Former CEO of Time Warner and Citigroup, Independent
An Evening With Richard Parsons (Washington, D.C. 2008)
This hour-long, one-on-one interview program showcased the life and career of corporate giant, Richard Parsons. Taped live in Washington, D.C. on the campus of The George Washington University at the Jack Morton Auditorium on Saturday, November 15, 2008, this program was the fifteenth in The HistoryMakers’ An Evening With... series. CNN journalist Soledad O’Brien served as the program’s interviewer.
Born in New York, Parsons went on to become Chairman and CEO of Time Warner, before assuming the chairmanship of Citigroup. The interview covered Parsons’ childhood, the extensive impact his mento...
About Dick Parsons
Richard Parsons, former CEO of Time Warner and Citigroup, has been active in discussions about racial inequity in finance and corporate leadership. In March 2023, he participated in a Washington Post Live interview to discuss The Equity Alliance, a fund he co-founded to invest in minority and female-led venture funds. Parsons described the lack of capital flowing to women and minority fund managers as "structural inequality," adding that he does not use the term "racism" because it "suggests there's an intentionality to it." He stated that less than two percent of the $70 to $80 trillion asset management industry goes to minorities or women. In December 2023, Parsons commented on the lack of CEO diversity, noting that there are only six Fortune 500 companies run by black CEOs, which he called a record high. He attributed the slow progress to a lack of familiarity between groups, saying, "It's a struggle because we don't live together and therefore we don't have familiarity with each other." He added that until corporate boards become more diverse, significant change in the CEO role is unlikely, though he expressed hope that the complexion of corporate America is changing, particularly with more women joining boards.
Transcript (32 segments)
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Narrator0:10
Lincoln Financial Group, Apple, American Airlines. A complete list is available at thehistorymakers.org. Born in New York, he rose from senior White House aide to New York corporate lawyer. His legal prowess led him to head one of the nation's largest thrift institutions. His business acumen, wit, and wisdom propelled him to become CEO of the world's largest media and entertainment company. His career speaks for itself. The HistoryMakers, the nation's largest African-American video oral history archive, is proud to present 'An Evening with Richard Parsons.' And now to our host, journalist and TV anchor.
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Host1:51
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Richard Parsons to the... sit down and do this interview with you because you've had a tremendous career. We all know you, of course, as the giant behind Time Warner, and you're my boss too, so on all those fronts, thanks a bunch for me to talk to you tonight. But I would like to start this conversation from the very beginning, so let's go back to 1948. Tell me about your mom and dad.
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Dick Parsons2:30
My mom and dad. My dad was from Virginia. He was the oldest of eight children, had grown up in Newport News, Virginia, went to Hampton University, which was Hampton College in those days, and then came north looking for work. My mother was born in Tarrytown, New York. She was the last of six children.
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Host3:13
Small boys and baseball, right? There's just something, I don't know, some chemistry. I was a huge Dodger fan.
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Dick Parsons3:15
I was a huge Dodger fan. We lived on Pacific in Bedford, and Ebbets Field was like six or eight blocks up Bedford Avenue, and my father used to take me to games. And I had an Aunt Lou who was infirm, so she couldn't get out of the house much; she was in a wheelchair and she listened to every Dodger game religiously. And I became a huge Dodger fan. I remember going up to Ebbets Field. I remember the block we lived on, where life unfolded in just this one block.
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Host4:12
Well, we always considered ourselves working class. Now, the dirty little secret was that everybody was poor, so what we really were, if you talk to an economist, we were part of the working poor. But we were working, right? They had money coming in and then they had to watch it carefully. Until when we moved, my older sister, who was born in Harlem, when I was born in Brooklyn, my parents lived in rental units. Then in the mid-50s, my father bought a house out in Queens for the princely sum, I think, of $11,900, and we moved to the promised land, which was South Jamaica.
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Dick Parsons5:10
On the corner, like in Brooklyn, you could go... as I said, everything was on the block, including stores. Queens back in the early 50s, mid to early 50s, was still very rural and was still being developed. It was like a boy's paradise because you could... there were swamps and stuff like that.
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Host5:30
You've said that your father is the one who instilled the idea of working hard. Tell me how he did that.
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Dick Parsons5:41
Because that's how you got anything from him. I'm not talking about love and affection, I'm talking about material things. What still sticks with me: I wanted a telescope. I got into astronomy when I was, I'm going to say, eight or nine years old. And he said, 'You can work for it.' So he gave me a job. He was constantly fixing up the house, doing things, and he decided he wanted to pave the little driveway from the street to where he built this carport with these Belgian blocks that all the streets in New York used to be made of. Then eventually somebody invented Macadam, and they tore up all the Belgian blocks and put Macadam down. There was a place about two blocks from my house where they were tearing up the street, and these things were like giant loaves of bread that weighed 30 pounds. He said, 'I'll give you a nickel for every two you bring up to the house.' I had this wagon and I was schlepping these Belgian blocks. But you know what? It worked. I mean, I got my telescope.
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Host7:10
Tell me about school.
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Dick Parsons7:12
School was a sort of mixed bag for me. I went from being an indifferent student. I was never a bad student, but there were whole periods when I was somewhat indifferent to the school experience, and then periods of time when school was engaging to me, and I would apply myself and do reasonably well.
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Host7:33
You went to PS 45 and Smart Junior High School, and you graduated early.
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Dick Parsons7:36
Yeah. How to explain that with the indifferent student? Well, you know, I said there were periods when I wasn't indifferent, so I got effectively skipped twice. But those were in the good years. You know, if I had to do it all over again – and I did this with my son – I would not have skipped a couple of grades.
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Host8:10
There comes a point in most people's lives, I think, when they realize how engaging learning can be, and how empowering knowledge is, and how satisfying it is to learn something. And you're like, 'Boy, I don't have any time for that now. I wish I should have done this when I was in college.' So there is some regret, but it's mostly abstract. I don't lay awake at nights regretting it. You had a couple of choices for college. What were you looking at?
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Dick Parsons8:41
I wanted to go to Princeton because when I was in seventh grade, our school took a trip to Princeton, and I just fell in love with the ivy halls and the campus and the whole, you know, the classic Northeastern county.
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Host9:13
University of Hawaii. Why the University of Hawaii?
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Dick Parsons9:16
Because when I was in high school, I sat next to this girl from Hawaii. Really. Literally, she rocked. I said... She attended university? This is no, she was from Hawaii. This is the truth. I actually didn't know that there was a University of Hawaii when I put it down. You used to be able to put three schools down on your SATs, so I put Princeton, CCNY, and I thought, well, Hawaii. And I got waitlisted at Princeton and no money, and I was not going to go to CCNY; I wanted to leave. So I went to University of... why? Because the girl wasn't there, thoughtful, right? Yeah, but there were others.
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Host10:10
Our first year, you go out to school, and even then, college level athletics is consuming. I mean, you're playing six or seven hours a day, so you're all consumed in basketball. Then when it ends, you have to make the adjustment. The place was very different than New York, so it took me about a year to sort of find my place, but I did. I would say – my wife always gets mad at me when I say this, although she was a part of it – the last three years I spent in Hawaii were the best years of my life. Why? I just had fun. That's the one time in your life you're not living at home, and you don't have a job, and you're just hanging out and having fun.
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Dick Parsons11:10
How did you meet your wife? It was an English class in my sophomore year. I just hadn't read the stuff, right? So you're looking around for help, and she was one of these women who writes like this so you can't see anything. But finally, I think, you know, maybe I started crying or something, but she finally let me see her paper. And I thought, 'This is a relationship that we ought to develop.'
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Host11:44
When did you know you were in love?
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Dick Parsons11:48
After we broke up. We dated pretty much our sophomore year, and then we both went back at the end of sophomore year to the mainland. I went to New York, she went... That wasn't good. And we sort of came back together, and then our senior year we were together pretty much all the time. When did you get married? Right after we got out of school, that summer, summer of 1968.
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Host12:26
So you met in 1965. It wasn't a time when interracial dating, and certainly even years later, interracial marriage was accepted, embraced, etc. Was that a big deal for you that your girlfriend was white, that your wife-to-be was white?
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Dick Parsons12:39
No, it wasn't really a big deal for me for a couple reasons. One: we're in Hawaii. Everybody thinks you're interracial in Hawaii because it is a polyglot society. And two: you know, people are going to do this, that, and the other thing, but it's been my personal experience that you can set yourself up for certain kinds of reactions and behavior. If you go into something with a sense of confidence and certitude, you can set the agenda frequently. So it never actually turned out to be a problem. And also, she's a sweet gal. Everybody likes her.
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Host13:44
You give her a lot of credit for your success. How do you mean?
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Dick Parsons13:46
As I told you, from literally high school through college, I was – it may be even kind to say – an indifferent student. I would do just enough to get by, and that was fine for me. Getting by was fine as far as I was concerned because I didn't have misgivings about the ability to get the car to go faster if you needed to, but I didn't have to do it for myself; there was nobody else. Laura – that's my wife's name – became the person in my life who it mattered to me what she thought of me. And that made you... well, you have to perform. You don't want somebody who's important to you, who you care what they think about you, to think you're a jerk, even if you are.
She's the one who said you should be a lawyer. There were all these pictures of people being napalmed or whatnot; it just seemed like not the thing to do. So like the rest of my colleagues, we were all talking about what we were going to do when we graduated. And she said, 'You've got to think about being a lawyer because you love to argue. You would argue with the post.' And I thought, well, that's interesting. Then I had a drink with a friend of mine one night, a guy named Dan Kelly, who I never actually got to think. He said, 'What are you going to do?' I said, 'Well, I don't know. Laura seems to think I should go to law school.' He said, 'Well, you know, there are always good jobs for the good lawyers.' And that was it. It seemed to me that that was enough of a threshold: do something where you can get a job.
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Host15:56
You didn't finish college.
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Dick Parsons16:13
I didn't finish college. Something which happened not infrequently: you would just take an 'I', an incomplete. So at the end of four years, by virtue of the accumulated I's, they said, 'You need six credits to graduate.' I was going to do it during summer school. But I had tested and gotten into law school. And there was something in New York, at least then, called a new law qualifying certificate or something like that: you get so many credits and such on the test, and they said, 'Oh, you can come here even if you don't.' And so I bagged it.
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Narrator16:48
The year we're looking at now is 1968. I want everyone to take a look. In 1968, the United States was in turmoil. There were protests against the war and a mounting peace movement. That same year, Richard Parsons and his bride Laura headed to New York, where he attended the University of Albany Law School. Here, Parsons graduated in 1971, number one in his class. He scored the highest statewide on the bar exam. This caught the attention of Governor Nelson Rockefeller's office, and Parsons was hired onto Rockefeller's staff. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Nelson Rockefeller was picked by President Gerald Ford to serve as Vice President. Nelson encouraged a group that included Parsons to follow him to DC, where Parsons served as general counsel.
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Host18:12
What was that time like?
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Dick Parsons18:16
Chaotic. 1970... well from graduation from law school to '76? No, that wasn't particularly chaotic. I worked for four years for Nelson in state government before we went to Washington. Washington was pretty chaotic because it was just on the heels of Watergate. That was obviously a time of great national trauma. Moving all the Nixon folks out and putting a new team on the field was the order of the day. I, to this day, think Gerald Ford never got quite enough credit for being the right guy at the right time in terms of just settling things down and restoring credibility to the office of the President.
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Host18:56
When you move back to New York, Laura by now was your wife. It was referred to as 'old manship.'