Richard Parsons, who steadied Time Warner and L.A. Clippers, dies at 76

Richard Parsons, the executive dubbed “Captain Emergency” for his record of stabilizing ailing companies such as AOL Time Warner, Citigroup Inc. and Dime Savings Bank of New York, has died. He was 76.

Parsons died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. The cause of death was bone cancer, the New York Times reported, citing Ronald S. Lauder, a friend. Parsons was named chairman of CBS Corp. in September 2018 and resigned less than one month later, citing complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.

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Parsons was named chief executive of AOL Time Warner in 2002 after the $124-billion merger of the dial-up internet provider and the largest entertainment and media company started to fall apart. Just before he took over, following the surprise departure of CEO Gerald Levin, the newly merged entity posted a record loss of $54.2 billion as the value of its stock sank amid the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

“My biggest dream for this company is to restore it — to bring Time Warner back to the position that I think it once had and, even better than that, to make it the greatest company in the media and entertainment world,” said Parsons, who was named chairman in 2003.

Parsons, a tall Black man with a gentle management style whom some compared to a teddy bear, removed AOL from the company’s name, changed key managers and shored up its finances by laying off employees and selling noncore units. Two years into his repair job, Fortune listed Parsons at No. 23 on the Power 25, its list of the most powerful people in business — just above Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs.

By the time Parsons resigned as Time Warner Inc.’s CEO at the end of 2007, the firm was financially stable. He stayed on as chairman until 2009, the year his successor as CEO, Jeffrey Bewkes, spun off AOL from the parent company.

The company later was acquired by AT&T Inc. and today is known as Warner Bros. Discovery.

Parsons, who joined the board of Citicorp in the 1990s with the help of philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller, went on to become chairman of its successor firm, Citigroup Inc., in 2009, assuming responsibility for a too-big-to-fail bank in the grip of the Great Recession.

He brought with him vital know-how about how government worked, having served as a legal advisor for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in Albany and in the White House after Rockefeller became Gerald Ford’s vice president. Parsons used that experience to negotiate a way for New York-based Citigroup to avoid the bankruptcy fate of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The government took a financial stake in the bank and in 2010 sold off its final holdings for a $12-billion profit.

In February 2011, President Barack Obama named Parsons one of his outside economic advisors.

In 2014, when Donald Sterling, owner of the National Basketball Assn.’s Clippers franchise, became embroiled in a scandal for making racist remarks, Parsons was again brought in to steady a horrendous situation. After Sterling was banned from the NBA, Parsons, who played basketball while attending the University of Hawaii, agreed to become the team’s interim CEO. Several months later, Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft Corp. CEO, purchased the Clippers for $2 billion.

Earlier in his career, Parsons, a lawyer by training, was picked to be chief operating officer of the troubled Dime Savings Bank of New York by CEO Harry W. Albright Jr., a former Nelson Rockefeller aide. Dime was a client of the law firm Parsons worked for at the time. Starting with bad debt of more than $1 billion, Parsons, who became Dime’s CEO in 1990, worked with regulators to reduce the debt to $335 million. That was a prelude to merging it with Anchor Savings in 1994, the year before Levin recruited him to become president of Time Warner based partly on his board membership.

“People wondered what I was doing,” Levin told Bloomberg Businessweek for a 2011 profile of Parsons. “But I was confident, given his style and his approach and his people skills. And I was proven right.”

Richard Dean Parsons was born on April 4, 1948, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Lorenzo Parsons, a Sperry Rand electrical technician, and the former Isabelle Judd, a homemaker. One of five children, he grew up in South Ozone Park, Queens, near a marshy area that would become JFK Airport. He did well in school, skipping grades in elementary and high school. He left the University of Hawaii a few credits short of a degree but was admitted to Albany Law School in New York.

After graduating at the top of his class in 1971, he went to work for Gov. Rockefeller and followed him to Washington.

After President Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Parsons worked for the Rockefeller family for a year, then joined the politically connected New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, where his clients included Nelson Rockefeller’s widow.

After his rescue stints at Dime, Time Warner and Citigroup, Parsons became an advisor at Providence Equity Partners, where he worked part-time reviewing potential buyouts of media firms.

In 2016, after a period on the board, he became chairman of the $4-billion Rockefeller Foundation, capping his connections with the family, who had employed his grandfather as a groundskeeper at the family estate just north of New York.

CBS, based in New York, hired Parsons as its interim chairman in September 2018, filling a role vacated by Leslie Moonves after he was accused of sexual harassment.

Parsons and his wife, the former Laura Ann Bush, had three children: Gregory, Leslie and Rebecca.

Oster writes for Bloomberg.