William Harrison of JP Morgan Chase — succumbed to the pressure of newspaper headlines and abandoned Mr. Grasso.
Not only did Mr. Grasso start America's economic recovery immediately after September 11, he also saved the NYSE from a late-1990s assault by the Nasdaq. At the time, the technology stock market threatened to induce numerous Big Board companies to switch their listings, and at one point cautioned it might even take over the NYSE. But it was the diminutive son of Italian immigrants who defended NYSE floor brokers and retail investors from a new era of impersonal electronic trading. Some thanks he got: Many of these same floor brokers helped push Mr. Grasso over the edge.
 Let's be very clear about this: Mr. Grasso has done nothing wrong. Nothing, that is, except believe his own board when they offered him a large pay package for his long-term service.
    Mr. Grasso did not fraudulently cook the books, steal from the corporate cookie jar, lie to federal prosecutors, or engage in insider trading. He is no Worldcom Bernie Evers, Enron Kenneth Lay, or Tyco Dennis Kozlowski. In fact, a Grasso-led decision to embark on full compensation disclosure as a way of hastening corporate-governance reform put him in this pickle in the first place.
    The announcement of a one-time payment of $140 million probably did in the former CEO. A longer-term smoothing out of his pay plan would have avoided the media killing field. But it was seldom reported that the payment covered 35 years of service, including pension, savings and other deferred incentives. Discounted properly, this sum comes to roughly $2 million a year over the entire three-decade period Mr. Grasso served — a modest amount by Wall Street standards.
The talented Mr. Grasso could have been lured away as CEO of another company. That's precisely why the NYSE board re-upped his pay package beginning in 1995 and extended his tenure through 2007. They were rewarding success and loyalty.
 In recent years, techie CEOs like Lawrence Ellison of Oracle, John Chambers of Cisco, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, and Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm received billions of dollars in stock-option-based pay packages.
    Mr. Grasso could have signed on with any of these companies, but he chose to stay with his long-time employer. For that, he was devoured by a wolf pack of anti-market journalists.
    No one really knows what pay is proper for successful management skills. But the example of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange — where $1.5 billion in daily trading of interest-rate, currency, and stock market futures is directly comparable to the NYSE — shows Mr. Grasso's pay was in the right ballpark.
 

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