The chief executive of the insurance giant, which had started as a Shanghai-based underwriting agency before being kicked out by the communist regime, had a simple message to convey. “Nixon has opened up China,” Mr Shelp recalls him as saying. “I wanna go back, Ron, I wanna go back first.”

Throughout more than three decades at the top of AIG, Mr Greenberg, a D-Day and Korean war veteran, showed an uncompromising desire to be first. At its apogee, AIG had nearly $1,000bn in assets, made $14bn in annual net profits and employed 106,000 people in 130 countries.

Today, three years after Mr Greenberg – now 83 and still AIG's largest shareholder – left under pressure from regulators, his edifice totters. The combination of an epochal financial crisis, outsized bets on exotic securities, inadequate internal controls and poor regulatory supervision forced AIG last month to accept an $85bn loan from the Federal Reserve that places it in government hands.