By the mid-1950s Greenspan and bond trader William Townsend opened a consulting company, Townsend-Greenspan. The company did its work discreetly, making predictions for large businesses and financial institutions.

The quiet venture was quite successful, making Greenspan a wealthy man.

In 1974, Greenspan was named by President Richard M. Nixon to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, a post he did not fill until two weeks before Nixon resigned.

While President Gerald R. Ford could have rescinded the nomination, he chose not to, and, according to the Washington Post, the two became good friends.

Ford credits Greenspan's time on the road with the band for honing his sensitivity to the sentiments of different people--an excellent talent for government.

This is a sentiment affirmed by CNN correspondent Judy Woodruff, who is a friend of Greenspan and his current wife, NBC News' chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

"Obviously he's very smart about all things economic, but beyond that he's just a very keen observer of people," Woodruff says. "He watches everything."

During the Carter administration, Greenspan returned to his private company, but the Reagan administration drew him back into the political fold, first with a post heading the president's Commission on Social Security Reform.

In 1987, Greenspan was promoted to chairman of the Federal Reserve, where he followed the general course set by his predecessors of stabilizing the economy by reducing inflation.

But there were hitches in those plans. In October 1987 the stock marketed plummeted 508 points.

Greenspan announced that the Fed was prepared to make cash available to the financial markets, and outside of that tried to maintain the status quo.

Six months later things were more or less back on a stable course and Greenspan returned his focus to decreasing inflation.

That focus involved raising interest rates in the early '90s which, in tandem with the economic tensions caused by the Persian Gulf War, sent the nation into a recession which some say cost President George Bush the 1992 election.

In contrast to the rocky relationship he apparently had with the Bush administration, Greenspan reportedly has a close working relationship with members of the Clinton administration--including strong ties to and mutual admiration of former treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen, outgoing treasury secretary Robert Rubin '60 and incoming treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who is also the former Ropes professor of political economy at Harvard.

Greenspan even sat in the president's box next to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at Clinton's first State of the Union address.