Parsons, Go-To Leader Who Rescued Troubled Companies, Dies at Age 76

Richard "Dick" Parsons, the affable troubleshooter who helped some of the most beleaguered U.S. companies navigate the 1980s and 1990s savings-and-loan meltdown, the dotcom bust and the 2008 financial crisis, died at age 76.

- BENJAMIN MULLIN

"Dick Parsons resides comfortably on the Mount Rushmore of financial and philanthropic leaders. There is no one comparable," said Ray McGuire, president of Lazard. Parsons died at his Manhattan home.

With his preternatural calm, gregarious charm and keen instincts for corporate politics, Parsons ascended rapidly through the ranks of U.S. corporations, ultimately serving as chairman of Citigroup and chief executive of Time Warner, interim chairman of CBS and interim chief executive of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. He was a board member at Estée Lauder for some 25 years until stepping down this month because of his health. Add it all up, and Parsons was one of the most powerful Black business executives in U.S. history.

Along the way, he clashed with business titans, including billionaire financier Carl Icahn, served in the White House under President Gerald Ford and tried to salvage the biggest merger in corporate history: the ill-fated $156 billion combination of AOL and Time Warner that he initially blessed, a deal that marked the peak of the dot-com bubble.

Born Richard Dean Parsons in Brooklyn on April 4, 1948, Parsons grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. The son of an electrical technician and a homemaker, he was one of five children and attended public schools in New York. By his own admission, his grades were "fair to partly cloudy." He skipped kindergarten and eighth grade, landing him on the wait list for Princeton University. When asked to list his top three university picks, a college-bound Parsons couldn't think of a third, so he scribbled down University of Hawaii-because an attractive high-school classmate of his was from that state. He ended up attending that university at age 16.