The Unwinding

Jeff Connaughton began a decades-long affiliation with Senator Joe Biden in 1979 when, as a student at the University of Alabama, he invited the Senator to speak to a campus group. Connaughton was so impressed by Biden that he committed to working for Biden if the Senator ever ran for President. After earning an M.B.A. degree and working for a few years in the financial industry, Connaughton joined Biden's 1988 presidential campaign as a fundraiser. After the campaign imploded, Connaughton found a job on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He later worked for Abner Mikva in the White House Counsel's office during the Clinton administration. Although Connaughton was identified in Washington as a "Biden guy" he was deeply disappointed with what he perceived as ingratitude by Biden – for instance, the Senator refused to call Mikva to recommend Connaughton. Still, after leaving the White House, Connaughton parlayed his connections into a career as a lobbyist for the firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, representing clients such as Laurent Gbagbo, the President of the Ivory Coast. Connaughton held frequent fundraisers for politicians in order to gain access to their offices.

When Biden became Vice President and Ted Kaufman, Biden's former Chief of Staff was appointed to fill Biden's Senate seat, Connaughton went to work for Kaufman. Together, Kaufman and Connaughton worked on reform of the financial services industry in the wake of the Great Recession. They encouraged criminal prosecution of financial fraud cases as well as limits to the size of banks, but met with limited success. Connaughton found that the lobbyists he used to work with had better information and more input on financial reform regulation than he had as a Senate aide. Connaughton believed that advocates for U.S. financial system reform, such as the group Americans for Financial Reform, were being overwhelmed by industry lobbyists. After Kaufman's term ended, Connaughton, disillusioned with Obama/Biden and Washington, moved to Savannah, Georgia and published a memoir of his experiences, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins.

A version of this section of The Unwinding was published in The New Yorker, where Packer is a staff writer.[7]

Dean Price came from a family of tobacco farmers in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina. A devotee of the self-help books of Napoleon Hill, Price opened a number of fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations along U.S. Route 220. Price witnessed the decline in the 1990s of all three of the region's important industries: tobacco, textiles and furniture. After Hurricane Katrina led to diesel shortages, Price became enamored with the idea of biodiesel. He believed that biodiesel, made from locally-grown crops, could help struggling local farmers while also avoiding what he believed would be the catastrophic consequences of peak oil. With partners, Price founded a business that would refine locally-grown canola into biodiesel, which was then sold at Price's gas stations. This was the first establishment of its kind in the country and it attracted the attention of the local Congressman, Tom Perriello and the Obama Administration. However, Price's restaurants and gas stations failed amidst the Great Recession and Price lost control of the biodiesel company. After these failures, Price began a new venture: using used cooking oil from restaurants to provide fuel for local school buses.

Tammy Thomas is an African American woman from Youngstown, Ohio. The child of a heroin addict, she was raised by her great-grandmother, a maid. Thomas witnessed the dramatic consequences of the collapse of Youngstown's steel industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The city's population declined from 140,000 in 1970 to 95,000 in 1990[8] (it was about 67,000 in 2010) and crime increased precipitously. Despite becoming a mother as a teenager, Thomas was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. Determined not to become dependent on welfare, in 1988 she got a union job at a Packard Electric plant that made automotive parts for General Motors. The job enabled Thomas to become a homeowner and send her three children to college. In 2006 Packard Electric's successor company, Delphi Automotive, announced that it would close most of its American plants, including those in Youngstown, as it shifted production to Mexican maquiladoras. Thomas took a buyout offer from Delphi. Thomas found a new job as a community organizer in Youngstown, recruiting local residents to advocate for neighborhood improvement and mapping the city's many abandoned properties.

In addition to the longer portraits of ordinary Americans, The Unwinding also includes shorter biographical sketches of the following influential figures:

• Newt Gingrich
• Oprah Winfrey
• Raymond Carver
• Sam Walton
• Colin Powell
• Alice Waters
• Robert Rubin
• Jay-Z
• Andrew Breitbart
• Peter Thiel
• Elizabeth Warren