Richard D. Parsons, a University of Hawaii alumnus who would become well known on Wall Street for leading major U.S. corporations, including Time Warner and Citigroup, through troubled times, died Thursday at his New York City home. He was 76.
The New York Times reported that the cause of death was cancer, citing Ronald Lauder, a longtime friend of Parsons and chairman of the board of Estee Lauder. Parsons also had served on the Estee Lauder board and on the board of asset management firm Lazard.
He “was more than an iconic leader in Lazard’s history — he was a testament to how wisdom, warmth, and unwavering judgment could shape not just companies, but people’s lives,” Lazard said in a statement on its website.
“When Citigroup faced its darkest hour during the financial crisis, he stepped forward as Chairman despite the immense challenges ahead, saying simply, ‘You can’t abandon your troops when the going gets tough,’” the Lazard statement said.
Parsons spent only four years — 1964 to 1968 — in Hawaii attending UH Manoa where he majored in history and played varsity basketball, but he maintained strong ties with the school throughout the years as he gained a reputation in the corporate world as “Captain Emergency.”
In the early 2000s Parsons was widely credited with the turnaround of Time Warner after its botched $165 billion merger with AOL. With Parsons as CEO, Time Warner slashed its debt by roughly half as it ushered in a new era of sustainable growth.
Parsons also helped the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers navigate a scandal over racism. In 2014, when the NBA banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life over racist comments, the basketball league installed Parsons as Clippers interim chief executive.
“At a time of adversity and uncertainty for the Los Angeles Clippers, Dick stepped in to provide the type of steady and reassuring leadership that defined his remarkable career in business and public service,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday in a statement.
The Clippers were eventually sold to Steve Ballmer, the billionaire former CEO of Microsoft, for $2 billion, and Parsons managed the transition, according to the Times.
The newspaper noted that Parsons was often the only Black executive in a boardroom and spoke out on social issues, including following the death of George Floyd in 2020.
He is remembered as a troubleshooter, handling corporate emergencies such as losses at Dime Bancorp during the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s.
In 2008, Parsons served on the transition team for President-elect Barack Obama and was an an economic adviser to the nation’s first Hawaii-raised commander in chief.
Lazard also noted his service as chair of the Apollo Theater and the Jazz Foundation of America, and his positions on the boards of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Richard Dean Parsons was born April 4, 1948, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family later moved to the New York borough of Queens where he skipped two grades and graduated from high school at 16 before enrolling at the University of Hawaii on a whim, according to the Times.
“I put down University of Hawaii, not actually really knowing if there was one,” 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.”
As a sophomore, he met his future wife, Laura, and later attended Albany Law School, where he was admitted despite being several credits short of his undergraduate degree; he finished at the top of his class, according to the Times.
Parsons told The Honolulu Advertiser in 2009 that he wanted to study astrophysics at UH but found that discipline to be “incompatible with playing basketball, drinking beer and partying.”
Throughout his stellar career as a U.S. corporate fixer, Parsons kept close ties to UH, which awarded him with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997.
In 2003, as then-AOL Time Warner CEO, Parsons delivered UH Manoa’s spring commencement speech. Two days before the address, Parsons added the chairman title at AOL, taking over from Honolulu-born Steve Case, according to a 2009 Honolulu Advertiser profile.
Parsons was back on the Manoa campus in 2009 to give a series of seminars and lectures as the Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals at UH.
In the Advertiser profile, Hawaii attorney Wilma Sur, who remained a close friend of Parsons since their days at UH, said his success as a fixer fit Parsons’ character.
“The calmness was always there,” Sur told the newspaper. “I think his strength is the same kind of what I see in President Obama; it’s this ability to take your ego out of the equation and simply solve the problem.”
Parsons’ survivors include wife Laura (Bush) Parsons and their three children, Gregory, Leslie and Rebecca.
In a 2008 PBS interview after he stepped down at Time Warner, Parsons was asked by 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, according to the Times.
Parsons 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.”
Star-Advertiser staff, The New York Times and Reuters contributed to this obituary.
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