Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

The Man Who Saved New York

DEALINGS By Felix Rohatyn Simon & Schuster, $27.00, 304 pages

His life is, in some ways, a classic tale of a Jewish boy making good. In 1940, at the age of 12, Felix Rohatyn escaped Nazi-occupied France with gold coins hidden in toothpaste tubes. After migrating to the U.S., Rohatyn earned a physics degree and then fell into a clerical job at Lazard-Frères, the venerable investment bank.

When he transferred to mergers and acquisitions, Rohatyn found his calling. Over the decades, Rohatyn would be intimately involved with many of the biggest deals of the century. He helped Kinney, a parking and funeral company, acquire then “moribund” Avis and turn it around. He identified targets for ITT during its acquisition frenzy. He negotiated for GE in its acquisition of NBC, then RCA. Rohatyn also has a public-service streak, which eventually led him to be appointed American ambassador to France.

?Dealings? by by Felix Rohatyn

Rohatyn’s new book, “Dealings,” is his record of all this: a memoir of mergers, municipalities and money. For the most part, it’s an interesting book, even for the financially illiterate. Rohatyn dumbs down some extremely complicated transactions without patronizing the reader and compresses 40 years of such deals into easily digestible chapters.

“Dealings” is particularly compelling when Rohatyn describes his years of public service. In 1970, while on the board of the New York Stock Exchange, Rohatyn discovered that “Wall Street’s entire capital structure seemed balanced on a weak, impermanent capital base” (which, we know, would never happen again). A few years later, Rohatyn would work around the clock to re-establish New York City’s creditworthiness after a decade of egregious mismanagement. In both cases, Rohatyn was instrumental in a return to solvency — while simultaneously still making deals for Lazard-Frères. One has the impression that he ate, slept and exercised in a business suit.

“Dealings” is also interesting for the quirks displayed by his fellow Masters of the Universe (avant la lettre). André Meyer, the legendary chairman of Lazard-Frères, liked to help Rohatyn’s wife cook dinner. Harold Geneen, the ferocious chairman of ITT, ignored clocks, keeping the curtains drawn whether he was in New York or Brussels. Hollywood dealmaker Mike Ovitz comes off as flat-out weird — overly groomed and needlessly circuitous in conversation.

The author displays some quirks himself. Rohatyn drops so many names that I felt I had repeatedly stubbed my toe: Governor Hugh Carey; Bennet Cerf of Random House; Ahmet Ertegun of Capitol Records; Clay Felker, publisher of New York Magazine; union boss

Victor Gotbaum; Pamela Harriman; literary agent Mort Janklow; François Mitterand; Edith Piaf and Liliane de Rothschild. Admittedly, Rohatyn worked with most of these luminaries. But he also claims to have been friends with many of them. One wonders, then, if he mistakes friendship for a temporary alignment of interests.

Much of the book is given to self-apologetics. Too often he decries, with suspect humility, his own naiveté when dealing with politicians or the press — this from a man who frequently uses the word “shrewd” as a compliment. And even if “Dealings” is not a personal memoir per se, we still learn almost nothing about Rohatyn’s family.

Other blind spots are more confusing. In “Dealings,” Rohatyn frequently announces that he is a liberal and a Democrat. In that vein, he relates that one of his goals as ambassador to France was to “erase many of the theories some of the French had about the way our economy was manipulated and how the marketplace catered only to the rich.” However, most of the deals in “Dealings” are about making rich people richer: Like any other banker, Rohatyn often served his clients by helping them to avoid taxes. Other deals became profitable only after layoffs pushed up a company’s stock price. Such maneuvers, while legal, have not been beneficial to public coffers or to the middle class.

“Dealings” is at its most disingenuous when Rohatyn discusses the current crisis. He writes how he has “witnessed the creation of a new corporate culture… huge deals were what mattered, while consequences for employees and communities were too often overlooked.” But what deal, by his own admission, “set the tone”? The RJR-Nabisco merger, negotiated by one Felix Rohatyn.

Gordon Haber is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.