Lewis Glucksman

Lewis L. Glucksman (December 22, 1925 – July 5, 2006) was a former Lehman Brothers trader and former chief executive officer and chairman of Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc. Glucksman was born into a second generation Hungarian Jewish family that lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. He served as a teenage volunteer with the US Navy in World War II. Glucksman graduated from the College of William and Mary and later earned a Master's degree in business administration from New York University. The National University of Ireland granted him an honorary Ph.D. in 2002. Glucksman had a distinguished career on Wall Street. He joined the staff of privately held Lehman Brothers in 1963. After rising from head of sales and trading at Lehman to co-CEO, Glucksman, described then as "gruff and tough" beat Pete Peterson, a former United States Secretary of Commerce for control of the then-closely held firm in 1983, a battle documented in the 1986 book Greed and Glory on Wall Street by Ken Auletta. Shortly after Glucksman took control, however, the firm experienced a sharp drop in profits. That resulted in a forced sale by Lehman's partners to American Express in 1984. American Express paid $380 million for the firm. Glucksman joined Primerica Financial Services after Citigroup Inc. founder Sanford Weill acquired the company in 1988. He also served as Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He travelled to Ireland frequently in his role as a trustee of New York University to promote academic relationships between Irish academia and NYU. He established a home in Cobh, County Cork in 1984 with his wife Loretta Brennan Glucksman and lived there from 1999. Glucksman directed much of his philanthropy towards projects of benefit to the promotion of culture in Ireland.