Richard ‘Dick’ Parsons
Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Richard Parsons, who helped Time Warner divorce from AOL after what was considered one of the worst takeovers in history, has died. He was 76.
His death was confirmed by Lazard, where he was a longtime board member.
Parsons became CEO of AOL Time Warner in 2002, replacing Gerald Levin, who stepped aside two years after the media giant’s disastrous $165 billion merger with the upstart internet company.
As CEO and later chairman, he led Time Warner’s turnaround, dropping “AOL” from the corporation’s name and shrinking the company’s $30 billion in debt to $16.8 billion by selling Warner Music and other properties.
“The merger did not work out quite the way many of us expected. The internet bubble burst and we had to fix the leaks,” Parsons told The Independent in 2004. “It was not as monumental a task as many people thought, as the fundamental businesses of the old Time Warner — like publishing, the cable networks and movies — was running well.”
He said that after the merger, AOL’s business had collapsed and Warner Music Group was declining, along with the entire music industry. “So we sold our music business, as well as other nonstrategic assets, to strengthen our balance sheet and put in new management.”
Parsons stepped down from Time Warner in 2007.
The Rockefeller connection
Richard Dean “Dick” Parsons was born into a working-class family on April 4, 1948, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section and grew up in South Ozone Park in Queens, New York. He was a middle child among five siblings.
He attended public school, skipping two grades, and at age 16, the 6-foot-4 Parsons enrolled at the University of Hawaii, where he played basketball and met his future wife, Laura Ann Bush, whom he married in 1968.
After graduation, he returned to New York state to attend Albany Law School, moonlighting as a part-time janitor to help pay his tuition and finishing at the top of his class. During an internship at the New York state legislature, he developed ties to moderate Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who became vice president under Gerald Ford in 1974 in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Parsons became associate director of President Ford’s domestic policy council.
“The old-boy network lives,” Parsons told The New York Times in a 1994 interview. “I didn’t grow up with any of the old boys. I didn’t go to school with any of the old boys. But by becoming a part of that Rockefeller entourage, that created for me a group of people who’ve looked out for me ever since.”
After Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, Parsons returned to New York and joined the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler in 1977, as did his friend Rudy Giuliani. Parsons and his wife and three children moved to Rockefeller country, Briarcliff Manor in Westchester County. Coincidentally, his maternal grandfather had been a groundskeeper on John D. Rockefeller’s nearby estate, Kykuit.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, left, and Richard Parsons, CEO, Time Warner Inc. chat at the media welcome party hosted by Time Warner before the Republican National Convention in New York, New York on August 28, 2004.
Dennis Brack | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Parson’s clients included Rockefeller’s widow, Happy, and the Dime Savings Bank of New York. In 1988, he accepted an offer to head Dime Bancorp, which had been struggling through the savings & loan crisis after aggressively approving high-risk mortgages as housing prices crashed. In 1989, it posted a $92.3 million loss. By the end of 1993, after ordering massive layoffs, Parsons helped the bank complete a $300 million recapitalization. In 1995, he helped engineer Dime’s merger with Anchor Savings, creating one of the nation’s largest thrift institutions.
Parsons joined the Time Warner board on the recommendation of Rockefeller’s brother Laurance. He became president of Time Warner in 1995.
As a Rockefeller Republican, Parsons considered himself a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. Parsons worked for Giuliani’s campaign for New York mayor but kept a behind-the-scenes profile. ”I didn’t want to be positioned as the Mayor’s Black guy,” he told the Times a few years later.
Giuliani put him in charge of the mayoral transition team in 1993 but Parsons turned down an offer to become deputy mayor for fiscal affairs. His relationship with Giuliani later soured after the mayor tried to pressure Time Warner Cable to carry the then-fledgling Fox News Channel in New York.
Two years after stepping down from Time Warner, Parsons became chairman of Citigroup in 2009, helping to stabilize the banking giant in the wake of the financial crisis. In May 2014, he was named interim CEO of the Los Angeles Clippers after the NBA banned owner Donald Sterling for life because he had made racist remarks.
“Like most Americans, I have been deeply troubled by the pain the Clippers’ team, fans and partners have endured,” Parsons said.
Parsons played down race as a factor of his success.
“For a lot of people, race is a defining issue. It just isn’t for me,” he told the Times in 1997. “It is … like air. It’s like height. I have other things that I’m focused on.”
He later came out of retirement to briefly serve as CBS chairman in the wake of Les Moonves‘ ouster following sexual harassment and assault allegations during the #MeToo movement.
After only a month as CBS’ interim chairman, Parsons stepped down suddenly in October 2018, citing health concerns.
“When I agreed to join the board and serve as the interim chair, I was already dealing with a serious health challenge — multiple myeloma — but I felt that the situation was manageable,” Parsons said in a CBS statement announcing he had been replaced by Strauss Zelnick. “Unfortunately, unanticipated complications have created additional new challenges, and my doctors have advised that cutting back on my current commitments is essential to my overall recovery.”
Parsons was active in many charities, including playing leading roles for the Jazz Foundation of America, the Apollo Theater Foundation and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. During his years on the Apollo Theater board, he helped the historic Harlem entertainment venue raise nearly $100 million. Parsons and his wife also donated 40 works of art to the American Folk Art Museum in July 2021 to help celebrate its 60th anniversary.
