell Amexco’s services on some sort of credit basis had been floating around the corridors of 65 Broadway since the 1920s. Initially, proposals centered around personal loans for travel, but these ideas did not go very far. Small opposed them, and after his unofficial ouster in 1935, any credit plan seemed too risky during the Depression.

甚至在Diners’ Club诞生之前，美国运通的高管就已经注意到“先买后付”正成为美国生活的新趋势。自1920年代起，在百老汇65号的办公走廊上，就不断出现各种基于信用模式销售运通服务的设想。最初，这些提议主要围绕个人旅游贷款展开，但未能走得太远。小斯莫尔对此表示反对，而在他于1935年被“非正式”排挤出局后，在大萧条时期，任何形式的信用计划都显得风险过高。

But after the war, when Reed had officially taken control, he received the first suggestion for an American Express Credit Card. In July 1946, an unnamed airline executive approached assistant VP Louis S. Kelly and suggested to him that American Express issue a travel charge card for use only by business people. Reed, who was never so receptive to new ideas before or after, liked the basic concept and assigned William Eichelberger, sales manager for travel, to study it and report to B. E. White, the head of travel operations. Late in 1946, Eichelberger proposed a plan, calling for the creation of a corporate travel card.

但在战后，里德正式掌权后，他收到了有关美国运通信用卡的首个建议。1946年7月，一位未透露姓名的航空公司高管找到助理副总裁路易斯·S·凯利，建议美国运通发行一款专供商务人士使用的旅行签账卡。对于一贯对新点子不感兴趣的里德而言，他却意外地喜欢这一基本概念，并指派负责旅游销售的经理威廉·艾克尔伯格进行研究，并向旅游业务主管B.E.怀特汇报。1946年底，艾克尔伯格提出了一项计划，建议创立“企业旅行卡”。

According to Eichelberger’s plan, companies would deposit money with Amexco—\$400–500—against possible default or abuse of a card. Then they could use the card to book all aspects of travel, either directly with carriers (if they agreed to accept the card), or through Amexco travel offices. Eichelberger estimated 5,000 firms would take the card, which would produce revenue of \$20 million per year and profits of \$1 million, no small amount for a company which in 1947 had net profits of about \$2 million for all its businesses. Eichelberger was unequivocal in his support of the plan. “If we go into it wholeheartedly,” he wrote in his final report, “we could materially increase our gross business and net revenue.”

根据艾克尔伯格的计划，各公司需向美国运通预存400至500美元作为信用担保，以防止违约或滥用。随后他们便可使用该卡预订各类出行服务——若运输公司接受该卡，也可直接订票，或通过美国运通的旅游办事处操作。艾克尔伯格估计将有5,000家公司使用该卡，每年将带来2,000万美元收入和100万美元利润——这对1947年净利润仅为200万美元的美国运通而言，绝非小数。艾克尔伯格在最终报告中毫不含糊地表达了对该计划的支持：“如果我们全力推进，将有望显著提升我们的总业务量与净收益。”

Reed studied the plan and, at first, appeared ready to approve it. The only worry he had was that the card would hurt TC sales. But Reed leaned toward the view, endorsed by Eichelberger, that business travelers were not big buyers of TCs. According to Eichelberger, businessmen and women already paid for one of their largest travel expenses, transportation, with airline and railroad credit cards.

里德最初认真研究了该计划，并似乎准备批准。唯一让他担忧的问题是，这张卡可能会影响旅行支票（TC）的销量。但他倾向于采纳艾克尔伯格的观点，即商务旅客并非TC的主要购买群体。根据艾克尔伯格的说法，商务人士通常已经用航空公司和铁路的信用卡支付了他们最大的出行开支之一——交通费用。

However, the proposal faced opposition from most of Reed’s staff. Executives noted the dangers of the business, especially the credit risks, and argued that Eichelberger was overly optimistic in expecting 5,000 companies to take the card. Their fears had an effect on Reed, whose support began to waver. However, he sought advice from outside the company, from an executive of an aviation company. The executive strongly backed the concept, claiming that Eichelberger was actually a pessimist; he predicted a yearly gross of \$50 million, not \$20 million. He supported, too, Eichelberger’s contention that business travelers did not buy TCs and wanted a general travel card in place of a hodgepodge of rail and air cards. Reed once more seemed ready to implement Eichelberger’s proposal and informed his men: “I will discuss \[this idea] again at the Officers’ Conference, June 1st.”

然而，该提案遭到了里德多数下属的反对。高管们指出该业务存在的风险，尤其是信用风险，并认为艾克尔伯格预计会有5,000家公司采用该卡的设想过于乐观。这些担忧影响了里德的态度，他开始动摇。然而，他还是向公司外部的一位航空公司高管征询意见。这位高管强烈支持该构想，并声称艾克尔伯格其实太保守了；他预测年营业额应为5,000万美元，而非2,000万美元。他也支持艾克尔伯格的主张，即商务旅客不会购买TC，他们更希望有一张通用的旅行卡以替代铁路和航空卡的混乱组合。里德似乎再次准备实施该提案，并告知下属：“我将在6月1日的高管会议上再次讨论这一想法。”

The idea came up at the meeting and it died there. As a Reed assistant noted, the card idea was put “in indefinite suspense.” Reed, who had been in favor of the card concept, had changed his mind for unknown reasons. Amexco had lost a chance to beat everyone to a universal charge card, and afterward Reed was no longer receptive to the card idea or any other new idea.

该想法在会议上被提出，但当场夭折。正如里德的一位助理所说，信用卡的构想被“无限期搁置”。曾经支持该理念的里德出于不明原因改变了主意。Amexco就此失去了率先推出通用签账卡的机会。自那以后，里德不再愿意接受信用卡或其他任何新想法。

Nevertheless, discussion of credit cards resurfaced at Amexco soon after the sudden emergence of Diners’ Club in 1950. Though executives talked about credit cards, few initially wanted to involve American Express in that business. They thought of Diners’ Club, according to one executive, as a “schlock” company that had alienated many customers because of billing and bookkeeping problems. The reputations of the other card operations such as Esquire’s were no better. To most company officials, who saw Amexco as a “high prestige” company, the card business was unworthy.

然而，在1950年Diners’ Club突然崛起后，Amexco内部很快又重新开始讨论信用卡业务。虽然高管们谈论该议题，但最初几乎没有人愿意让美国运通涉足这一行业。一位高管称，他们认为Diners’ Club是一家“低端”公司，因账单和账务处理问题而得罪了许多客户。而Esquire等其他卡片运营商的声誉也好不到哪去。对大多数视Amexco为“高端品牌”的公司官员来说，信用卡业务配不上公司的身份。

Yet by the mid-1950s, some Amexco executives, particularly the younger men, discerned two trends: first, more Americans than ever were acquiring credit cards; and second, people were using cards for travel-related services. The first trend represented a business opportunity, but the second posed a threat. If people were using cards for travel, then eventually they would use them in place of the TC. This situation presented Amexco with what a few executives realized was one of the company’s most important business dilemmas ever: how to protect the TC market, which made all their money?

然而到了1950年代中期，一些Amexco高管，尤其是年轻一代，察觉到两个趋势：其一，美国人持有信用卡的比例前所未有地上升；其二，人们正将信用卡用于旅行相关服务。第一个趋势代表了商机，而第二个趋势则构成威胁——如果人们用卡来支付旅行费用，那最终他们也会用它取代旅行支票。这个局面带来了Amexco有史以来最重要的商业难题之一：如何保护TC市场——这正是公司盈利的核心所在？

Just how quickly the credit card business was growing became apparent in late 1955. On November 16, Diners’ Club made a public offering of 150,000 shares, a one-third interest, at \$8 per share. The prospectus showed that the club had increased its membership from 40,000 in 1951 to 200,000 in 1955. Annual charge volume topped \$20 million; profits, \$500,000; and both were rising. Despite its poor reputation, Diners’ Club was, in fact, expanding at an astonishing rate. As Howard Clark noted, such growth might encourage other “prestige companies” to issue travel and entertainment credit cards of their own, thereby increasing the threat to American Express.

信用卡业务的增长速度在1955年底显现无遗。11月16日，Diners’ Club以每股8美元的价格公开发行了15万股，占公司三分之一股权。招股说明书显示，该俱乐部的会员数量从1951年的4万增长至1955年的20万。年交易额突破2,000万美元，利润达50万美元，且两者均在持续上升。尽管声誉欠佳，Diners’ Club实际上却在以惊人的速度扩张。正如霍华德·克拉克所指出，这种增长可能促使其他“高端公司”也开始发行自己的旅游娱乐信用卡，从而进一步加剧对美国运通的威胁。

But Reed continued to show no interest in credit cards, until the matter surfaced again in the spring of 1956, when American Express was suddenly presented with the chance to buy Diners’ Club. This offer began a Byzantine decision-making process that continued on and off for almost two years. It was a process that included countless meetings, memos, proposals, and deals, nearly all of which would lead nowhere.

但里德仍对信用卡毫无兴趣，直到1956年春天该议题再次浮出水面：美国运通突然获得了收购Diners’ Club的机会。此举开启了一场盘根错节的决策过程，前后断断续续持续了近两年，涉及无数次会议、备忘录、提案和交易——几乎全都不了了之。

The process began when a board of directors meeting was breaking up. As most of the directors rose from the table and made their way to the door, director Joe King collared Reed and Howard Clark. King, an investment banker with numerous contacts in the financial community, said he had received a message from Ben Sonnenberg, a publicist and corporate marriage broker, that Ralph Schneider and Alfred Bloomingdale wanted to sell their shares in Diners’ Club to American Express. Since the two men owned two-thirds of their company, this offer was tantamount to a full sale. Despite their public offering, the two men had actually been trying to make a deal for some time. They had sounded out Amexco through Pete Bradford, who had turned them away, and subsequently they had unsuccessfully shopped the club to Western Union. Now, through King, they were trying Amexco once again.

事情的起点是一场董事会会议即将结束时。大多数董事起身准备离场时，董事乔·金拉住了里德和霍华德·克拉克。金是位拥有广泛金融界人脉的投资银行家，他说自己刚收到公关及企业撮合人本·索嫩伯格传来的消息：拉尔夫·施奈德与阿尔弗雷德·布鲁明戴尔希望将他们在Diners’ Club中的股份出售给美国运通。由于两人合计拥有公司三分之二的股份，这等于整个公司的转让。尽管两人曾进行公开募股，但实际上早已在积极寻求交易。他们曾通过皮特·布拉德福德试探Amexco，但被拒绝；随后又试图卖给西联汇款，也未果。如今，他们通过金，再次尝试联系Amexco。

While Reed ignored proposals from his staff, he listened to directors such as King, and consented to King’s suggestion that Howard Clark pursue the matter with Sonnenberg. On May 7, both Clark and Robert Townsend had lunch with Sonnenberg and Belmont Towbin, an investment banker at C. E. Unterberg & Towbin Company. Towbin had handled the Diners’ Club public offering and was himself on the board of Diners’ Club. He reported that Schneider and Bloomingdale were interested in exchanging their shares for shares of Amexco and would support a tender by American Express for the shares in public hands.

尽管里德一向忽视下属提出的建议，但他愿意听取像乔·金这样的董事意见，并同意让霍华德·克拉克与索嫩伯格跟进。5月7日，克拉克与罗伯特·汤森德一同与索嫩伯格及投资银行家贝尔蒙特·托宾共进午餐。托宾供职于C.E.安特伯格与托宾公司，曾主导Diners’ Club的公开发行，亦是其董事会成员之一。他透露，施奈德和布鲁明戴尔希望将手中股份换成Amexco股份，并愿意支持美国运通向公众持股人发起要约收购。

Clark returned from the luncheon clearly enthusiastic about the proposal and wrote a lengthy memo to Reed. He addressed what he knew would be the biggest objection to a card business: that a credit card belonging to American Express would undercut its own TC market. Clark did not dispute the idea that a card would hurt TC sales. Rather, he argued that cards were going to cut into those sales anyway, and the best offense would be to get a share—the biggest share—of the credit-card business. This idea became the basic premise of the procard argument. But Clark’s argument was by no means universally accepted. To some officials, the idea of undercutting the TC seemed like lunacy.

克拉克午餐回来后，对该提议表现出明显的热情，并给里德写了一份长篇备忘录。他直面一个他知道会成为最大反对理由的问题：美国运通如果推出自己的信用卡，会削弱旅行支票（TC）的市场。克拉克并不否认信用卡会伤害TC销售，反而指出信用卡无论如何都会蚕食这一市场，因此最好的进攻方式就是在信用卡市场中占据一席之地——最好是最大份额。这个观点成为支持发行信用卡的基本论点。但克拉克的主张并未得到普遍认可；对一些高管而言，自己动手削弱TC业务简直是疯了。

Clark also thought Amexco could get Diners’ Club at a good price, and he argued in the terms most likely to win a favorable response from the old bean counter, Ralph Reed: small and cheap. Clark estimated that Amexco could acquire the whole of Diners’ Club for 120,000 shares of Amexco, a total market value of \$4.32 million and a dilution of around 5 percent. Even at \$5 million Clark thought Diners’ “a real buy.” Clark’s figures were perhaps overly optimistic since, on a market basis, Diners’ Club would have cost \$8.6 million, which Clark considered too much. However, he noted that even at that price Amexco would realize 40 cents a share in pretax earnings immediately.

克拉克还认为，Amexco有望以合理价格收购Diners’ Club，他用最有可能赢得老会计师里德青睐的语言来论证：规模小，价格低。克拉克估算，Amexco可用12万股公司股票收购Diners’ Club全部股份，市值约为432万美元，仅稀释5%左右。即使以500万美元的价格买下，他也认为是“超值交易”。不过，克拉克的数据或许过于乐观，因从市值角度看，Diners’ Club估值为860万美元，克拉克认为这个价格太高。然而他指出，即便以该价格收购，Amexco也能立即实现每股税前收益0.40美元。

Clark also discussed creating a separate American Express card, which he saw as the only sensible alternative to buying Diners’ Club. But Clark argued against it. First, he considered it a “cheaper substitute \[that would] ‘downgrade’ our quality product,” the TC. And he thought Diners’ Club already had too large a share of the market and was too well established in the business. Buying Diners’ Club would offer instant profitability, while Amexco would have to take losses if it started the business from scratch.

克拉克还讨论了创建一张独立的美国运通信用卡，他认为这是收购Diners’ Club之外唯一合理的替代方案。但他也反对此举。首先，他认为这是一种“廉价替代品，会‘贬低’我们高品质的产品”，即TC。此外他认为Diners’ Club已占据过大的市场份额，并在该行业中根基深厚。收购Diners’ Club可立即带来盈利，而若从零起步，Amexco势必会先经历亏损阶段。

Clark recommended pursuing Diners’ Club, but he proposed some interim steps before Amexco made an offer: continue the discussions with Diners’ Club representatives; talk to Western Union (which Clark thought might be interested in a card business) about joining forces for a takeover; get an opinion about the potential legal problems of such a bid; and consider an outside survey to assess Diners’ Club and the impact of cards generally on the TC.

克拉克建议继续推进Diners’ Club收购案，但提出在Amexco正式报价前应采取几项中间步骤：继续与Diners’ Club代表进行谈判；与西联汇款接洽（克拉克认为其可能有意涉足信用卡业务），探讨是否可以联合收购；就此类收购可能面临的法律问题征求法律意见；并考虑委托外部调查，评估Diners’ Club的业务及信用卡对TC整体市场的影响。

Reed read the memo and passed it on to Pete Bradford, who promptly and thoroughly attacked it. On H.M.S. Queen Mary stationery, Bradford expressed his low opinion of Diners’ Club, and of Schneider and Bloomingdale, and pronounced himself “VERY LUKEWARM” to the proposal. Reed concurred with Bradford and dispatched a memo marked “urgent” to Clark: “I would not continue your discussions with Messrs. Schneider and Towbin of the Diners’ Club because there might be some implied commitment of you to carry these discussions further.”

里德看完备忘录后，立即转交给皮特·布拉德福德审阅，后者迅速且彻底地加以抨击。他用英国玛丽皇后号邮轮的信纸写道，明确表达对Diners’ Club及施奈德、布鲁明戴尔两人极低的评价，并表示自己对该提案“极为冷淡”。里德完全认同布拉德福德的观点，并立即向克拉克发出一份标注“紧急”的备忘录：“我不希望你继续与Diners’ Club的施奈德和托宾先生接洽，因为这可能被视为你在承诺推进谈判。”

Reed had two objections to Diners’ Club, and both were more a reflection of Reed’s prejudices than his business judgment. First, he did not want to purchase and operate a business that did not have the Amexco name attached to it. The fact that, once he owned it, he could change the name to American Express Diners’ Club, or anything else he wanted, seemed to escape him. It was as though he wanted to make some kind of symbolic point—or perhaps he just used this as an excuse to bolster his second reason.

里德对Diners’ Club有两个反对理由，但两者都更多反映了他的个人偏见，而非商业判断。其一，他不愿意收购一个不带“Amexco”品牌的业务。他似乎忽视了一个事实：一旦完成收购，他完全可以将其改名为“American Express Diners’ Club”或任何他想要的名字。这看上去像是一种象征性的坚持——或者说，他只是用这个理由来支撑他更真实的第二个反对点。

He did not want Schneider and Bloomingdale to own a large block of Amexco stock, even though they would have no real power. As Clark noted, the stock they received could have been put in a voting trust, giving them stock, but no power to use it. Also, although Towbin talked stock, there was no evidence that the two men would not entertain a stock and cash offer, or just a cash offer.

他不愿施奈德和布鲁明戴尔持有Amexco的大量股份，尽管他们不会拥有实质性的控制权。正如克拉克指出，他们所得股份本可放入一个投票信托中，赋予他们持股权但不具表决权。此外，尽管托宾提到以股换股，但并无证据表明两人不会接受部分现金或全额现金的交易方式。

Reed never explained why he did not want Schneider and Bloomingdale to own Amexco’s stock. Bloomingdale did have a reputation as a playboy, and Reed was known to disapprove of such behavior generally, but some of the younger men at Amexco wondered whether Reed was motivated by anti-Semitism (both Diners’ Club men were Jewish). Amexco officials were virtually all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the company’s relations with the Jewish community were poor at the time.\* But whatever the reasons for Reed’s decision, significantly, he did not discuss the TC or any other business issue in opposing the Diners’ Club offer.

里德从未解释为何他不希望施奈德和布鲁明戴尔持有Amexco的股份。布鲁明戴尔的花花公子形象广为人知，而里德一向不赞成此类行为，但Amexco一些年轻员工怀疑里德的真实动机可能与反犹情绪有关（Diners’ Club的两位创始人皆为犹太人）。当时Amexco的高层几乎全是盎格鲁-撒克逊白人新教徒，公司与犹太社群的关系也颇为紧张。\*但无论里德做决定的原因为何，值得注意的是，在反对Diners’ Club提案时，他从未提及TC或任何其他业务层面的理由。

The Diners’ Club proposal was dead for now, but the credit-card issue was not. In the same letter in which he attacked Diners’ Club, Bradford urged Reed to consider an American Express credit card. Bradford, an enormously opinionated individual, possessed a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance. While still head of the London office, he had the distinction of being one of the few people to get Reed to admit an error (on a small business detail, but the admission was unusual nonetheless). Now, in arguing the case for the card, Bradford proved far more forceful in disputing Clark than Clark had been in making his proposal. Bradford could “not see how an Am. Exp. card would ‘downgrade’ our TCs.” An Amexco card, he argued, would “have prestige and would be honored everywhere.” As for the difficulty of a start-up, he called it a simple business. “I could organize it,” he boasted, “so could Dennis Harmon.” For starters, he revived the 1946 idea, a card for commercial travelers. “After some experience, we could decide whether to expand it.”

Diners’ Club的收购提案暂时夭折了，但信用卡议题并未就此终结。在同一封批评Diners’ Club的信中，布拉德福德敦促里德考虑发行美国运通自己的信用卡。布拉德福德是个主见极强、几近傲慢的人，担任伦敦办事处主管期间，曾罕见地让里德承认一个业务细节上的错误（虽然是小事，但对里德而言极不寻常）。在为信用卡辩护时，布拉德福德在反驳克拉克方面远比克拉克当初提出建议时更强硬。他说自己“看不出一张美国运通卡怎么会‘贬低’我们的TC”。他主张，美国运通卡“将具有声望，且能被广泛接受”。至于启动的难度，他称这只是个简单业务，“我可以组织起来，丹尼斯·哈蒙也行”。作为起点，他重新提出1946年的构想，即为商务旅行者发行卡。“我们可以先积累一些经验，然后再决定是否扩大范围。”

Reed was not ready to go ahead, but he was persuaded to continue discussion. He told Clark to form a committee with Bradford, Townsend, treasurer Olaf Ravndal, secretary N. F. Page, and Robert Mathews (formerly the head of advertising and now in charge of money orders and utility collections) “to spell out how American Express can get into \[credit cards] as an American Express activity.”

里德尚未准备好推进该项目，但他被说服继续探讨。他指示克拉克与布拉德福德、汤森、财务主管奥拉夫·拉文达尔、秘书N.F.佩奇及负责汇票和公共事业缴费的罗伯特·马修斯（原广告主管）组成一个小组，“明确说明美国运通如何以公司名义进入\[信用卡]业务。”

Clark gathered his committee together, and over the next month, they wrote a report. It called for the creation of a credit card strictly for domestic use to limit competition with the TC. The report projected losses of about \$500,000 over the first year and a half, and a net of \$500,000 per year on a volume of \$32.7 million by year five. The committee figured cardholders at 48,000 in the first year, rising over five years to 196,000. These figures were largely guesses and could just as easily have been half or twice the size; as the report itself noted, all the figures were “rough” and “unchecked.” Ultimately, the main recommendation from Clark’s group was to get another recommendation—from an outside consultant. Reed agreed, and Clark chose Cleveland-based Robert Heller & Associates.\* In August, Reed approved an expenditure of about \$30,000 for a credit-card study.

克拉克召集小组成员，并在接下来的一个月撰写了一份报告。报告建议发行一张专为国内使用的信用卡，以减少对TC业务的竞争。报告预测首年半亏损约50万美元，到第五年时，在年交易额达到3270万美元的情况下，每年可实现净利润50万美元。小组预计第一年会有4.8万持卡人，五年后增至19.6万。由于缺乏数据支持，这些数字大多是估算，也可能只达一半或是翻倍——报告本身也承认，这些数据“粗略”且“未经验证”。最终，克拉克小组的主要建议是：请外部顾问做进一步评估。里德同意了，并由克拉克选择总部位于克利夫兰的罗伯特·海勒咨询公司。\* 8月，里德批准拨款约3万美元，用于开展信用卡可行性研究。

On October 22, the consultants submitted to Reed a summary of their report, which strongly opposed the creation of an American Express card. According to the summary, credit cards were going to have “a substantial adverse effect on Travelers Cheques in the near future,” and there was “little opportunity for \[Amexco] to operate a credit card plan on a profitable basis.”

10月22日，顾问公司向里德提交了报告摘要，明确反对美国运通发行信用卡。摘要指出，信用卡在不久的将来将对旅行支票“造成重大不利影响”，而且“\[Amexco]几乎没有机会将信用卡业务运营为一个盈利项目”。

The Heller consultants based their dire predictions in part on a supposition that the American Automobile Association (AAA) was about to get into the credit-card business. According to the consultants, this card would be used by middle-income people who ordinarily bought TCs. The Heller study estimated that the AAA card would cost Amexco 10 percent of its TC sales, about \$147 million annually.

海勒顾问的悲观预测部分基于一个假设：美国汽车协会（AAA）即将进军信用卡领域。根据顾问方判断，该卡目标用户是通常购买TC的中产阶级。海勒的研究估计，AAA卡将使Amexco失去10%的TC销售额，约为每年1.47亿美元。

Projecting the profitability of an Amexco card, the Heller group examined Diners’ Club and some department-store charge divisions. They concluded that Amexco’s own study had overstated costs but inflated revenues and profits. When they refined those numbers, they concluded that a card would lose money for two and a half years and in the fifth year would earn only \$185,513; Amexco would still not have earned back its initial investment. As a result, the consultants determined that an American Express card would be a bad business proposition.

在预测Amexco信用卡的盈利能力时，海勒小组分析了Diners’ Club及部分百货公司信用部门。他们认为Amexco自己的研究低估了成本，同时夸大了营收和利润。经重新评估后，顾问得出结论：Amexco卡在前两年半将持续亏损，到第五年也只能盈利18.55万美元，仍未收回初期投资。因此，顾问方认定，美国运通信用卡将是一个糟糕的商业决策。

Though the Heller study seemed to destroy any hope of a card operation at American Express, Reed asked his own people for comments on the report. Before he received them, another complication made a card even more unlikely. On November 8, the American Hotel Association (AHA) announced the creation of a new card, The Universal Travelcard, in what was termed “an all-out fight against encroachment of outside credit card schemes into the hotel and restaurant fields.” Said Seymour Weiss of the AHA, “these outsiders are trying to chisel into the hotel business as 7 percent partners.” Amexco ran the risk that, if it created a card, hotels might refuse the TC and damage sales severely.

尽管海勒研究几乎摧毁了美国运通发行信用卡的所有希望，里德仍请公司内部人员就该报告发表意见。然而，他尚未收到反馈，新的变数再次使信用卡前景变得渺茫。11月8日，美国酒店协会（AHA）宣布推出一款新卡——Universal Travelcard，宣称这是“为抵御外部信用卡计划入侵酒店与餐饮领域而进行的一场全面斗争”。AHA的西摩·韦斯表示：“这些外部人士试图以7%的分成比例侵蚀酒店业。”若美国运通推出自己的信用卡，酒店可能会拒绝接受TC，这将严重打击销售。

Despite this latest bit of bad news, Bradford attacked the Heller report and continued to press for some form of card. He argued that, because of continued economic growth in the U.S., there was room for both a robust card business and a TC. He again endorsed the idea of a business-travel card and added a new wrinkle: an overseas credit card. With its worldwide office network, Amexco had a tremendous advantage over Diners’ Club abroad.

尽管又有新的利空消息传来，布拉德福德依旧猛烈抨击海勒报告，并继续力推某种形式的信用卡。他指出，鉴于美国经济持续增长，信用卡与TC可并存且各有发展空间。他再次支持发行商务旅行卡，并提出新设想：推出海外信用卡。借助其遍布全球的办事处网络，Amexco在国际市场上相较Diners’ Club具备巨大优势。

Reed heard other dissent both inside and outside the company. Publicist Fred Rosen and the company’s advertising agency, Benton & Bowles, both believed that, although cards could have an impact on TC sales, the impact would be nowhere near as great as the Heller people had predicted, and Benton & Bowles seconded Bradford’s opinion that a card and the TC could coexist side by side. Townsend joined the debate with a new plea to buy Diners’ Club, if not the whole company then a minority interest of 40 percent. He thought it would work out as long as “we approach the Diners’ Club with admiration and enthusiasm rather than condescension and reluctance.” His was a lone voice this time.

公司内外还有其他反对意见传入里德耳中。公关专家弗雷德·罗森和广告代理公司Benton & Bowles均认为，尽管信用卡可能对TC构成冲击，但远不如海勒报告预测的那样严重。Benton & Bowles还支持布拉德福德的观点，认为信用卡与TC可以并行不悖。汤森也加入辩论，提出重新考虑收购Diners’ Club，即使不是全资收购，也可购买40%的少数股权。他认为，只要“我们是以钦佩与热情而非傲慢与勉强的态度接触Diners’ Club”，交易就可能成功。然而，这一次他的声音显得孤单。

Other Amexco officials, including Howard Clark, supported the Heller argument against a card. Clark attacked Townsend’s proposal, opposing a purchase of less than 75 percent of Diners’ Club, and he now rejected any acquisition involving Amexco stock. He also argued against an American Express card and suggested following Heller’s advice, which was to develop other sorts of new business to make up for the expected falloff of TC sales.\* Company’s secretary F. Page opposed an Amexco card, too, and seemed uninterested in anything other than “expanding and developing the travelers cheque business.”

其他Amexco高管，包括霍华德·克拉克在内，均支持海勒关于不应发行信用卡的观点。克拉克反驳汤森的提议，表示反对收购Diners’ Club 75%以下的股权，并拒绝任何涉及Amexco股票的交易。他也反对发行美国运通信用卡，主张应采纳海勒的建议，发展其他新业务以弥补TC销售预期下滑的影响。\* 公司秘书F·佩奇也反对发行Amexco卡，似乎对除“扩展与发展旅行支票业务”以外的任何事项都毫无兴趣。

The report and the disagreements it engendered bolstered Reed’s own opposition. Only Bradford seemed determined to press on with the card, at least the overseas version. But Reed no longer showed the slightest interest in any card proposal; the Heller report had for the time ended formal discussion.

这份报告及其引发的内部分歧，反而加深了里德的反对立场。除了布拉德福德仍坚持至少推动海外版本的信用卡，其他人都趋于保守。而里德则对任何形式的信用卡提案已毫无兴趣；海勒报告暂时终结了正式讨论。

By June 1957, the Diners’ Club discussion was revived. Bloomingdale, apparently without Schneider’s knowledge, asked the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs to arrange a takeover of Diners’ Club by the American Express Company. Bloomingdale made his request in a letter to Gustave Levy, Goldman’s managing partner, who passed it along to Robert Townsend. Townsend arranged a meeting between Reed and Bloomingdale for July 10, but first he had an inspiration: before Reed had a chance to talk with Bloomingdale, Townsend proposed that Amexco acquire not just Diners’ Club, but also the Hertz Corporation.

到了1957年6月，Diners’ Club的话题再次被重新提起。布鲁明戴尔似乎在未告知施奈德的情况下，请高盛为Diners’ Club与美国运通的并购安排牵线搭桥。他将请求写信交予高盛的管理合伙人古斯塔夫·利维，利维随后将信转交给罗伯特·汤森。汤森安排了里德与布鲁明戴尔于7月10日会面，但在此之前，他心生一计：在里德与布鲁明戴尔会谈之前，他提议Amexco不仅要收购Diners’ Club，还要一并收购赫兹租车公司。

Through one of his many contacts on Wall Street, an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, Townsend had begun discussions on a joint Amexco-Hertz project. Reed’s attitude to Hertz at this point appeared cool. Townsend, in a memo just before the Bloomingdale meeting, scolded Reed: “Every time one of the top men of these two organizations \[Hertz and Diners’ Club] makes an effort to see you, you should advantage yourself of the opportunity to learn their ideas about travel and how American Express can profitably apply these ideas either in combination with Hertz and the Diners’ Club or alone.” But Townsend really wanted a “three-way merger” in which Amexco would buy the other two with an issue of 2.6 million new shares, more than doubling the current total. He tried to catch Reed’s attention by putting the idea in the context of travel. He told Reed, correctly as it turned out, that both car rentals and credit cards were going to be big factors in the travel market, big enough that travel’s Grand Pooh-Bah should not ignore them. But if Townsend believed he could convince Reed of an idea this vast, he was mistaken, and he soon abandoned his grand plan.\*

汤森通过他在华尔街的诸多关系之一——雷曼兄弟的一位投行家，开始推动一个Amexco与赫兹的合作项目。此时，里德对赫兹的态度显得冷淡。就在与布鲁明戴尔会面前，汤森在一份备忘录中斥责里德：“当这两家机构（赫兹与Diners’ Club）的高层主动希望与你见面时，你应抓住机会了解他们对旅游行业的看法，并思考美国运通如何能单独或联合对方，从中获利。”不过，汤森的真正构想是一个“三方合并”计划——Amexco以增发260万股新股的方式收购赫兹和Diners’ Club，这将使公司股份总数翻倍。他试图用“旅游”的语境来吸引里德的注意。他告诉里德——事实也证明确实如此——汽车租赁和信用卡将在旅游市场中扮演重要角色，作为旅游业的“总管”，里德不应对此置若罔闻。但如果汤森以为他能说服里德接受如此宏大的构想，那他错了，不久便放弃了这个大胆的设想。\*

Reed’s first and last face-to-face encounter with Alfred Bloomingdale went ahead as scheduled. On July 10, Bloomingdale, Levy, and Richard Fay, also of Goldman Sachs, met with Reed and Townsend in Reed’s office. Bloomingdale started out by explaining why he wanted a merger: Diners’ Club was undercapitalized. The company needed a bigger bankroll to cover the cost of a new billing system using IBM computer equipment; it needed the support of a company with resources like those of American Express. Bloomingdale wanted Reed to take two steps: acquire at least a majority of the shares of Diners’ Club, and then give the club a loan of \$6 million for the IBM equipment. To show that the loan was a sound business idea, Bloomingdale noted that the equipment would lower overhead 30 percent, or about \$1.1 million a year, allowing Diners’ Club to repay its new parent company quickly and with interest. But Bloomingdale could not have picked a worse line of argument for the old bean counter, Ralph Reed.

里德与阿尔弗雷德·布鲁明戴尔唯一一次面对面的会谈如期进行。7月10日，布鲁明戴尔、利维及高盛的理查德·费伊与里德和汤森在里德办公室会晤。布鲁明戴尔首先解释他为何寻求合并：Diners’ Club资本不足，公司需要更强的资金基础来支付使用IBM电脑设备的新账单系统的费用；公司需要像美国运通这样拥有雄厚资源的支持者。他希望里德采取两项措施：收购Diners’ Club的大多数股权，并向该公司提供600万美元贷款，用于采购IBM设备。为了证明该笔贷款的商业可行性，布鲁明戴尔指出，IBM系统将能使运营成本降低30%，约合每年节省110万美元，使Diners’ Club能快速还清贷款并支付利息。但对这个老派精打细算的账房先生里德而言，布鲁明戴尔选错了说辞。

Reed said nothing, and Bloomingdale went on. He painted a picture of a Diners’ Club–American Express card used by ten million people for every service and product imaginable. Already, he reported, there were nearly 500,000 cardholders, and profits and revenues were rising. (Schneider told security analysts a few days later that charge volume had reached \$7 million per month.) When Bloomingdale finished, Reed had two questions. Did Bloomingdale have a detailed proposal? No. Did Bloomingdale and Schneider intend to stay on in the event of a merger? Bloomingdale said yes for himself, but thought Schneider, who had had a heart attack recently, might want to step down. That of course would have killed the idea for Reed; he had said from the very beginning that he opposed keeping either of them.

里德沉默不语，布鲁明戴尔继续说下去。他描绘出一幅前景图：Diners’ Club与美国运通联名卡由一千万用户使用，涵盖所有可以想象的产品与服务。他指出，目前已有将近50万持卡人，公司利润与收入持续增长。（几天后，施奈德向证券分析师透露，月度消费额已达700万美元。）布鲁明戴尔讲完后，里德只提了两个问题：你是否准备了详细的合并方案？没有。你和施奈德是否打算在合并后留任？布鲁明戴尔回答自己会留下，但施奈德因近期心脏病发作，可能会选择退休。对里德来说，这当然是不可接受的；他一开始就明确表示反对让两人继续掌控局面。

Twelve days later, Reed met with the finance committee of the board, at The Recess, an old luncheon club of the financial community. The committee members took their places around a table in one of the back rooms: Robert Clarkson, Howard Clark, Joe King, Ralph Owen, Howard Smith (retired as a VP, but still a member of the board and the finance committee), financier and board member James Lee, and of course Reed himself. Four others sat around the table at Reed’s invitation: Robert Townsend and three other young men from the Investment Department.

十二天后，里德在金融圈老牌午餐俱乐部“The Recess”召集董事会财务委员会会议。会议在后厅的一个房间里举行，与会成员包括：罗伯特·克拉克森、霍华德·克拉克、乔·金、拉尔夫·欧文、霍华德·史密斯（虽已退休但仍是董事会与财务委员会成员）、金融家兼董事会成员詹姆斯·李，以及里德本人。此外，还有四位受里德邀请的人士参与会议：汤森与来自投资部的三位年轻职员。

Reed began by explaining that there were two parts to the agenda: a proposal for a joint Hertz-Amexco overseas car-rental operation, and a discussion of a takeover of Diners’ Club. Reed was ready to accept the car-rental idea, which surprised some staff members; it was the first significant new venture he had approved in years. Townsend was able to sell the deal because it was the kind Reed could accept: travel-related and relatively small and cheap, about \$2–3 million.\*

里德首先介绍会议议程共分两部分：一是Amexco与赫兹合作开展海外租车业务的提案；二是讨论收购Diners’ Club事宜。里德已准备接受汽车租赁合作项目，这令部分员工颇感意外——这是他多年来首次批准的重大新业务。汤森之所以能促成该项目，是因为这正符合里德的偏好：与旅行相关、项目规模小、成本低，大约只需200万到300万美元。\*

Diners’ Club, however, was another matter. Reed had spent the previous week putting some numbers together. By his reckoning, 80 percent of Diners’ Club would cost \$20 million, four times what Clark had thought Amexco could pay for the whole company a year earlier. Reed would never have agreed to an expenditure that large. Clarkson wondered if Amexco should not take \$20 million and start its own card. Reed, Clark, and Townsend countered that Diners’ Club was too far ahead for Amexco to start its own card operation profitably.

但Diners’ Club则是另一回事。此前一周，里德花时间做了些数据测算。他估计，收购Diners’ Club 80%的股份将耗资2000万美元，是一年前克拉克估算Amexco可支付收购整家公司金额的四倍。对里德而言，这种开支无法接受。克拉克森提出，或许Amexco不如将这2000万美元用于自建卡业务。对此，里德、克拉克与汤森一致认为，Diners’ Club已领先太多，Amexco若从零开始发行信用卡，难以盈利。

Townsend alone defended the Diners’ Club deal. He began after Lee asked, “Why are we interested in Diners’ Club anyway?”

只有汤森为Diners’ Club交易辩护。当詹姆斯·李问道：“我们为什么要对Diners’ Club感兴趣？”后，他开口作答。

Townsend launched into a description of the growth and potential of Diners’ Club. “Earnings,” he said, “are increasing, conservatively speaking, at a rate of 50 percent per annum and there doesn’t seem to be anything to reverse the trend.” As for the price Amexco would have to pay, the cost would be in the range of \$20 million, but if Amexco would issue 400,000 shares of new stock “it would not cost us any money.” For an outlay of zero dollars, Amexco should realize a return of at least \$6 per new share before taxes. Though this new stock issue would give Bloomingdale and Schneider each some 6 percent of American Express, he noted, the shares could be placed in a voting trust to prevent the newcomers from instituting an agenda of their own.

汤森开始阐述Diners’ Club的发展势头与未来潜力。“收益正在增长，”他说，“即使保守估计，也以每年50%的速度在上涨，且似乎没有什么因素能逆转这个趋势。”至于Amexco的收购成本，他表示总额约为2000万美元，但如果Amexco发行40万股新股，“我们实际上无需支付现金。”换言之，在不动用现金的前提下，Amexco每股可望获得至少6美元的税前收益。虽然这批新股会使布鲁明戴尔与施奈德各持有美国运通约6%的股份，但汤森指出，这些股份可放入投票信托中，以防两位新股东干预公司事务。

When Townsend finished, Reed objected that he had forgotten the \$6 million loan. But Townsend had a ready answer. Diners' Club had established a \$4 million line of credit through Chase, its principal bank; to date, the club had taken out only \$400,000, so more than half the money for the new equipment could be financed out of the proposed new subsidiary’s own resources.

汤森话音刚落，里德便提出异议，指责他忽略了600万美元的贷款问题。但汤森立即做出回应：Diners' Club已通过其主办银行大通银行建立了一条400万美元的信贷额度，而迄今为止仅动用了40万美元，因此这笔IBM设备费用中超过一半的金额可由未来新子公司自身融资解决。

There may well be a gap in the record of the meeting at this point—a missing question—because Reed volunteered that “our people do not feel that Diners’ Club competes with Travelers Cheques.” Perhaps his statement was simply a non sequitur, but in any event, it was both important and also false. Several executives, including Clark and Townsend, were sure that the Diners’ Club card did or would compete with the TC. The Heller group agreed.

此时，会议记录中可能存在一个遗漏的问题，因为里德突然主动表示：“我们的人不认为Diners' Club与旅行支票存在竞争。”这句话或许只是无关紧要的随口一说，但无论如何，它既重要，又错误。包括克拉克与汤森在内的几位高管都坚信Diners' Club信用卡确实与旅行支票存在或将存在竞争关系。Heller顾问团队也持同样观点。

No one challenged Reed on this point, however, and the discussion resumed. What about the Diners’ Club people, James Lee asked, “Do we want these kind of people \[Schneider and Bloomingdale] in the American Express Club?” Townsend, who did not suffer fools gladly, shot back, “I thought American Express was a profit-making enterprise rather than a country club.” Lee, probably embarrassed, suddenly pronounced himself ready to go ahead and see “what kind of arrangement could be worked out.” Clarkson agreed and so did Howard Smith. Townsend appeared to have won cautious support from the committee for a takeover.

然而，没有人当场反驳里德的说法，讨论继续进行。詹姆斯·李问道：“至于Diners' Club的人，我们真的希望施奈德和布鲁明戴尔这种人加入美国运通俱乐部吗？”脾气直率、不耐愚钝之人的汤森立即反击道：“我以为美国运通是一家盈利企业，不是乡村俱乐部。”李可能感到尴尬，突然表示支持推进谈判，“看看能达成怎样的安排”。克拉克森和霍华德·史密斯也表示同意。汤森似乎赢得了委员会对收购提案的谨慎支持。

As the discussion wound down, however, Reed decided to summarize: He “sensed” enthusiasm for the deal with Hertz, but as for Diners’ Club, “Since that Committee does not have much enthusiasm for \[it], I’ll tell them we don’t want to talk any more.”

然而，当讨论接近尾声时，里德做出了总结：他“感觉到”大家对与赫兹的合作充满热情，但至于Diners' Club，“既然委员会对此并不热衷，我会告诉他们我们不再继续谈了。”

Townsend at first refused to accept Reed’s version of the outcome.

汤森起初拒绝接受里德对会议结果的解读。

As the meeting was breaking up, he said he would vote to buy Diners’ Club, and the next day, in a memo to Reed, he claimed “there was no real objection to pushing the discussions with Diners’ Club further.” But to Reed, the issue was “filed.”

会议结束时，汤森表示自己将投票支持收购Diners' Club，次日他在写给里德的备忘录中称：“并没有真正的反对意见阻止我们进一步推进与Diners' Club的谈判。”但在里德看来，此事已“归档处理”。

To an outsider with no understanding of Amexco’s internal structure and politics, the meeting’s resolution might seem incredible. Although only Townsend was wholeheartedly in favor of a deal with Schneider and Bloomingdale, the consensus clearly favored continued discussion. Clark was in favor in principle. Lee, Smith, and Clarkson wanted to keep talking. King expressed no view but had brought the matter to Reed in the first place. In fact, only two people at the meeting definitely opposed a deal: Owen and Reed. They carried the day two to five.

对不了解Amexco内部结构与政治的人来说，这次会议的决定可能难以置信。尽管只有汤森全力支持与施奈德、布鲁明戴尔达成交易，但整体意见明显倾向于继续讨论。克拉克原则上表示支持；李、史密斯和克拉克森希望继续谈判；金虽未明确表态，但最初是他将此事带给了里德。事实上，会议中明确反对该交易的只有欧文和里德两人——但正是这两人决定了会议结果，少数否决多数。

The meeting appeared to finish off the card idea, but a few people in the company were not willing to let it go. Despite Reed’s rejection, cards were going to take business away from the TC, and the only way to cushion the blow was to be in the card business.

这次会议似乎终结了信用卡项目，但公司中仍有少数人不愿就此罢休。尽管里德拒绝了该提案，信用卡终将分流旅行支票的业务，而唯一能减缓冲击的方法就是自己也进入信用卡行业。

Bradford and Townsend continued to push the hardest. Bradford bulled ahead in trying to win support for his overseas card. From May 1957 through the early summer, he polled managers in European offices, many of whom supported the basic idea. Harry Hill wrote from Paris, “I would like to stress that I feel very strongly that something must be done for New York to get into this picture. There are too many people coming abroad with their Diners’ cards and we are losing business. . . .

布拉德福德与汤森仍是最积极的推动者。布拉德福德全力推进海外信用卡方案，从1957年5月到初夏，他在欧洲分公司对多位经理进行了调查，其中很多人都支持这个基本构想。来自巴黎的哈里·希尔写道：“我必须强调，我非常强烈地认为纽约必须采取行动介入这一局面。太多旅客带着Diners卡来欧洲，我们正在失去业务……”

But in New York, only Townsend, who had abandoned his hopes of acquiring Diners’ Club and had turned to the idea of an Amexco card by default, endorsed Bradford’s scheme. He saw it as a first step toward a worldwide card. “I agree with Harry Hill that the real question is not whether American Express should have a credit card but how long we can afford to delay. I for one would move immediately.” Other executives continued to worry about doing harm to the travelers cheque business, and about something called a “negative float.” With the TC, Amexco collected money, floated it, and paid it back over time. With a card, the order changed: the company had to pay the service establishment first and then collect. If it could not collect, the card company would have to take a loan to pay off the service establishments. A long-term average of negative outstandings could build up—a negative float. The prospect of a negative float did not appeal to people who had lived by the TC so long.

但在纽约，只有汤森一人支持布拉德福德的方案。此时，他已放弃收购Diners’ Club的希望，转而默认支持发行Amexco自有信用卡。他认为这是走向全球信用卡系统的第一步。“我同意哈里·希尔的看法，真正的问题不是美国运通是否应该发行信用卡，而是我们还能拖延多久。我个人会立刻行动。”其他高管仍担心这会伤害旅行支票业务，同时担忧所谓的“负浮存金”问题。在旅行支票模式下，Amexco先收钱再分期付款。而信用卡模式则相反，公司需先向商户付款，再向客户收款。如果回款不畅，公司将不得不举债付款，长期累积的负应收账款将形成“负浮存金”。对那些长期依赖旅行支票模式的高管而言，这种前景并不吸引人。

While Amexco executives continued to have doubts about a card, more and more outsiders thought a card would be a natural addition to American Express. In September, Amexco received another proposal, this time from Arthur Roth, president of the Long Island-based Franklin National Bank. Roth met with Clark and Townsend, and suggested that Amexco start a card, handling only promotion and sales. The Franklin, which had more experience with credit matters, would handle all the credit checks and the rest of the bookkeeping. The response at Amexco to Roth’s proposal was mixed: Reed, however, displayed no more enthusiasm for this deal than he had for any other.

尽管Amexco的高管们仍对发行信用卡持有疑虑，越来越多的外部人士却认为信用卡是美国运通的自然延伸。9月，Amexco收到了一份新提议，这次来自长岛的富兰克林国民银行（Franklin National Bank）行长亚瑟·罗斯（Arthur Roth）。罗斯与克拉克和汤森会面，建议Amexco推出信用卡，仅负责推广与销售部分；而富兰克林银行凭借其在信用业务方面的经验，将负责所有信用审核及账务处理。Amexco内部对罗斯的提议反应不一，而里德对这项提议的热情不比他对以往任何一次提案更多。

Meanwhile, Bradford kept pressing Reed on the overseas card. Finally, in late September the chief executive told him to get together with nine senior executives and produce a definitive recommendation one way or the other. Reed had a system of “concurrences” which required everyone who might be affected by a decision to sign off on it. Reed seemed to use this system at his convenience since he reserved for himself veto rights over every decision. But in this case, the system would put Bradford’s proposal to rest since opinion was far too divided. Reed said nothing himself, but then he did not have to; his system killed Bradford’s plan.

与此同时，布拉德福德继续向里德施压，推进海外信用卡项目。最终，在9月底，首席执行官里德指示他召集九位高管，共同提出一个明确的建议，要么支持要么否决。里德有一套“同意制度”，要求所有可能受决策影响的人都必须签字同意。这个制度常常被他随意运用，因为他保留了对所有决策的否决权。但在本次事件中，该制度成为终结布拉德福德计划的工具——因为内部意见严重分歧。里德本人没有明确表态，但他根本不需要表态；这个制度就足以否决该提案。

But Townsend kept up a stream of memos backing the Franklin scheme. On November 19, he told Reed that he and treasurer Olaf Ravndal had made a lunch date with Roth at The Recess on November 27. Would Reed talk to Roth? The answer was no, but Townsend was allowed to go, and Clark, Ravndal, and Bradford, who had conceded defeat on his own plan, went along. Roth repeated his offer to take over the bookkeeping for an American Express card, and he reported that Amexco could acquire the entire membership list of the Gourmet Club for next to nothing.\* Since the problems of running and marketing a universal credit card made Gourmet eager to get out of the business, Roth thought they might sell their membership for as little as \$2,000. Roth noted that buying Gourmet’s list would give the proposed Amexco card 40,000 members who had already proven creditworthy. It all sounded good to Amexco’s executives, who asked Roth for a formal proposal. Townsend and Bradford returned to 65 Broadway and advised Reed to wait for Roth’s response before making a decision.

但汤森继续通过一连串备忘录支持富兰克林方案。11月19日，他告诉里德，自己和财务主管奥拉夫·拉文达尔（Olaf Ravndal）约了罗斯11月27日在金融界著名的“Recess俱乐部”共进午餐。里德是否愿意亲自与罗斯会面？答案是否定的。但汤森被允许出席，克拉克、拉文达尔，以及已放弃自己方案的布拉德福德也一同前往。罗斯再次提出愿为美国运通的信用卡处理账务事宜，并透露Amexco几乎可以零成本收购美食家俱乐部（Gourmet Club）的全部会员名单。由于经营和推广通用信用卡的困难，Gourmet急于退出该行业，罗斯认为他们可能愿意以低至2,000美元的价格出售会员数据。罗斯指出，购买这份名单将使Amexco拟议中的信用卡一开始就拥有40,000名已经过信用验证的会员。所有这些都令Amexco的高管们听起来很满意，于是他们请罗斯提交正式提案。汤森与布拉德福德返回百老汇65号总部，并建议里德在罗斯正式回函前暂缓决策。

Reed did nothing of the kind. Five days later, on December 2, at his regular Monday Officers’ Conference, Reed addressed the card issue once and for all. Present at the meeting were most of the senior officials of the company: Clark, Groves, Bradford, Page, comptroller Paul Ross, Townsend, Ravndal, White, and VP George Shirey.

但里德并未照此办理。五天后，也就是12月2日，在他的例行“周一高管会议”上，里德决定就信用卡问题做出最终裁决。出席会议的有公司大多数高层：克拉克、格罗夫斯、布拉德福德、佩奇、总会计保罗·罗斯、汤森、拉文达尔、怀特以及副总裁乔治·夏里。

Although this was to be Reed’s chance to announce his final decision, he played out a little scene first. He gave his executives one last chance to state the things they had said repeatedly over the previous two years. One by one the executives raised all the old issues; Townsend tried to rebut the objections. No one had changed his mind.

尽管此次会议原本是里德宣布最终决定的时机，但他先上演了一场小“戏码”——让高管们最后一次陈述他们在过去两年中反复表达的立场。高管们轮流提出之前的各种反对意见，汤森则逐一进行反驳。然而，没有人改变了原来的立场。

Then it was Reed’s turn. He started out like the bean counter of old: the costs of launching a program, he lamented, “could be extremely heavy,” and he saw no way of limiting the issuance of the card and so limiting the risk. As a result, he concluded, “we probably have to go all out as long as the cardholders are creditworthy.” Most of the people in the meeting were stunned, waiting for the other shoe to drop, something like, “we would have to go all out, so we won’t get involved.” But Reed was finished. He had reversed himself. He had given a go-ahead.

轮到里德发言了。他起初还是那个精打细算的老会计：他感慨说启动该项目的成本“可能极其高昂”，并表示难以控制发卡数量，进而限制风险。于是他总结道：“只要持卡人信用可靠，我们可能就必须全力以赴。”与会人员大多惊愕不已，等待他继续说出“既然必须全力以赴，我们就不参与了”之类的话。但里德并未继续，他已经说完了——他推翻了自己过去的立场，给出了“放行”的决定。

From that day onward, Amexco executives wondered why—why had Reed changed his mind? There was no definitive answer. Reed apparently had heard a rumor that Diners’ Club was planning to enter the travel business through a new outfit called the “Intercontinental Express Agency.” Bloomingdale planned to use this new agency to put together tours for travel agents, and perhaps, to offer traveler’s checks. Reed probably took the news as a personal attack and decided to fight back by invading the club’s territory. Such a scenario would have been completely in character for Reed.

自那天起，Amexco的高管们始终疑惑：为什么？——为什么里德改变了主意？没有明确答案。据说里德听说了一个传闻：Diners' Club正计划通过一家名为“洲际快线旅行社”（Intercontinental Express Agency）的新公司进军旅游业。布鲁明戴尔计划借此新机构为旅行社组织旅游项目，甚至可能推出自己的旅行支票。里德或许将这则消息视为一种“人身攻击”，决定反击，入侵对方的地盘。这样的反应，完全符合里德一贯的性格。

Perhaps his reversal was more the result of the continuous lobbying he faced for two years. That Reed had permitted the debate to continue suggests that he was still considering the issue. However strong his resistance was, he clearly changed his mind over time, perhaps because the most forceful arguments came from the two men he liked best, Bradford and Townsend. But finally, the reasoning behind the most important decision for the company during the twentieth century remains a mystery.

或许，里德的转变更多是两年来持续游说的结果。他之所以一直允许相关讨论进行，说明他始终在考虑这个问题。尽管他最初反对得非常坚决，但显然随着时间推移他逐渐改变了想法，这也许是因为最有力的论据来自他最欣赏的两位下属——布拉德福德和汤森。但最终，这项对公司20世纪发展影响最重大的决策，其背后的真正动因仍是一个谜。

So Reed made the decision to create the American Express Card, but the new venture was to have a difficult birth. Amexco was totally unprepared for this business and was unable to learn from the experiences of Diners’ Club and the other card companies. American Express suffered from a belief that this was a simple business over which the venerable American Express would easily triumph, as Bradford had once claimed. But the card operation became so chaotic that before long, many executives would regret that Reed had changed his mind.

于是，里德最终做出了推出美国运通信用卡的决定，但这一新事业的“诞生”却异常艰难。Amexco对这一业务毫无准备，也未能借鉴Diners' Club等信用卡公司的经验。美国运通错误地认为这是一个简单的业务，像布拉德福德曾宣称的那样，他们将轻松取胜。但信用卡业务很快变得混乱不堪，以致于许多高管后来都后悔里德当初改变了主意。

In early February 1958, Reed appointed Robert R. Mathews to head the start-up of the card division.\* He was joined on the project by in-house troubleshooter Clark Winter. A few months later, assistant VP Michael Lively, who had been working on the Hertz-American Express joint venture, became the third executive of the start-up project and was named the future general manager of the new card division.

1958年2月初，里德任命罗伯特·R·马修斯（Robert R. Mathews）负责筹建信用卡部门。公司内部专门解决疑难问题的专家克拉克·温特（Clark Winter）也加入了这个项目。几个月后，负责赫兹－美国运通合资项目的副总裁助理迈克尔·莱弗利（Michael Lively）成为该启动项目的第三位高管，并被任命为新信用卡部门未来的总经理。

Reed also designated Bradford and Townsend to advise the card operation. While all of these men had proven themselves competent executives, none had ever had anything to do with a credit-card operation. Lively even admitted that his knowledge of such cards was “limited to a layman’s evaluation . . . hearsay and conjecture.” But that was sufficient for Reed, who never thought of bringing in someone who knew what the business was about.

里德还指定布拉德福德和汤森担任信用卡业务顾问。尽管这些人都曾是称职的高管，但他们无一具有信用卡业务的实际经验。莱弗利甚至坦言自己对信用卡的了解“仅限于门外汉的判断……道听途说和猜测”。但这对里德来说已经足够，他从未考虑引入真正了解该行业的人才。

At this point, no details of the card operation had been decided. Amexco still considered the idea of having the Franklin Bank handle the paperwork, an option not finally rejected until March. The question of buying the membership of Gourmet or some other club to get a nucleus of cardholders was also up in the air and would hang there for months. At the same time, Reed made one thing clear: he wanted to get this project moving swiftly. Mathews was as committed as Reed. He wrote, “We are convinced without reservation that we should get in to this business as quickly as possible.” Long before most issues were resolved, in early March, Reed set the launch day for October 1, 1958.

当时，信用卡业务的具体方案尚未敲定。Amexco仍在考虑是否让富兰克林银行负责账务处理，这个选项直到3月才被最终否决。是否收购美食家俱乐部（Gourmet）或其他俱乐部的会员名单，以快速建立初始持卡人群，也悬而未决，并将拖延数月。与此同时，里德明确表示：他希望此项目尽快推进。马修斯对此也同样坚定。他写道：“我们毫无保留地相信，我们应尽快进入这一业务。”在大多数问题尚未解决之前，里德已于3月初敲定了正式发行日期：1958年10月1日。

Mathews, Winter, and Lively faced promotional details, organizational details, management details, credit details, policy questions. They had to decide whether or not to charge for the card and how much; what kind of contract to have with service establishments; what discount rate to charge; whether there would be a uniform rate or different rates; what the card would be made of; what the card would be called; and so on. Winter and Mathews sat down one day and filled sheet after sheet of yellow paper just enumerating the questions that had to be addressed. Both men began putting in long days, working until midnight or later, seven days a week. It was not enough. By April, they were still grappling with basic questions like the cost of the card, and whether it would be made of plastic or cardboard. To be sure, they were beginning to get some of the issues in hand. They knew they needed a credit department, a sales department, and a collection department, and they began sketching out a rough organizational plan.

马修斯、温特和莱弗利面临大量的推广、组织、管理、信贷和政策层面的问题。他们必须决定是否向持卡人收取费用，以及收费标准；与商户签订何种协议；折扣率是多少；是否统一费率或因行业而异；信用卡材质是塑料还是纸板；信用卡的命名等等。温特与马修斯有一天干脆坐下来，在一页又一页的黄色便签纸上罗列出所有待解决的问题。两人开始加班至午夜甚至更晚，每周工作七天。即便如此，仍然不够。到了4月，他们还在为一些基本问题如卡片成本、材质是塑料还是纸板而苦恼。当然，也开始理清部分核心问题——他们意识到需要设立信贷部、销售部和催收部，并开始初步勾勒组织架构图。

On many matters, Reed gave Mathews and Winter an unusual degree of autonomy and authority. They could simply make decisions without the need to write lots of memos or get concurrences and were required to advise only Reed—with whom they dined one or two nights a week. The card-division heads were able to maintain their autonomy in part because the new division operated out of the old 1858 redbrick building on Hudson Street, out of sight and oversight of headquarters.

在许多事务上，里德给予马修斯和温特极高的自主权和决策权。他们可以直接做出决定，无需撰写大量备忘录或获得各方签署同意，只需向里德汇报——他们每周还会与里德共进一到两次晚餐。信用卡事业部之所以能维持这种高度独立，部分原因是其办公地点设在哈德逊街那栋建于1858年的红砖旧楼里，远离总部视线，也避免了总部的监管干预。

But Reed took one matter out of the new division’s control entirely. He settled the question of who would handle the accounting: it would be neither the card division nor the Franklin Bank. Instead Reed gave complete authority to the company comptroller. His decision was not surprising. Reed continued to draw on his own experience as company comptroller, and he always maintained tight oversight of the company’s operations through his comptroller, Paul Ross. In this instance, however, the paperwork was of a different character and a different order of magnitude. By its very nature, a card business involved an enormous burden on an accounting operation. Although the company brought in an outside consultant to help set up new accounting procedures, the comptroller’s office never hired the personnel to manage the volume of work the card would entail. The people in the office knew nothing about credit cards and made no apparent effort to learn.

但里德将其中一项事务完全从新部门的控制中拿走——他亲自决定了谁来负责账务处理：既不是信用卡部门，也不是富兰克林银行，而是公司财务主管全权负责。这一决定并不令人意外。里德一直延续他担任公司财务主管时的经验，并通过现任财务主管保罗·罗斯（Paul Ross）对公司运营进行严格监督。然而，这次所涉及的文书工作具有完全不同的性质与规模。信用卡业务本质上就意味着对会计系统带来极大负担。虽然公司聘请了外部顾问来协助设立新的会计流程，但财务部门却从未雇用足够的人员来应对信用卡业务所需的庞大工作量。部门员工对信用卡业务一无所知，也未表现出学习意愿。

Through April, preparations for the card went on in relative secrecy. No one, not even Diners’ Club, knew what Amexco was planning. But Mathews, Winter, Lively, and other employees could not keep the operation quiet for long. Out of necessity they had to let an ever-widening circle of people know what they were planning. They had to advise managers in the field, sound out some service-establishment owners, and talk to bankers (to make certain the card would not cost Amexco their goodwill), and so the secret inevitably got out. By early May, B. E. White received a message from his friend Seymour Weiss of the American Hotel Association and its Universal Travelcard. Weiss wanted to talk to White for unknown reasons. But White surmised correctly that it had “to do with our entrance into the Credit Card Field.”

直到4月，信用卡的筹备工作还相对保密。没有人，包括Diners’ Club在内，知道Amexco的计划。但马修斯、温特、莱弗利及其他员工终究无法长期保守这个秘密。出于业务需要，他们不得不逐步告知更多人，包括通知各地经理，试探部分商户意愿，以及与银行进行沟通（以确保发行信用卡不会影响Amexco在银行界的声誉），因此消息最终不可避免地泄露了出去。5月初，B.E.怀特收到了他的朋友、美国酒店协会及其“环球旅行卡”负责人西摩·韦斯的来信，想与他面谈，原因不明。但怀特判断正确，韦斯是因为“我们即将进军信用卡领域”而来。

White expected that Weiss would be angry about the card. But actually, Weiss offered assistance on two fundamental concerns of the card operation: recruiting cardholders and signing up service establishments. Weiss wanted to make a deal. The American Hotel Association, Weiss’s organization, had gotten into the card business to battle Diners’ Club and the other travel and entertainment cards. But while the AHA had 150,000 cardholders and 4,500 participating hotels, member establishments were still losing business to other cards. Consequently, the hotel association decided to end its war against outside cards and form an alliance with one of the card organizations. Weiss and his group picked Amexco and offered the latter all AHA card members and service establishments. At once, American Express had 150,000 cardholders, and its card had credibility as a travel and entertainment instrument widely accepted in U.S. hotels.

怀特原以为韦斯会因Amexco发行信用卡而感到愤怒，但实际上韦斯提供了协助，正是针对信用卡业务最关键的两点：发展持卡人和招募签约商户。韦斯希望达成一项合作协议。他所在的美国酒店协会原本涉足信用卡业务，是为了对抗Diners’ Club及其他旅行娱乐类信用卡。尽管AHA已拥有15万持卡人和4,500家合作酒店，其成员商户仍持续流失客户，被其他信用卡蚕食。因此，该协会决定停止与外部信用卡公司的竞争，转而寻求联盟。韦斯及其团队选择了Amexco，并提出将全部AHA卡会员和合作酒店纳入Amexco体系。美国运通因此一跃拥有15万持卡人，其信用卡也一举获得了“全美酒店广泛接受的旅行娱乐支付工具”的市场信誉。

Mathews, Winter, and Lively achieved other notable successes in the search for both service establishments and card members. In the summer, the New York Central Railroad, an old friend of Amexco, agreed to allow passengers to charge tickets on the card. Amexco bought the Gourmet card’s membership list, adding more than 40,000 members. That list, combined with the one Amexco had acquired from the AHA, brought the number of holders of the still-to-be-issued American Express Card to over 190,000. Two years earlier Howard Clark’s committee had projected 196,000 holders after five years of operation; instead, Amexco had that two months before operations began.

在发展商户和持卡人方面，马修斯、温特和莱弗利还取得了其他重要突破。夏天，Amexco的老朋友——纽约中央铁路公司同意允许旅客使用该卡购票。Amexco还收购了“美食家卡”（Gourmet Card）的会员名单，新增4万多名会员。将这份名单与从AHA获得的名单相加，美国运通尚未正式发行的信用卡已有超19万名预备持卡人。两年前，霍华德·克拉克所领导的委员会曾预计，五年后Amexco持卡人将达196,000人；而现在，距离启动运营还有两个月，Amexco就已基本达到这一目标。

Actually, Amexco had many more cardholders than that. In May the press had begun to report rumors about Amexco’s plans for a card, and so many reports appeared that the company felt it had no choice but to confirm that the rumor was true. The response to the news was both overwhelmingly positive and just plain overwhelming. With the card still in a very formative stage, Mathews, Winter, and Lively were deluged with appeals from people who wanted to be cardholders. This response demonstrated how much goodwill the company had built up over the years. But it was more a distraction than anything else; people clamored for cards, and Amexco still had not even decided how much to charge for them.

事实上，Amexco的潜在持卡人数远不止这些。5月，媒体开始纷纷报道Amexco即将推出信用卡的传闻，消息传播如此广泛，公司最终只能公开确认传闻属实。此消息引发了压倒性的热烈反应，既“正面”，又“疯狂”。当时卡片还处于初期筹备阶段，马修斯、温特和莱弗利便已被无数申请持卡人的请求淹没。这种反应展现了Amexco多年来积累的良好声誉，但在当下却更多是一种干扰：公众纷纷索卡，而Amexco甚至尚未决定应收多少年费。

Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Amexco decided to give people a more formal opportunity to apply for a card. Mathews, Winter, and Lively put ads in twenty-three newspapers that included a return coupon so that people could apply for the card. Lively recalled how he and Mathews were told that some mail had arrived, and they went to take a look, expecting a few dozen responses. Instead there were thousands in a dozen mailbags. Two days later, the three card-division heads were forced to assign eighteen people to work in the mailroom going through these letters—some of which not only asked for a card, but wanted special favors such as “lucky” card number. The problem for the card division was that each one of these letters required not just a polite note in response; they required credit checks, entries into a billing system, a printed card (if they qualified), and then some letter of response complete with cardholder rules and obligations. Working day and night, the card operation tried to accomplish all of these tasks, and by launch date the company had issued more than 250,000 cards. But the division was still behind in its correspondence, and new applications were arriving at a rate of thousands per week.

尽管如此，几周后Amexco还是决定让公众以更正式的方式申请信用卡。马修斯、温特和莱弗利在23家报纸上刊登了带有回执的广告，以供人们填写申请。莱弗利回忆说，当时他与马修斯接到通知说“有些邮件到了”，他们过去一看，原本只以为会有几十封，结果竟是上千封、满满十几袋信件。两天后，三位部门主管不得不指派18名员工驻守邮件室，专门处理这些申请信——其中还有人特别要求获得“幸运号码”的卡片。对信用卡部门而言，问题在于这些来信每封都不仅仅需要回复致谢，还需进行信用审核、输入计费系统、打印卡片（若符合资格），并附上卡主守则和使用说明回函。整个部门日以继夜地努力完成这些流程，到正式上线日时，公司已发出超过25万张信用卡。但函件处理仍严重滞后，每周仍有数千份新申请源源不断地寄来。

The pressure on the card division not only to approve cards, but also to sign up service establishments grew enormous as October 1 drew near. Mathews, Winter, and Lively dispatched their representatives from New York, briefcases filled with contracts to sign up as long a list of service establishments as possible. Amexco managers around the world got into the act soliciting restaurants and hotels. Other service establishments actually came to Amexco unsolicited, in part because they valued the American Express name and the goodwill it enjoyed. As the colorful restaurateur Toots Shor said, “\[Amexco’s] got a reputation for being clean and decent, and it’ll probably lend some class to my place.” Shor called Reed directly and told him, “Ralph, ya bum, I’m going into business with ya—put my joint down for them credit cards of yours.”

随着10月1日的临近，信用卡部门面临的压力日益增大，不仅要批准新卡，还要尽快签约商户。马修斯、温特和莱弗利从纽约派出代表，公文包里装满了合同，目标是在最短时间内招募尽可能多的签约商户。全球各地的Amexco经理也纷纷行动，游说餐厅和酒店加入。有些商户甚至主动找上门来，部分原因是他们看重“美国运通”这一品牌及其积累的良好声誉。个性鲜明的餐厅老板图茨·肖尔（Toots Shor）说：“Amexco有种干净、体面的声誉，可能还能让我这地方增添几分品位。”他甚至直接打电话给里德，说：“拉尔夫，你这家伙，我要跟你做生意——把我这店加进你们信用卡系统。”

By opening day, Amexco had signed up 17,500 establishments. It charged its quarter-million cardholders \$6 per card, one dollar more than the Diners’ Club card to emphasize that it was a higher prestige item. The cards were made of paperboard—a lightweight cardboard—and had a purple border over a purple-tinted beige field. On the left side, it had, in purple, a familiar decoration: the head of a centurion, a symbol that had been added to travelers cheques in the early 1950s to make them harder to counterfeit. The card numbers were printed in red, and the old slogan, created by Howard Brooks and Douglas Malcolm, “World Service,” was watermarked into the card’s background. Reed presented the new creation to the world, as promised, on October 1 at a packed press conference. Already, the American Express Credit Card, as it was officially called, rivaled the Diners’ Club card in size and scope; on the surface, the American Express Card appeared a smashing success at birth.

开卡当日，Amexco已签下17,500家商户。对其25万名持卡人，公司每张卡收取6美元年费，比Diners’ Club多1美元，以突出其更高端的定位。卡片材质为纸板——轻质硬纸板，带有紫色边框，底色为带紫调的米色。卡片左侧印有一个熟悉的装饰：紫色的百夫长头像，这是20世纪50年代初为防伪而加入旅行支票中的标识。卡号印成红色，背景中则水印着由霍华德·布鲁克斯和道格拉斯·马尔科姆设计的老口号：“世界服务”（World Service）。10月1日，里德如约在一场座无虚席的新闻发布会上向全世界推出这张新卡。根据发行时的持卡人数与商户覆盖范围来看，美国运通信用卡（官方名称）已与Diners’ Club旗鼓相当，表面上看，堪称“开局即巅峰”。

But initially, the card was the most paradoxical development in the company’s history: its success nearly destroyed it. While no product or service ever received such a warm reception, no product so greatly threatened the company’s goodwill, or so drastically drained its treasury. Part of the trouble stemmed from Reed’s decision to put the comptroller’s office in charge of accounting. The comptroller just did not get the work done. As Mathews and Lively tried to explain to Reed, “There was no accounting going on.” Relations particularly with service establishments suffered. The card business depended on their goodwill, but they were not getting paid on schedule. Complaints poured in to a company that had not heard more than a handful in any one year since it lost its express business. Although they tried, Mathews and Lively could not make Reed believe that the accounting operation endangered the entire venture. They went to Reed’s office to explain, and Reed immediately called in the comptroller who reported that “everything was in hand.” Reed threw Mathews and Lively out of his office. For a few more weeks the work backed up, and the complaints mounted. The comptroller fell at least two months behind. Finally, Mathews and Lively sent the outside accounting consultants in to see Reed and explain the problem to him. Then the card division heads went back to the chief executive’s office themselves. Reed acknowledged at last that the problems were serious, and he accepted a recommendation to take the billing system out of the comptroller’s hands and give it to the card division. But the paperwork would not finally be brought up-to-date for years.

但最初，这张信用卡成为了公司历史上最具讽刺意味的发展：它的成功差点毁了公司。公司从未推出过哪项产品或服务能如此受欢迎，同时也从未有任何产品能如此严重地威胁公司声誉，或如此迅速地消耗其资金储备。问题的一部分源自于里德将账务交由财务主管办公室处理的决定。财务主管根本无法完成工作。正如马修斯和莱弗利向里德解释的那样：“基本上根本没有账务在运作。”与商户的关系尤为恶化。信用卡业务依赖于商户的合作与信任，但Amexco未能按时向商户付款。大量投诉涌入这家公司——而自从丧失快递业务以来，公司每年几乎没收到过几封投诉信。尽管马修斯和莱弗利试图说服里德，相信账务体系正危及整个项目，但无果。两人亲自到他办公室说明情况，里德随即召见财务主管，后者声称“一切尽在掌控之中”，然后便将两人轰出了办公室。接下来的几周，账务继续积压，投诉持续激增。财务主管的账务处理至少落后了两个月。最终，马修斯和莱弗利不得不请外部会计顾问前往里德处解释问题，随后两人再次亲自到办公室说明情况。里德这才承认问题严重，并采纳建议，将账务系统从财务主管手中交还给信用卡部门。但整个文书系统直到数年后才真正恢复正常。

Lively, Mathews, and Winter adopted a positive philosophy about such problems. They remained determined to forge ahead and clean up the messes as they went along. As a result, growth in both card members and service establishments continued at a rapid pace. But the complaints persisted, and far more important, the card lost money—lots of money, on the order of \$4 million in the first two years, a total of perhaps \$14 million by 1962.

面对这一切问题，莱弗利、马修斯和温特选择了积极的态度。他们决心继续推进业务，一边扩展，一边收拾残局。正因如此，持卡人数和商户数量仍在迅速增长。但投诉并未停止，更严重的是，信用卡业务亏损严重——前两年就亏损约400万美元，到1962年累计亏损或达1,400万美元。

Some of the losses resulted from organizational problems such as accounting. But actually most of Amexco’s losses stemmed from the behavior of cardholders, from a combination of card abuse and slow payment. The company had done a poor job in evaluating credit risks, which was understandable since it had no experience with handing out blank-check credit, or any credit for that matter. Beginning with the Glass Eye Era, Amexco had made a policy of denying credit; now it suddenly shifted policy and handed it out to hundreds of thousands of people. Mathews, Winter, and Lively recognized the potential of card abuse, and they hired a few people from other card operations who had some experience in credit evaluation. But these people did not know their business very well; indeed the card operations they came from had similar problems. Amexco just had the problems on a bigger scale, a roster of cardholders that quickly topped 500,000

部分亏损来自于组织层面的问题，例如账务处理。但实际上，美国运通的大部分亏损源于持卡人的行为——即滥用信用卡与还款缓慢的双重问题。公司在信用评估方面做得很差，这也可以理解，因为它此前从未涉足信用发放，更不用说“空白支票式”的信用授权。从“玻璃眼睛时代”开始，Amexco一贯拒绝提供信贷；如今它却突然政策大转弯，将信用大举发放给数十万用户。马修斯、温特和莱弗利意识到了卡片滥用的风险，于是从其他信用卡公司招募了几名在信用评估方面有些经验的员工。但这些人对业务并不熟练——事实上，他们原先所在的卡片公司也有类似问题。Amexco只是把这些问题放大了：持卡人数迅速超过50万。

Some of the losses arose from a deliberate abuse of the card. But many other people just did not pay on time. This was partly due to the way Americans had traditionally settled their debts. Travel and entertainment cards were new, and Americans were not used to the idea of paying off bills like clockwork every thirty days. Amexco pledged to settle with service establishments in ten days, but many cardholders squared their accounts only after ninety days or even six months. When Amexco pressed cardholders, they often reacted indignantly. American Express compounded the problem with a reluctance to crack down on the deadbeats. Reed, especially, despised the idea of dunning customers. Pressing people for money built ill will, and the company was only used to creating will of the good kind. After a couple of years, Lively tried a gentle approach to both educate and threaten; he dispatched a seven-stanza poem allegedly from a remorseful cardholder that included lines such as:

I let your bills go much too long—The oversight, I know, was wrong.

It roused your righteous indignation

And brought about my cancellation.

部分亏损是因持卡人故意滥用信用卡造成的，但更多人只是未能按时还款。这在一定程度上源于美国人传统的还款习惯。当时，旅行与娱乐卡尚属新鲜事物，美国人尚未习惯每月准时还清账单的理念。Amexco承诺在十天内结算商户账款，而许多持卡人却要等到90天甚至六个月后才还款。当Amexco催款时，许多人反而愤怒回应。美国运通的问题还被其自身态度加剧：它不愿对“老赖”动真格。尤其是里德，他极度反感催收客户。他认为催款会招致怨恨，而公司一向擅长的是营造正面 goodwill。几年后，莱弗利尝试用一种更柔和的方式去教育和“半威胁”客户——他寄出了一首据称出自一位懊悔的持卡人的七段诗，诗中写道：

“我拖欠账单太久——

疏忽我知确属错；

惹恼你们义愤填膺，

招来我卡被注销。”

The poem appeared to have some effect, but prior to it, the amount of money due from cardholders—“receivables”—increased steadily, a negative float grew, and the card lost more and more money. In 1959, Reed told the Wall Street Journal that the card was “pulling out of the red as fast as expected and should begin to show a profit next month.” Reed was not telling the truth. Profitability was nowhere in sight. But having committed himself to the card, he now showed no signs of backing away from it.

这首诗似乎多少起到了一些作用，但在那之前，应收账款持续攀升，“负浮存金”日益扩大，信用卡业务亏损也在不断加剧。1959年，里德对《华尔街日报》称，该卡“正以预期的速度摆脱亏损状态，预计下月开始盈利”。然而这并非事实，盈利遥遥无期。但既然他已经押注于此，他就没有任何退缩的迹象。

Such support was typical of Reed; once something bore the American Express name, he believed in backing it out of what other executives termed “corporate pride.” At the same time, his support for the card was unusually tenacious and personal. He appeared to tie it to his own future, as well as the future of the company. He was nearing seventy now and board members, including his supporters and friends, began to suggest to him that he should choose a successor and retire. Reed did not want to go, and he appeared to use the card’s struggle as a means of hanging on, an excuse for delay. He had told Mathews and Winter that they were not to tell his likely successor, Howard Clark, what was going on in the card division. Since Clark’s office was across the hall from Reed’s—their secretaries faced each other—Reed could see any disloyalty. Winter and Mathews felt extremely awkward about this order; they were faced with the choice of disobedience to the boss or denial of vital information to the second-ranking official in the company, the man likely to be chief executive soon. But that seemed to be the point; Reed wanted to forestall the possibility that there would be a next chief executive.

这种支持态度正是里德的典型风格：一旦某项业务打上“美国运通”的标志，他便会出于同事们所称的“企业自尊”而坚定支持它。同时，他对信用卡的支持格外顽强而带有个人情感。他似乎将其与自己未来以及公司命运紧密相连。当时里德已接近七十岁，董事会成员（包括他的支持者与朋友）已开始建议他物色接班人并考虑退休。但里德无意离开，他似乎将这场信用卡的苦战作为继续留任的理由与借口。他曾要求马修斯与温特不要将信用卡部门的情况透露给他潜在的接班人霍华德·克拉克。克拉克的办公室就在他对面——两人的秘书面对面办公——他可以轻易“监控”任何不忠之举。温特和马修斯对此感到非常为难，他们面临的是：要么违抗上司，要么隐瞒公司第二号人物——也可能是下任CEO——的重要信息。但这似乎正是里德的目的：阻止“下任CEO”的出现。

In the midst of his personal struggle, Reed suddenly made what turned out to be his last major decision: he agreed to the resurrection of the international banking organization. The decision about the bank was as simple as the card decision had been complicated. But in the process, Reed reversed a policy that Small had set down and that Reed himself had followed throughout his presidency. In the late 1940s, Frank Groves had brought to Reed the idea of developing an international commercial bank.\* Groves told Reed that in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, there was plenty of money and nothing to spend it on, and Groves wanted to loan money especially for trade. Reed said no; then and throughout his first fifteen years, he consistently limited banking activities just as Small had done. He once responded to a report that one of his managers had earned extra money in foreign-exchange trading by asking nervously, “Is Max within his limits?”

在个人斗争的夹缝中，里德突然做出了他任期内最后一个重大决定：他同意重建国际银行组织。这个关于银行的决定远比信用卡的决定要简单。但在这个过程中，里德推翻了小富兰克林·斯莫尔早年设定的政策——而里德本人此前始终遵循这些政策。在1940年代末，弗兰克·格罗夫斯曾向里德提出建立国际商业银行的想法。格罗夫斯告诉里德，在像香港、新加坡这样的地方，资金充裕但消费渠道有限，他希望向贸易活动发放贷款。里德当时拒绝了；在其执掌公司最初的十五年里，他始终像斯莫尔一样限制银行业务的发展。某次当听说一位经理通过外汇交易赚了些钱时，他紧张地问道：“马克斯有没有超出权限？”

Yet Reed turned aside decades of tradition and did so after a period of discussion lasting only a few days. Reed was in fact persuaded by one long memo from Robert Townsend. Townsend, along with two consultants, had studied the company’s banking operations for several months, and they concluded that Amexco had vast, untapped potential as an international bank. Of course this was the same conclusion reached by Groves, by Lynde Selden and Albert Wiggin, by Howard Brooks and R. A. Foulks. It was not a view that Reed had shared.

然而，里德推翻了几十年的传统，而且仅仅在几天讨论之后就做出了决定。事实上，说服他的人是罗伯特·汤森德的一封长备忘录。汤森德与两位顾问一起，花了数月时间研究公司的银行业务，得出结论：美国运通在国际银行领域拥有巨大的、尚未开发的潜力。当然，这一观点早已被格罗夫斯、林德·塞尔登、阿尔伯特·威金、霍华德·布鲁克斯和R.A.福尔克斯等人提出过。但过去里德从未接受这一观点。

But Townsend tried to convince him anyway. By this time, he appeared to understand Reed better than anyone else in the company and knew how to approach him. In February, he wrote a twelve-page memo urging Reed to expand and revitalize Amexco’s banking operations. He put the proposition this way: “By spending \$100,000 now for additional experienced banking personnel at New York," he wrote, "We can produce \$1,000,000 more of interest income in 1960 than is currently blueprinted for 1959.” In other words, spend next to nothing and make a great deal. Other executives regarded the argument as extremely simplistic. But it was a Reed proposition if there ever was one, and the chief executive accepted the idea at once. In part, Reed bought the small and cheap argument, but he also appeared to back it as a vote of confidence in Townsend, who was to become head of the new bank. The speed and tone of the debate amazed other executives. As one would later say, “It’s an interesting footnote to corporate history that a major decision like that would be made on such a basis.”

但汤森德还是尝试说服他。此时，汤森德似乎比公司里的任何人都更了解里德，也知道如何接近他。二月，汤森德写了一份12页的备忘录，敦促里德扩展并重振Amexco的银行业务。他这样表述这个提案：“如果我们现在在纽约花10万美元聘请一些有经验的银行人员，到1960年，我们可以比1959年预算多创造100万美元的利息收入。”换句话说，是以极低投入换取高额回报。其他高管认为这个论点过于简单。但这完全是一个“里德式”的提案，于是CEO立刻接受了这个主意。部分原因是他认同“低投入”的逻辑，部分原因则是他把这当作对汤森德的信任投票——汤森德将出任新银行的负责人。这场讨论的节奏与调性让其他高管感到惊讶。正如某位高管后来所说：“这在企业史上是一则有趣的脚注——一个如此重大的决定竟是在这种基础上做出的。”

Though his approach was tailored to the man rather than the business, Townsend was confident he could deliver on the promise of a substantial increase in income. The company had accumulated about \$100 million in deposits, mostly through its military banking. But Amexco had a small loan portfolio, and all loans were doled out only after microscopic scrutiny. Townsend planned to loosen and expand loan activity and to make much better use of the vast world office network. Amexco, he noted, still had banking rights in dozens of countries that it hardly used. In some places, like Karachi, Pakistan, Amexco was the only U.S. banking operation, but thanks to policies set down by F. P. Small, the office hardly did any banking.\*

虽然他的说服策略更多是因人施策而非因业务本身，但汤森德有信心兑现大幅增加收益的承诺。公司当时已积累了大约1亿美元的存款，主要来自其军事银行业务。但Amexco的贷款组合规模非常小，所有贷款都经过严格的审核。汤森德计划放宽并扩大贷款业务，同时更好地利用公司庞大的全球办事处网络。他指出，Amexco在几十个国家仍保有银行业务许可权，却几乎未加利用。在某些地区，比如巴基斯坦的卡拉奇，美国运通甚至是唯一一家美国银行机构，但由于F.P.斯莫尔早年设定的政策，该办事处几乎没有开展任何银行业务。

But Reed’s approval did something far more fundamental to American Express than just expand a business line. By endorsing Townsend’s plan, Reed had agreed to the first change in the branch-office system since Small had created it. Small had established the system of offices with local chieftains responsible for everything, a structure Reed had maintained. But Townsend’s plan would establish a centralized international-banking authority under his own management.† He would hire professional credit managers, professional loan officers, and build a true banking operation. His Overseas Banking Division, as it came to be called, was to be organized along broad geographical lines, with its own officers responsible for all banking activity in a given region. In other words, these officers would take authority over all banking from the branch-office managers. Not surprisingly, local managers opposed the plan, and Harry Hill, onetime manager of 11 Rue Scribe, urged Reed not to rush into this scheme. But Reed ignored him and instructed Townsend to create the banking division.‡

但里德的批准不仅仅是扩大一个业务线那么简单，它对美国运通的意义远为深远。通过支持汤森德的计划，里德实际上批准了自斯莫尔创建以来，美国运通分支机构体系的首次重大变革。斯莫尔最初设立的体制是各地办事处由本地“酋长”全面掌控，里德一直维持这种结构。而汤森德的计划将建立一个集中化的国际银行管理机构，由他本人领导。他将聘请专业的信贷经理和贷款官，建立一套真正意义上的银行体系。这个后来被称为“海外银行部”的新机构，将按大区域划分，设立各自负责人，全面负责该区域的银行业务。换言之，这些新任命的人员将接管原由当地分支办事处经理掌控的所有银行职权。不出意料，地方经理们普遍反对这一计划，曾任巴黎司令街11号办事处经理的哈里·希尔甚至劝说里德不要仓促推进。但里德并未理会，反而指示汤森德着手创建该银行部门。

As Townsend predicted, banking business picked up immediately. By the end of 1960, deposits topped \$169 million, and the company’s loan portfolio more than doubled to \$48.5 million. Whether he made good on his promise to spend \$100,000 and make \$1 million, no one exactly knew since company accounting procedures could not determine it. (For the one-year period between 1960 and 1961, Townsend claimed a net of \$1.047 million.) Whatever the true figure, most agreed it showed that banking could make a significant contribution to Amexco’s earnings, although for the next twenty years, Amexco officials would continue to debate whether the company really needed a bank after all.

正如汤森德所预期的那样，银行业务很快就有了起色。到1960年底，公司存款超过1.69亿美元，贷款组合也翻倍增长至4850万美元。汤森德是否实现了“花10万美元赚100万美元”的承诺，没有人能确切说清楚，因为公司当时的会计制度无法精准衡量这类绩效（1960至1961年期间，汤森德本人声称净收入为104.7万美元）。无论真实数字为何，大多数人都承认，这证明银行业务确实能为Amexco的盈利作出重要贡献——尽管在此后的二十年里，Amexco高层仍不断争论一个问题：公司到底是不是真的需要一项银行业务。

If Reed hoped that the addition of banking as well as the card would make him seem the more indispensable, he was mistaken. In fact, these new activities highlighted how archaic and inadequate his system was; the branch-office network, which had trouble sustaining travel and freight, could not manage travel, freight, the card, the TC, Hertz-Amex, and other minor operations. Nor could Reed make decisions on all the little trivial details anymore. Other officials found themselves making decisions because neither they nor Reed had time to go through all the old decision-making procedures. Reed was the victim of his own success; the company had grown literally beyond his control, and now the structure of American Express needed drastic overhaul.

如果里德曾希望通过增加银行业务以及信用卡业务来让自己显得更不可或缺，那他错了。事实上，这些新业务反而凸显了他那套制度的陈旧与不堪：原本就难以支撑旅行与货运业务的分支网络，如今更无法应对旅行、货运、信用卡、旅行支票、赫兹-运通合资项目以及其他零碎业务。里德也再无法亲自处理所有细枝末节的决策。其他高管们不得不开始代为决策，因为他们和里德都无暇再按过去那种冗长程序行事。里德成了自己成功的牺牲品：公司已经实质性地超出了他的掌控范围，美国运通的组织架构急需彻底改革。

Soon after Reed approved the bank, the board decided on its own to end the Reed era. Some of Reed’s friends such as General Lucius Clay tried to persuade him to step down voluntarily. But when he would not, General Clay and a few other directors formed an ad hoc nominating committee to appoint a new chief executive. Eventually, the committee met informally with Reed and told him emphatically that they wanted him to retire, and they asked him to name his own successor. Bradford, at sixty, was too old; Townsend, too brash. Reed named Clark, the man the board wanted as well. Soon after, the board went through the ritual of electing Howard Longstreth Clark, forty-four, president and chief executive.\*

就在里德批准设立银行业务不久后，董事会自行决定终结“里德时代”。一些里德的朋友，如卢修斯·克莱将军，试图劝他主动退休。但在他拒绝之后，克莱将军与几位董事成立了一个特别提名委员会，以任命新一任CEO。最终，这个委员会非正式地与里德会面，明确告诉他董事会希望他退休，并请他亲自指定继任者。布拉德福德因年届六十而被视为太老，汤森德则被认为太鲁莽。里德提名了克拉克——这正是董事会中意的人选。不久之后，董事会象征性地选举霍华德·朗斯特雷斯·克拉克（44岁）为总裁兼首席执行官。

Reed and Clarkson were named to powerless jobs as chairmen of the executive and finance committees respectively, but Reed was permitted one remaining trapping of power. The board voted him the right to visit offices of the company throughout the world as a kind of roving eye of the board. This right produced one of the more painful moments in the company’s annals.

里德和克拉克森被分别任命为执行委员会和财务委员会的主席，但这两个职位毫无实权。里德被保留的唯一一点“权力象征”是：董事会投票赋予他全球各地办事处巡视的权利，作为董事会的“流动观察者”。而正是这项权利，带来了公司历史上最令人尴尬的时刻之一。

In the spring of 1960, Reed and Clark traveled together to Europe. It was to be the swan song of the Reed Circus and the beginning of a new era. Office managers from around Europe assembled at the Ritz in Paris to say farewell to Reed. Clark made a speech, and then Reed stood up. “I want to tell you,” he said, “while the Board of Directors has made Howard president—I’m going to be there every day, looking over his shoulder. And you can be sure that I will be responsive to any problems or questions you men may have, and that I will certainly, on behalf of the Directors, be watching this young man.”

1960年春，里德与克拉克一同前往欧洲。这是“里德马戏团”的谢幕演出，也标志着新时代的开端。来自欧洲各地的办事处经理齐聚巴黎丽兹酒店为里德送行。克拉克先发表了讲话，随后里德起身说道：“我要告诉你们，虽然董事会已任命霍华德为总裁——但我每天都会盯着他。你们有任何问题或困惑，尽管找我，我一定会代表董事会密切关注这个年轻人。”

After this, the trip became a nightmare for the company and probably for Clark. The strain, according to some, was visible on his face. Reed would crook his finger at Clark and issue some kind of command—impossible to follow, impossible to ignore, impossible to contradict without making an ugly scene. In London, Reed gave another demonstration of how he saw his new role. On discovering that the London office had hired a man without his approval, Reed ordered the employee dismissed. When this news was passed on to Clark, Clark knew he had to stop Reed. Back in New York, the two men met. The exchange was brief, and Clark has always been circumspect on what was said, but when Reed left, even he seemed to appreciate that his era was over. Soon after, the board rescinded Reed’s right to travel to offices abroad in an official capacity. Reed moved down to the eleventh floor, where he recreated his old office but without the lines of men waiting to see him, without the signs of power.\*

此后，这次出访变成了公司甚至克拉克的噩梦。据说，克拉克脸上写满了压力。里德时常一抬手指就对克拉克发号施令——这些命令既无法执行，也不能忽视，更不能反驳，否则场面将极其难堪。在伦敦，里德又一次展现了他对自己新角色的理解：当得知伦敦办事处未经他批准聘用了一个新员工，他立刻下令将其解雇。消息传到克拉克耳中，他意识到必须阻止里德。回到纽约，两人进行了简短会谈。克拉克始终对谈话内容守口如瓶，但连里德自己在会后似乎也意识到他的时代已经结束。不久，董事会正式撤销了他以官方身份出访各地办事处的权利。里德搬到了公司11楼，复制了他过去的办公室——但门外已不再有排队等候的部下，权力的痕迹也随之消失。

Most of the executives around Clark resented Reed’s lack of generosity, his unwillingness to do what was right for the company. When circumstances called for magnanimity, he turned petty. Indeed, Reed’s maniacal refusal to leave office created such a lasting negative impression among young executives that the event overshadowed in their minds any of his accomplishments. Throughout the 1950s, revenues and profits climbed steadily. In 1959, revenues stood at \$69.6 million. Net income reached \$8.4 million and had risen every year since 1948, an enviable record. Assets topped \$732 million, TC sales exceeded \$1 billion every year, and the company had 383 offices around the world, more than seven times the number it had during the war years. And of course Reed made two of the most crucial decisions in the company’s history: the bank and the card.

克拉克身边的大多数高管都对里德的缺乏大度感到愤懑，他不愿做出对公司有利的决定。在需要宽宏大量的时候，他却表现得小肚鸡肠。实际上，里德对权位的狂热执念在年轻一代高管中留下了极为负面的印象，甚至掩盖了他过往的所有功绩。整个1950年代，公司营收和利润持续增长。1959年，营收达到6960万美元，净利润达到840万美元，自1948年以来年年递增，成绩斐然。公司资产突破7.32亿美元，旅行支票年销售额超过10亿美元，在全球设有383家办事处，是战时数量的七倍。而且毫无疑问，里德做出了公司历史上最关键的两个决定：涉足银行与信用卡业务。

There were negatives too, of course, and these negatives were very much tied up with Reed’s personality. The organization he insisted upon was so archaic that the company had reached the limits of its capacity to grow. But then, perhaps Ralph T. Reed was the kind of man who was likely to leave big problems behind him: he always seemed larger than life, a Grand Pooh-Bah, more controlling, more egotistical, more domineering, more softhearted than any ordinary man.

当然，问题也不少，而这些问题往往与里德的性格密切相关。他所坚持的组织体系过于陈旧，已将公司的成长空间压缩到极限。但或许，拉尔夫·T·里德就是那种注定会留下一堆“大麻烦”的人：他总是显得超凡脱俗，像个“总司令”般的存在，控制欲极强，自我意识高涨，专断霸道，却又比常人更柔软善良。