The Man Who Sold America

Introduction

THE COLLIER’S REPORTER who interviewed Albert Lasker in Washington in February 1923 was struck by his subject’s rapid-fire delivery and elusive logic.

Lasker’s brain was a “furious express train,” which seemed to run along six or seven tracks simultaneously. The train raced ahead “with every chance that when it reaches the terminal station it will go straight through the back wall.”¹

For Lasker—a forty-three-year-old advertising executive from Chicago who had temporarily transformed himself into a Washington bureaucrat—this was nothing ...