Billionaire, exec warned against rising U.S. debt
NEW YORK — Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire and business executive who became one of the most prominent voices to argue for entitlement reform and reducing the U.S. national debt, died Tuesday, his family said. He was 91. The cause was not immediately known.
Born in Kearney, Neb., to Greek immigrants, “Pete” Peterson was CEO of two major U.S. companies and co-founded one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. He was already a national figure in business by the early 1960s, serving as chairman and CEO of Bell and Howell, one of the largest manufacturers of movie cameras at the time.
He left Bell and Howell to work for the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, eventually serving as secretary of commerce from 1972 to 1973.
But Peterson was never a White House insider. Nixon loyalists distrusted him because he was comfortable with Democrats, and Nixon once needled him about his “friends in the Georgetown cocktail set,” Peterson wrote in his 2009 autobiography, “The Education of an American Dreamer.”
Sensing he would soon be at “the far end of a telephone that would rarely ring,” he stepped down as commerce secretary after a year and felt lucky that he departed unscathed by the Watergate scandal.
He took over as chief executive of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in 1973 after leaving the Nixon administration. In 1985, he co-founded the private-equity firm Blackstone Group with Stephen Schwarzman.
“His intelligence, wit and vision made him an inspirational leader who brought people together from the White House to Wall Street,” his family said in a statement. Blackstone went on to become one of the biggest private-equity firms in the world, with $434 billion in assets under management at the end of last year. When the firm went public in 2007, Peterson’s stake in the company made him a billionaire. His wealth was estimated at $2 billion, according to Forbes Magazine.
Peterson dedicated the rest of his life to what he called “key fiscal challenges threatening America’s future,” donating $1 billion to create the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in 2007.
He never publicly endorsed the fiscal ideals of the tea party. However, his ideas did give him some common ground with them.
He long argued that U.S. entitlement programs, principally Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, had to be restructured or benefits cut back to avoid bankrupting the government.
“The fact he was able to start a serious debate about the future of Social Security and other entitlement programs was a huge accomplishment,” said Fred Bergsten, founder of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who worked with Peterson in various capacities going back to the 1970s.
Peterson was not considered ideological when it came to dealing with Social Security and Medicare. A life-long Republican, he still believed that raising taxes should be considered as part of any major restructuring of the U.S. budget, Bergsten said. The foundation quickly became a major voice on all budget-related matters, repeatedly quoted in national media outlets. In 2008, his organization helped bankroll the documentary “I.O.U.S.A,” with the goal of making the federal government’s ballooning national debt, then around $10 trillion, a central campaign issue.
He went to Northwestern University, where he had a social life rich with beer, women and occasional “debauchery,” as he put it, yet managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1947 with a degree in marketing. In 1951, he earned a master’s degree at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
Peterson’s first two marriages, to Kris Krengel and Sally Peters, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 37 years, Joan Ganz Cooney, a creator of “Sesame Street,” of New York; five children from his second marriage; a brother; and nine grandchildren.