James Wolfensohn, former World Bank president, dies
James D. Wolfensohn, who escaped a financially pinched Australian childhood to become a top Wall Street deal-maker and a two-term president of the World Bank, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
His daughter Naomi Wolfensohn confirmed the death.
Wolfensohn was a force on Wall Street for years, helping to rescue the Chrysler Corp. while working for Salomon Brothers and running his own thriving boutique firm, before President Bill Clinton nominated him to lead the World Bank, the world’s largest economic development institution.
But he was more than a financier. He led fundraising efforts as chairman of Carnegie Hall and headed a revival of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. An accomplished cellist under the tutelage of
the renowned Jacqueline du Pré, he performed at Carnegie Hall on his milestone birthdays. And as a university fencing champion, he was part of Australia’s 1956 Olympic team, competing in front of his fellow Australians in Melbourne.
But his main legacy was his stewardship of the World Bank, to which Clinton nominated him in 1995 after he had given up his Australian
citizenship 14 years earlier to qualify for the job, only to be passed over.
Arriving at the bank’s Washington headquarters to begin his first five-year term, he found life there too comfortable and its staff members demoralized — a professional malaise, he said, that had them denigrating the bank to their families and even to the news media.
He immediately attacked
the bank’s “complacency and insularity,” as he put it. He found that the bank’s emphasis on technocratic, market-based reforms was inhibiting its central mission: aiding the world’s poorest countries.
Wolfensohn said he was particularly proud of having installed a high-speed communications network linking affiliates in 80 countries, allowing interactive video conferencing and distance learning. “Modest, he wasn’t,” declared Fauzia S. Rashid, a staff member who worked with him.
James David Wolfensohn was born on Dec. 1, 1933, and grew up in Sydney, where his parents, Hyman and Dora Wolfensohn, had moved from London in 1928. The family, which included an older sister, Betty, was always in financial stress even though his father had at one time moved in the upper echelons of British society: He had met James Armand de Rothschild in the British army and then served as his private secretary, before having a falling-out that the elder Wolfensohn never explained.
The family’s failure to establish itself in Australia weighed heavily on young James from about the age of 7, producing an obsession with monetary insecurity that carried long into his adult life.
During law school Wolfensohn obtained a clerkship with a top Sydney firm, Allen Allen & Hemsley, where a colleague introduced him to fencing. Preferring the épée to the saber despite not being tall and lean, he did well against world-class Italian and British competitors in the Melbourne Olympics before, by his account, becoming distracted and losing.
With full legal credentials, Wolfensohn worked on a major antitrust case involving American companies and then decided to apply to Harvard Business School. He eventually flew to attend the school free of charge because of his service in the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve.
While studying there he met Elaine Botwinick, a Wellesley senior who had grown up in Manhattan and New Rochelle, New York. They married in 1961 and had three children, Sara, Naomi and Adam.
Elaine Wolfensohn died in August at 83. An advocate for education and the arts, she was an adviser to many boards of directors, including those of American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Teachers College at Columbia University. Thursday would have been the Wolfensohns’ 59th wedding anniversary.
James Wolfensohn is survived by his children and by seven grandchildren.