Richard Parsons, Serial Fixer of Media and Finance Giants, Dies at 76 - The New York Times
Length: • 8 mins
Annotated by John Borthwick
Mr. Parsons’s lengthy résumé is a catalog of corporate emergencies at Time Warner, Citigroup and the Los Angeles Clippers.
Richard D. Parsons, whose humane approach to business made him a serial troubleshooter at distressed companies such as Time Warner, CBS and Citigroup and a sought-after adviser at the highest echelons of American industry, died on Thursday at his Manhattan home. He was 76.
The cause was cancer, said Ronald S. Lauder, a member of the Estée Lauder board and one of Mr. Parsons’s oldest friends.
Mr. Parsons’s winding career tracked the biggest companies in American media and finance — and the biggest problems. Time and again, he stepped in when things looked catastrophic and put his smooth leadership style to work, disentangling Gordian knots and assuaging discontented shareholders.
Mr. Parsons, a jazz-loving oenophile who served on the board of the Apollo Theater and owned a Tuscan winery, rose to the top of the business world in an era when he was frequently the only Black executive in the boardroom. A self-described “Rockefeller Republican,” Mr. Parsons spoke out on social justice issues in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, signed a letter protesting a 2021 law that imposed restrictions on Georgia voters and co-founded the Equity Alliance, a fund that backs early-stage ventures led by women and people of color.
Mr. Parsons’s lengthy résumé is a catalog of corporate emergencies: He stanched losses at Dime Bancorp during the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s; cleaned up the disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner after the dot-com bust at the turn of the century; stepped in at Citigroup as the banking colossus teetered after the 2007-8 financial crisis; served as CBS’s board chairman after its disgraced chief executive, Leslie Moonves, went to war with its controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone; and came out of semiretirement to steady the Los Angeles Clippers after their owner at the time, Donald Sterling, made racist remarks.
Throughout it all, Mr. Parsons deployed his easy manner and extensive Rolodex — he was an aide to Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former vice president and New York governor — to lead, charm and cajole his way out of tight corporate corners. In 2007, as Time Warner was crawling back from the brink of disaster, Mr. Parsons summed up his career during a steakhouse interview with The New York Times before ordering a second bottle of wine.
“I want my legacy to be simple: I left the place in good shape and in good hands,” he said.
His survivors include his wife, Laura (Bush), and their three children, Gregory, Leslie and Rebecca.
Richard Dean Parsons was born on April 4, 1948, in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of five children of Lorenzo, an electrical technician, and Isabelle. A huge fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mr. Parsons soon moved reluctantly with his family to the Ozone Park neighborhood in Queens, where he was a precocious but somewhat indifferent student. An astronomy and physics enthusiast, he nearly blew up a friend’s house trying to make rocket fuel on the stove. He skipped two grades and graduated from high school at 16 before enrolling at the University of Hawaii on a whim.
“I put down University of Hawaii, not actually really knowing if there was one,” Mr. Parsons said in a 2008 interview with the Brooklyn Historical Society. “I just assumed there was. I had sat next to this girl in physics class who was from Hawaii who was just gorgeous.”
Mr. Parsons was somewhat unprepared for college life when he arrived in Hawaii — he hadn’t made any lodging plans — but things fell into place quickly. After going broke within weeks, he learned to manage his money, settled on a major (history) and joined a fraternity.
Later in life, he would recall a conversation with one of his white fraternity brothers, who told Mr. Parsons that although he hadn’t had any Black friends growing up outside Detroit, he was able to bond with Mr. Parsons “because you’re different.”
“On reflection, I’ve thought, different than what, or different than whom?” Mr. Parsons said in an interview with Citigroup in 2021. “Was I different than his other Black friends? No, because he didn’t have any other Black friends. In fact, I was different from an image he had in his head of what Black people were supposed to be like.”
Mr. Parsons met Ms. Bush during his sophomore year at the university. She had come to his rescue during an English class for which he hadn’t done the reading. She eventually let him see the paper she was working on, Mr. Parsons said in a 2008 interview with PBS. They were soon married.
Laura Parsons helped focus her husband. She dragged him out of bed the morning he was supposed to take his law school admission exams and guided him toward Albany Law School. He was admitted despite being several credits short of his undergraduate degree, and finished at the top of his class.
When he landed a job on Governor Rockefeller’s staff, it was a full-circle moment for the Parsons clan: Decades earlier, his grandfather had worked as the head groundskeeper at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Mr. Parsons would go on to serve as the chair of the Rockefeller Foundation’s board of trustees.
When Mr. Rockefeller became vice president under President Gerald R. Ford, Mr. Parsons decamped to Washington, serving on Mr. Rockefeller’s legal team and on Mr. Ford’s Domestic Council. After his stint in the White House, Mr. Parsons moved back to New York and joined a prestigious law firm, Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler.
His first corporate fixer-upper was on the horizon. He left Patterson Belknap in 1988, becoming president and eventually chief executive of Dime. The bank was in trouble: Bad loans would leave the lender with a $92.3 million loss in 1989, and investors had driven the company’s stock down precipitously.
He initially faced some skepticism at home about taking on the challenge.
“Both of my daughters dropped their silverware, literally,” Mr. Parsons recalled in the PBS interview. “The oldest one whipped around and looked at her mother and said, ‘Has he talked to you about this?’ Then she looked back at me and said, ‘What do you know about running a bank?’”
They needn’t have worried. Mr. Parsons helped turn Dime around, putting in place a plan to clean up bad loans, cut costs and sell new services to the bank’s customers. He announced his departure from Dime in 1994 after helping shepherd a merger with Anchor Savings Bank.
But it was at his next company, Time Warner, where Mr. Parsons had a front-row seat to one of the biggest corporate catastrophes in business history. In 2000, several years after he joined as president, Time Warner agreed to be acquired by AOL for $165 billion, a deal that aimed to fuse traditional media with the rising power of internet connectivity.
“Fundamentally, I thought it was a good idea,” Mr. Parsons later told The Times.
It wasn’t. Time Warner’s old-line media culture clashed with AOL’s freewheeling milieu like orange juice and toothpaste, and it emerged that the internet giant was improperly inflating its advertising revenue. Ted Turner, the cable pioneer who estimated that he personally lost $8 billion on the deal, told The Times in 2010 that it should “pass into history like the Vietnam War and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”
When Time Warner’s chief executive Gerald M. Levin retired in 2002, Mr. Parsons was left to pick up the pieces. The stock had cratered, erasing billions of dollars in shareholder value. Mr. Parsons sold the Warner Music division, eased out AOL’s founder, Steve Case, and defused squabbling among Time Warner’s divisions. Having prevented the company from imploding or being sold for parts, he handed the reins to Jeffrey Bewkes at the end of 2007.
Mr. Parsons didn’t waste time finding his next rehabilitation case, becoming chairman of Citigroup in the aftermath of the financial crisis. At Citi, which had received two government bailouts, he shuttled between New York and Washington to rebuild relations between the bank and regulators. Though he helped Citigroup bounce back, some critics said he hadn’t done enough as a long-serving board member to intervene before things went sideways.
After he stepped down from Citigroup in 2012, Mr. Parsons kept busy. He had previously joined Providence Equity Partners, a large private-equity firm with ties to the media business, as an adviser. And in 2014, as the National Basketball Association was reeling from racist remarks by Mr. Sterling, Commissioner Adam Silver tapped Mr. Parsons to be interim chief executive of the Clippers.
Mr. Parsons provided a credible presence at the top of the organization after Mr. Sterling was barred from the league for life and fined $2.5 million. The Clippers were sold to Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief executive, for $2 billion, and Mr. Parsons managed the transition.
By then, his reputation as a corporate fixer was well established. A 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek profile called him “Captain Emergency”; it said he was “a master in the art of the relationship,” referring to “the pat on the back, the well-told joke, the gossipy anecdote.”
In September 2018, Mr. Parsons was named chairman of the board of CBS after Mr. Moonves exited the company amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Mr. Parsons stepped down about a month later, citing health concerns: he had developed a form of cancer known as multiple myeloma. Still, he had helped navigate the aftermath of Mr. Moonves’s departure, the appointment of his replacement and the selection of several new board directors.
Though he was done leading major companies, Mr. Parsons didn’t sit still. In 2021, he teamed up with Kenneth Lerer, a veteran investor who had also been an executive at Time Warner, and Mr. Lauder to launch the Equity Alliance, a fund that backs ventures by women and people of color. In early 2023, Mr. Parsons told The Wall Street Journal that the fund was expecting close to a 300 percent return.
In the 2008 PBS interview, shortly after he stepped down at Time Warner, Mr. Parsons was asked by the journalist Soledad O’Brien to reflect on his career. “If you’re given three lines for people to say, ‘This is who he was,’ what’s in those three lines?” she asked.
Mr. Parsons thought for a moment, then responded: “Good husband, good father, good grandfather. My grandmother used to say the essence of a good man was humility and grace. I’ll go with that."