Combining the skills of an investigative reporter with the style and sensibility of a novelist, James B. Stewart examines the major events in business, law and politics that shape American society. The San Francisco Examiner called him “the journalist every journalist would like to be.”

From his Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal articles on the 1987 stock market crash and insider trading scandals to the legal maneuverings in the Clinton White House and the recent crisis in corporate ethics (Enron, WorldCom, etc.), Stewart explores the use and abuse of power and ways to raise ethical standards at the highest levels of government and finance.
 
Stewart is an editor-at-large of SmartMoney magazine and contributing editor for SmartMoney.com. His weekly column, “Common Sense,” which also runs in The Wall Street Journal, features his insights into business and investing trends as well as what he’s buying and selling in his own portfolio. A former page-one editor of The Wall Street Journal and executive editor of American Lawyer Magazine, he currently is the Bloomberg Professor of Business and Economic Journalism at Columbia University.

A contributor to The New Yorker, his penetrating profiles on influential personalities in business convey the ambition, gameplay and ethical conflicts that have come to define this era’s powerful elite, from Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski to Michael Milken.

Stewart’s latest book, DisneyWar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom, is a dramatic, behind-the-scenes account of the tumultuous tenure of Michael Eisner as Disney’s chief executive. A New York Times bestseller, it won the 2006 Loeb Award for Best Business Book and was named one of the best books of the year by Barron’s.
 

You are a gifted storyteller and had us spellbound....It was a memorable evening!

Strong Financial

He is the author of three other national bestsellers: Den of Thieves (a definitive account of Wall Street in the 1980s), Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away With Murder and Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries.

Stewart’s Heart of a Soldier: A Story of Love, Heroism and September 11, was named “Best Book about 9/11” by TIME. The book recounts the life of a Vietnam war hero and head of security for Morgan Stanley who lost his life while saving 2,700 World Trade Center employees under his watch.

Stewart’s lecture, “The Call to Duty: Leadership in Times of Crisis,” weaves together themes from Heart of a Soldier and the erosion of values that led to the post-9/11 corporate scandals. “I believe it to be no coincidence that Enron and subsequent scandals unfolded in the months after 9/11,” says Stewart. “The selfish greed of corporate America stood suddenly in stark contrast to the noble sacrifices of those confronting a direct assault on our safety and way of life.”

A Harvard-educated lawyer, Stewart is a resonant voice amid the changing landscape of corporate America and its relationship with all of us.