James D. Robinson III, who as chief executive of American Express Company from 1977 to 1993 helped transform Wall Street into a more competitive financial market with a wide variety of businesses housed under one roof, died Monday at Roslyn, New York, Long Island. It was 88.
The death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure from recurrent pneumonia, Walter Montgomery, a family spokesman, wrote in a statement.
A mild-mannered son of Georgia gentry, Mr. Robinson followed a well-worn path to financial success, power and influence: from private school to the Ivy League and then the financial canyons of Lower Manhattan, with side trips to the corridors of Capitol Hill .
In Washington, he was one of Wall Street’s strongest advocates for deregulating the financial industry and expanding its horizons. Some called him the unofficial secretary of state for corporate America.
The deregulation he fought for was largely achieved when Congress repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall legislation in 1999. As a result, commercial banks were authorized to underwrite and trade corporate securities and own insurance companies.
This cultural shift also prompted the securities industry to respond with increasingly sophisticated and complex computer-enabled products. Among them were highly leveraged derivatives that played a major role in the 2008 market crash.
But while Mr. Robinson later acknowledged that financial deregulation had “gone too far,” he never advocated reimposing the Glass-Steagall restrictions that had erected a wall between investment banking and retail banking.
Mr. Robinson may have been best known to the public for his role in the epic $25 billion battle for control of RJR Nabisco in 1988 and his firing by disgruntled shareholders.
In the Nabisco episode, an Amex-owned investment firm, Shearson Lehman Hutton, was the financial backer of an RJR Nabisco management group that tried to control the company in a bidding war that was eventually won by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company.
“I was a facilitator trying to bring the sides together,” Mr. Robinson said in an interview for this obituary in 2016.
This acquisition was the largest business deal on record for nearly a decade and was called by some the culmination of a new golden age.
The fight was chronicled in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s 1989 best-selling book, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. The book was the basis of a 1993 HBO movie in which Mr. Robinson was played by Fred D. Thompson, who later became a United States senator from Tennessee.
Mr. Robinson’s career was more defined by the fact that he put American Express at the forefront of expanding the corporate boundaries of his time.
“We coined the term ‘diversified financial services industry,'” Mr. Robinson said in the interview, in his Midtown Manhattan office (where an abstract Frank Sinatra painting hung on one wall).
During his tenure, the American Express travel and charge card empire expanded to include Shearson Lehman Hutton. First Data Corporation, payments company. Investors Diversified Services, a mutual fund company. and the Fire Fund Insurance Company. American Express also operated an international bank.
Mr. Robinson made an unsuccessful bid in 1978 for the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company and at one point considered buying the Walt Disney Company.
But the prosperity of the late 1980s and early 1990s turned into what he called a “dark period,” as the stock market and brokerages collapsed and traders, in what became known as the “Boston pay party” , revolted nationally over the high cost. accepting American Express cards.
The revolt forced the company to lower its so-called discount rate – about 4 percent per transaction – to match that of its credit card rivals, who charged a third.
Disgruntled shareholders and directors forced Mr. Robinson to resign in 1993, aged 57.
Within a year he had joined with his son and Stuart J. Ellman to form RRE Ventures, a venture capital firm in New York that invests in new information-technology companies.
His departure from American Express came a decade after he had presided over the tumultuous exit of Sanford I. Weill, the Wall Street titan whose securities empire had been absorbed by American Express under Mr. Robinson.
Brash, Brooklyn-born Mr. Weill, who began his Wall Street career as a messenger, and Mr. Robinson, a patrician Georgian, made a cultural odd couple. When Mr. Weill’s proposal to buy the Fireman’s Fund, which he headed, was rejected by Amex’s board, he decided he had to leave.
Mr. Weil found Mr. Robinson bureaucratic and indecisive. But in the 2016 interview, Mr. Robinson challenged a widely held belief that Mr. Weill was a risk-taker and that he was obnoxious. In fact, argued Mr Robinson, “it was the opposite”.
James Dixon Robinson III — sometimes called “Three of Spades Jimmy” because of his use of Roman numerals — was born on November 19, 1935, in Atlanta to James Dixon Robinson Jr. and Josephine (Crawford) Robinson. The son and grandson of prominent Georgia bankers—his father was president of the First National Bank of Atlanta—he grew up with two sisters in the city’s affluent Buckhead neighborhood.
A neighbor, famous golfer Bobby Jones, helped inspire Jimmy to start playing the game at age 8, offering the occasional tip. His 2016 resume listed seven golf club memberships, including Augusta National (founded by Jones), and nine former golf club memberships.
After attending Woodberry Forest, a private school in Virginia, Mr. Robinson enrolled as a full-time student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studied industrial management. After graduating in 1957, he joined the Navy, which assigned him to the nuclear submarine base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a disbursing officer, or paymaster. In between he took correspondence courses at the New York Stock Exchange. In the same year he married Bettye Bradley, with whom he had two children.
After his discharge in 1959, Mr. Robinson enrolled at Harvard Business School and earned an MBA in 1961. He began his business career at the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company and after five years was appointed assistant to the managing director, Thomas S. Gates Jr.
In 1968, Mr. Robinson became a partner at White Weld & Company, where he developed an interest in venture capital. He joined American Express in 1970 as an executive vice president, hired by Atlanta native Eugene R. Black Sr., an Amex director and former head of the World Bank. Mr. Robinson became chairman in 1975 and president and CEO in 1977.
He was also chairman and CEO of Shearson Lehman Brothers, the brokerage subsidiary of American Express.
He resigned in early 1993 after a boardroom battle over his continuation in the job. Major shareholders demanded his ouster. The Times reported that he had left behind a company with “crushing morale”, erratic profits and losses and a falling share price. Analysts, investors, some board members and even his predecessor, Howard L. Clark Sr., had turned against him.
His marriage to Ms. Bradley ended in 1983 after he had an incapacitating brain aneurysm, he said, and he filed for divorce.
In 1984 he married Linda Gosden, a senior public relations executive who later advised him during the RJR Nabisco battle. She is the daughter of Freeman F. Gosden, co-creator and voice of the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” radio program. Active in philanthropy and fundraising for Republican candidates, Mr. Robinson and his wife became prominent members of a glamorous New York social scene, living at the famously exclusive 778 Park Avenue.
He is survived by his wife. his two children from his first marriage, James IV and Emily Cook; two children from his second marriage, Nicholas and Olivia Robinson; his sister, Frances Huber; and six grandchildren. Mr. Robinson lived on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
In his 80s, when asked when he planned to retire, Mr Robinson said: “Three years after I die.” He added that if his dreams of technological advancement come true, “I might be able to make it.”
Robert D. Hershey Jr.a reporter who covered Wall Street finance and economics for the Times for many years, died in January. Alex Traub contributed to the report.
