Former civil rights leader Andrew Young talked about the man who anonymously donated $50,000 for rebuilding every time bigots burned down a southern church.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney talked about the man’s modesty in light of his global business triumphs.
Superconnected Washington lawyer Robert Strauss, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told how the man paid $1 million from his own pocket for a program to teach U.S.-style banking to Russian students.
So who is this man with the heart of Martin Luther King Jr., the stature of Ronald Reagan and the pro-Russian leanings of Armand Hammer? None other than Dwayne O. Andreas, who stepped aside Monday as the chairman of Decatur-based grain giant Archer Daniels Midland.
For three hours they carried on at Monday’s ADM board meeting, the last one Andreas chaired. The ADM board worked overtime honoring its 80-year-old leader.
Others know a different Andreas than the one discussed at the ADM board meeting. There’s the Andreas who looked the other way as his son, Michael D. Andreas, conducted a global price-fixing scheme for the feed additive lysine.
There’s the political heavyweight who contributed about $2 million per election cycle to help grease the way toward more than $3.5 billion in subsidies for ADM’s ethanol fuel additive–a bargain in anyone’s book.
And then there’s the Andreas who scored a strange, dubious bipartisan daily double: He was investigated for both a $100,000 contribution to Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign and a $25,000 cash donation to President Nixon’s 1972 re-election effort.
Just who is the real Andreas, anyway?
Andreas is a complex man for a complex age, perhaps a perfect archetype for our era. His retirement marks the end of an age of corporate bossism as surely as the death of Mayor Richard J. Daley marked the end of the big-city boss.
When Michael Andreas lost the inside track for his dad’s job thanks to the price-fixing conviction, Dwayne Andreas kept ADM all in the family by picking a nephew, G. Allen Andreas, for the job. The nephew inherits the tough task of finding a new vision for ADM and halting the steady decline in the company’s financial outlook.
I have two memories that for me will always sum up Dwayne Andreas. As I covered the business impact of the Soviet Union’s demise in the late 1980s, I spoke frequently with Andreas. He had an amazing instinct for the course of events and detailed knowledge of all the players. It was from him that I first heard names like Boris Yeltsin and Viktor Chernomyrdin. That was the Andreas whose mind and enterprise spanned the globe.
Then there was the last time I saw Andreas. He was listening to closing arguments in his son’s price-fixing trial. His thin hair tinted a youthful red, a perpetual Florida tan on his grim face, wearing a high-tech hearing aid as he listened to the lawyers.
His friends would rather not consider the courtroom scene as Andreas’ last public act.
“It’s been a terribly difficult time for him,” says Strauss, who speaks with Andreas at least twice a week. “But you can’t taint a life that’s been lived like his.”
Strauss would prefer to recall the son of Mennonite Midwestern farmers, the dropout of Wheaton College who took over a struggling grain processor and turned it into a global colossus. He would like to remember the man who counseled heads of state and played in golf foursomes with former House Speaker Tip O’Neill.
No one would want to erase Andreas’ life. The good parts are too inspiring to dismiss him so lightly. But the taint won’t wash out. Even rose-colored glasses can’t make it go away.
