To Goldman, With Love: Lloyd Blankfein’s Life on Wall Street

One by one, the mighty of Wall Street were falling.

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch – where the panic would end, no one could say.

Inside 85 Broad Street, headquarters of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., an urgent call came for Lloyd Blankfein. Is Goldman in trouble too? The legendary dealmaker Bruce Wasserstein asked him. Do you need help?

Blankfein’s cool response on that September day in 2008: We’re good. We’ve got this.

Lloyd Blankfein leaves the US Treasury building in Washington, DC, in 2008.

Photographer: Ken Cedeno/Bloomberg

“It was like an undertaker calling at your sick bed,” Blankfein, who ran Goldman for a dozen years, recalls in his new memoir, ...