Former American International Group spokesman Nicholas Ashooh said it would have been a “clear mistake” to let the insurance giant fail, despite the massive public backlash that followed the company’s government bailout.

Ashooh, a 1976 Marquette alumnus, addressed students, faculty and alumni in the Alumni Memorial Union ballrooms Tuesday morning.

He was the company’s senior vice president for corporate communications from September 2006 until January 2010, a period during which AIG received a total of $182 billion in government funds.

Ashooh tried to demonstrate the impact of AIG on people’s lives, recalling the time when he started working there.

“To put it in perspective, you could wake up in September of ’06 in your AIG-insured home to your alarm clock, drive to work in your AIG-insured car, work at your AIG-insured business, plan a vacation, and insure that vacation with an AIG policy. And then you could fly on a plane owned and insured by AIG to a port operated by an AIG joint venture, sail on a cruise ship probably insured by AIG through the Panama Canal, which is insured by AIG,” Ashooh said.

He said a potential failure of AIG would have been “catastrophic,” and credit around the world would have dried up.

“The U.S. government recognized that the failure posed a global risk of extraordinary proportions,” he said.

But while this crisis has seemingly been avoided, Ashooh acknowledged that the bailout of AIG may have forever changed the way Americans view Wall Street and big businesses.

Ashooh said his office at 72 Wall Street became a “tourist attraction.”

“We never could have predicted the scale and level of anger,” he said. “Mobs would be standing outside the door. … Michael Moore was there one day.”

The company came under fire in March 2009 when it awarded $165 million in bonuses to employees in the Financial Products unit — the part of the company that was losing money.

“At the time, this was portrayed as ‘big bonuses to the people who caused the trouble,’ but really these were the people solving the problem,” he said.

AIG was contractually required to make these retention payments or it would have risked having to pay them double — something the company would not have been able to explain to the public, he said.

“It got to the point where we had to send out a memo urging employees not to go out in public with AIG stuff on,” he said. “Elected officials and the media were decrying the bonuses.”

Coupled with internal issues, Ashooh received threatening calls in the months that followed. He described the time as very difficult personally, saying that for weeks it felt like he “lived on Advil and Diet Coke.”

While Ashooh said he thinks the long term implications of the bailout are difficult to predict, he is confident AIG has done a “remarkable” job and is healthy today.

AIG will report its fourth quarter and full 2009 results before the stock market opens this Friday, an indicator of progress the company has made since the bailout, according to a press release the company issued Tuesday.

Mark Herr, a spokesman for AIG, refused to comment on Ashooh’s speech or the upcoming numbers.

Ashooh said he learned through the crisis that one must remain “calm, patient, and good humored” in business. Internally, he thinks he was prepared for the situation, partly because of the “moral and ethical grounding” he learned at Marquette.

Craig Meyer, a part-time graduate student working on his M.B.A., said he was particularly impressed by Ashooh’s emphasis on ethics.

“It’s great the way he is sticking to his roots,” Meyer said.