Financier J. Pierpont Morgan; Strategy For Success: His tough but fair approach earned him worldwide respect.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)

Publication: Investor's Business Daily

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.

Byline: SEAN HIGGINS

John Pierpont Morgan probably did as much as anyone else to create the stereotype of the American robber baron. He was a hard-driving deal maker who became wildly successful as a banker, but was never exactly known as a people person.

"I owe the public nothing," he was once quoted as saying.

Images can be deceiving. There's no record that Morgan ever actually uttered those gruff words. In truth, he was a great philanthropist and a key early supporter of institutions such as New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yet his greatest public service was undoubtedly in the world of finance. More than once, Morgan (1837-1913) was the only person standing in the way of a total collapse of the U.S. financial system. It was his steady hand that kept the nation from falling into more than one depression, wrote Charles A. Morris in "The Tycoons."

"In two perilous instances of American institutional failure - the gold panic of 1893-95 and the stock market panic of 1907 - he was able to assume the role we currently expect of...

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