If Thomas Friedman’s columns for the New York Times sound a tad glum lately, there’s a reason: Besides the world economic meltdown and his employer’s accumulating red ink, his wife’s fortune has all but evaporated.
When Friedman wed Ann Bucksbaum in 1978, he married into one of America’s richest families. The Bucksbaums had turned a family grocery business in Marshalltown, Iowa, into a retail shopping powerhouse - the nation’s second largest shopping mall company.
Ann Friedman’s family still holds about a 25-percent stake in General Growth Properties, which includes Water Tower Place in Chicago, the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu and the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian in Las Vegas. But with $25 billion in debt, largely in short-term mortgages due by next year, the company filed for protection from creditors April 16.
Thomas Friedman
The filing marked the largest real estate bankruptcy in U.S. history.
Of course, Tom Friedman hasn’t exactly lived a life of leisure, mooching off his wife’s money - although the couple did build what a July 2006 Washingtonian described as “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house” in Bethesda, MD, then valued at $9.3 million.
Besides his work for the Times which has won three Pulitzer Prizes (two for international reporting and the third for commentary), Friedman has authored five best-selling books - the most recent called Hot, Flat, and Crowded.
His wife’s wealth aside, Washingtonian’s profile estimated that between Friedman’s salary, syndication rights, and royalties from his books, his annual income easily reached seven figures. And that didn’t count speaking fees which reportedly topped $50,000 a pop.
Friends say Friedman has never been motivated by money - for him, the work is about engagement and about ideas. And he’s certainly gotten plenty of affirmation for those. Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins once said that traveling with Friedman in the Middle East was like going to the mall with Britney Spears.
Still, some readers sense a growing dark side to his writing, especially in a chapter in his latest book entitled Subprime Nation.
“In some ways, the subprime mortgage mess and housing crisis are metaphors for what has come over America in recent years: A certain connection between hard work, achievement, and accountability has been broken. We’ve become a subprime nation that thinks it can just borrow its way to prosperity…”
Ann Friedman, for her part, has maintained a low profile, supplying the yin to her husband’s yang, despite her family’s wealth which had been estimated at $4.1 billion in 2007.
In addition to devoting herself to raising the couple’s two daughters and teaching elementary-school reading and writing in the Montgomery County public schools, she is active in several philanthropies focused on education and the arts.
She is vice chair of the SEED Foundation, a national nonprofit and the parent of the SEED Public Charter School in southeast D.C., the nation’s first inner-city, college-prep, boarding school. Ninety-eight percent of SEED graduates have been accepted to college.
She is also a member of the executive committee of the National Symphony Orchestra, a director of WETA, the flagship public broadcasting station of Washington, where she helped fund a website promoting adolescent literacy, and a board member of DC-based Conservation International.
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