Richard D. Parsons, one of the leading corporate executives and crisis managers of his generation, who as chairman of Time Warner and Citigroup became a steadying pilot for media and financial institutions in moments of boardroom and market turbulence, died Dec. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.
His wife, Laura Parsons, confirmed the death and said the exact cause was not yet known. Parsons had multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer.
Parsons charted an impressive trajectory from his middle-class childhood in Queens to the top of his law school class in Albany, New York, to his place as one of the few African Americans in the highest echelons of U.S. business.
“He is someone who can see the big picture of any situation yet grasp the fine point of the details,” R. William Murray, then-chairman of the Philip Morris Cos., once said of Parsons, who served on the food and tobacco conglomerate’s board.
A charismatic personality with a talent for attracting powerful patrons, he became a legal assistant and protégé of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the moderate Republican New York governor who saw in the ambitious young man a future in the governor’s mansion. “I’ve always been in a hurry,” Parsons once told The New York Times of his career plans. “I’ve just never been certain exactly where I’m heading to.”
When Rockefeller became Gerald Ford’s vice president, he took Parsons with him to Washington. Parsons served as a senior aide and domestic policy adviser in the Ford administration, then became a litigator and later managing partner at the politically connected New York firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler after Ford lost the 1976 election.
As a 29-year-old Black lawyer working with upper-crust, mainly white clients, he later told The New York Times, he was initially treated as a curiosity or overlooked entirely. He once went to a meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on behalf of Rockefeller and sat with museum lawyers, waiting for them to call the session to order.
“I hate to tell you this,” Parsons told them when they remarked that they were still expecting the governor’s counsel, “but I’m already here.”
His entrée into the corporate world came through a client, Dime Savings Bank of New York. Chief executive Harry W. Albright Jr., a onetime Rockefeller associate, helped bring Parsons aboard as an outside counsel.
“Law has become less significant as an instrument for change,” Parsons told the Times, noting that the legal profession had grown increasingly specialized. “It’s not the big game any more. Financial guys are leading the parade now.”
Parsons was named president of the venerable institution in 1988 as it was battered by the failing New York real estate market and, shortly after, a national recession. It had suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses attributed to massive mortgage lending at the peak of the market. Parsons kept regulators at bay while minimizing losses by selling branches and cutting staff, among other measures.
As he rose to become chairman and chief executive, he emerged as a stabilizing influence, calming the board, his workforce and Wall Street. In 1994, he helped orchestrate the bank’s merger with Anchor Savings Bank, which produced the country’s fourth-largest thrift institution.
The merger made Parsons one of the most visible Black executives in the nation. He was invited to serve on Time Warner’s board in 1991 on the recommendation of Laurance Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller’s brother, and was tapped as its president in 1994. He later became the media giant’s chairman and chief executive, often helping to cool crises others had heated up.
“Dick Parsons was the ultimate calmer of the waters,” said Charles M. Elson, founding director of the University of Delaware’s center for corporate governance. “Almost every situation he has been in has been difficult when he got there. And he has left it better.”
Time Warner, TBS, AOL
Parsons oversaw Time Warner’s transition from an embattled collection of print, video and audio content assets to a global media conglomerate.
He negotiated the nearly $7.5 billion purchase of Turner Broadcasting System in 1996 to beef up Time Warner’s television operations. His move thrust Time Warner into the entertainment space with properties such as Cartoon Network and the burgeoning realm of cable news with the acquisition of CNN.
Parsons was often called in to make peace among the company’s high-maintenance personalities, including Ted Turner, the Turner Broadcasting visionary, and Gerald M. Levin, Parsons’s predecessor and onetime boss. Both soon left amid squabbling over blame for Time Warner’s much-hyped merger plans in 2000 with the online service provider America Online. (Levin died in March.)
AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion and created the world’s largest media company. Parsons had voted for the merger, which occurred at the apex of the internet bubble of vastly overpriced dot-com businesses and had disastrous consequences.
The fallout consumed Parsons over the next several years, as the two corporate cultures clashed, the combined firm lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and AOL became embroiled in scandal after federal regulators accused it of accounting improprieties.
Outmaneuvering AOL chief and co-founder Steve Case for the chairmanship of the new company, Parsons then began leading it on the turnaround. To help pay down the company’s sky-high debt, he abandoned its long tradition of music, selling Warner Music in 2004. He also finessed the relationship with regulators, reaching financial settlements of hundreds of millions of dollars with the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Parsons left his job as chief executive in 2008 — opting, at 59, to turn the keys over to deputy Jeff Bewkes — with his mission partly filled: Time Warner was on far more solid financial footing. But most Wall Street analysts considered its stock price depressed.
He continued to navigate rough seas during his stint at Citigroup, where he was appointed chairman in 2009 amid the global financial crisis.
Over the years, Parsons was lauded for his level head and cool hand in a tough job, earning him sobriquets such as Ambassador in Chief and Captain Emergency from the media. He had a low-key demeanor and was prone to affably addressing other powerful male executives as “bro.”
Citigroup had received as much as $45 billion in bailouts after losing billions of dollars in the subprime mortgage crisis. Regulators had a tight hold on the company, and investors lost faith in it. Parsons, who joined the board in 1996, was seen as part of the leadership that led to the crisis.
But as chairman he was credited with bringing fiscal responsibility back to the financial giant, with the bailout repaid in full by the time he left the job a little more than three years later.
“Parsons can walk out knowing he was part of the problem but he was also part of the solution,” David Knutson, a credit analyst with Legal & General Investment Management, told Bloomberg News in 2012.
A formidable ambition
Richard Dean Parsons was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on April 4, 1948, and grew up in the neighboring borough of Queens.
His father was an electronics technician for the Sperry Rand company, and his mother was a homemaker. His maternal grandfather had been head groundskeeper of the Rockefeller estate in nearby Westchester County, and Parsons in midlife made his home on the property at the invitation of the family.
Amid the Civil Rights Movement and Black pride era, his father raised him to focus on personal success instead of race, Parsons told the Times. The slogan “I’m Black and I’m proud” had little resonance for his father, he said.
“If you’re going to take pride in anything, take pride in something you’ve accomplished. Don’t take pride in an accident of birth,” he recalled his father saying.
“For a lot of people, race is a defining issue,” Parsons continued. “It just isn’t for me.” He added, “It is like air. It’s like height. I have other things that I’m focused on.”
With strong marks, he skipped two grades and finished high school at 16. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii to see a world very different from his native New York. As a 6-foot-4 basketball standout and active participant in fraternity life, Parsons described a life that often involved parties. He credited his then-girlfriend and later his wife, Laura Bush, with helping him gain his focus and also persuading him to pursue the law.
He graduated from Hawaii in 1968 and was first in his class when he received a degree from Union University’s Albany Law School three years later. He began working in the governor’s office in 1971 as assistant counsel and felt a political kinship with Rockefeller.
Parsons’s political background and reputation as a unifier led to service on various presidential task forces.
He also was hired as interim chief executive of the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 after owner Donald Sterling was heard making racist comments on an audio recording, prompting a shake-up in the team’s management and the $2 billion sale of the Clippers to former Microsoft chief executive Steven A. Ballmer.
In September 2018, Parsons joined the board of CBS Corp. as interim chairman after the departure of Leslie Moonves, the company’s chief executive and chairman who had been accused of sexual misconduct. But Parsons stepped down a month later, citing health concerns.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1968, survivors include their three children, Gregory, Leslie and Rebecca; a daughter, Ella, from a relationship with model-philanthropist MacDella Cooper; two sisters; and two grandchildren.
Parsons sat on charity committees and held a wide spectrum of board memberships, from Estée Lauder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was chairman at Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater.
Brian Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, said he witnessed Parsons’s down-to-earth qualities as the two were negotiating a swap involving their cable-operator businesses in the early 2000s.
The deal, which had already been announced, involved tens of millions of dollars and was suddenly about to be derailed by regulators’ inquiries into AOL’s accounting practices. With only hours remaining to finalize an agreement, Parsons and Roberts waited anxiously to see what regulators — and the market — would say.
“On my way to a meeting, I heard AOL had certified” the accounting, Roberts recounted to The Washington Post. “So I stopped at a pay phone to call him up. I said, ‘Congratulations, I guess we have a deal.’
“And he said, ‘Hold on, let me turn on the screen to see what the market says.’ So he turns on the TV, and I hear him say, ‘Son of a gun, we’re up a buck.’ Then he turns back to me and says, ‘We have a deal, bro.’”
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