John Whitehead, former leader of Goldman Sachs, dies at 92

By Doina Chiacu
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - John Whitehead, a
former senior partner and co-chairman of
Goldman Sachs who helped make it a top-tier
Wall Street firm and led its international
expansion, has died, the investment bank said
on Saturday. He was 92.
Whitehead joined Goldman Sachs in 1947 and
worked his way to the highest rung of its
corporate ladder before leaving after 38 years to
become a deputy secretary of state under U.S.
President Ronald Reagan.
He was a chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York and a member of the board of the
New York Stock Exchange. Active in political and
philanthropic circles, he also served as chairman
of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp after
the World Trade Center was destroyed during
the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
"We grieve the loss of John Whitehead and
honor his achievements and contributions in
service to his country and Goldman Sachs,"
Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein said in
a statement.
"He was a man of enormous grace and integrity
and his legacy will endure in the institutions he
led and in the lives of those he cared for and
mentored."
Whitehead joined Goldman with a starting salary
of $3,600 a year when it had fewer than 300
employees and its service offerings were almost
exclusively in commercial paper. The firm today
has 34,000 workers and $869 billion in assets.
Over time he identified new business lines
including such things as mergers and
acquisitions and initial public offerings, according
to a biographical account provided to Harvard
Business School.
"I remember assigning one young fellow, who
later became an important partner, to keep
records about companies that might want to
merge with a larger company or might be
interested in acquisitions," he said.
"And then we tried to match them up. We were
doing this before anybody thought that there
might be business for investment bankers in the
merger field."
Goldman pioneered two other innovation in
investment banking: the idea of soliciting
business and the handling of public offerings,
Whitehead said in the Harvard biography.
He was born in Evanston, Illinois on April 2,
1922 and grew up in Montclair, New Jersey,
during the Great Depression, when he
remembered "scrimping and saving" and eating
a lot of macaroni and cheese, fish cakes, but
not much meat, he said in the Harvard account.
He attended Haverford College outside
Philadelphia and served in the U.S. Navy during
World War Two before going to business school.
(Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Frances
Kerry)