Lewis Lehrman
Lewis E. Lehrman is an American investment banker, historian, and former politician. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2005 for his contributions to American history, Abraham Lincoln scholarship, and monetary policy.
Lehrman writes for the Lincoln Institute. He is currently a senior partner at L. E. Lehrman & Co., an investment firm he established in 1981. He is also the chairman of the Lehrman Institute, a public policy research and grant-making foundation founded in 1972.
On November 10, 2005, Lehrman and Richard Gilder were awarded the National Humanities Medal in an Oval Office ceremony by US President George W. Bush. Lehrman converted to Catholicism.
Early life and education
Lehrman was born on August 15, 1938, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Rose and Benjamin Sachs Lehrman, who was chairman of the Rite Aid Corporation. His family is Jewish.Lehrman attended The Hill School, a boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Lehrman's engagement in teaching of history began as a Carnegie Teaching Fellow at Yale University in 1960 and subsequently at Harvard University, where he completed a master's degree as a Woodrow Wilson fellow.
Career
Lehrman is the former president of Rite Aid Corporation, a writer, businessman, and economic historian.Rite Aid
"Rite Aid Corporation was an outgrowth of a family wholesale grocery business in central Pennsylvania, Louis Lehrman & Son, founded by Lehrman's grandfather, Louis, and expanded by his father, Benjamin. On holidays as a teenager, Lehrman worked part-time at the firm. He later worked summers and holidays at the company while continuing his education at Yale and Harvard before enlisting in the Army Reserves.In 1962, in Pennsylvania, the company began opening health and beauty stores; it was then a small-town competitor for both customers and store leases. Lehrman joined the company full-time in 1964—the same year the first Rite Aid pharmacy was opened in New York State. "Lehrman was forced to go from town to town, looking for older stores in downtown areas where landlords were more desperate for tenants, even unknowns," reported the New York Times. "Having found a site, he and his partners would devote a Saturday in painting and remodeling and a Sunday to stocking shelves. On Monday, the store would be open for business."
Rite Aid went public in a successful 1968 stock offering and continued expansion. At the time, with 32 percent of the company's stock, Lewis Lehrman was the company's president and largest stockholder. Alex Grass, Lehrman's brother-in-law, brought into the business by Lehrman's father, was eventually named chief executive.
Lehrman stepped down as Rite Aid president in 1977 and as chairman of the firm's executive committee in 1981, eventually severing all ties with the company. His role in what Lehrman called "help to build Rite Aid" became a political issue in Lehrman's 1982 New York State gubernatorial campaign when Grass, who was then the company's chairman and CEO, took issue with published articles that gave credit to Lehrman for the company's growth. New York Magazine's Michael Kramer interviewed Grass for a profile on Lehrman. Lehrman "wasn't the founder. I was," said Grass. After quoting Grass's version of the founding of Rite Aid, Kramer wrote: "Grass of course, is denigrating Lehrman, and as for the facts, they aren't facts at all, or at least they are disputed facts. They are disputed by a host of former and present Rite Aid officers and directors with whom I spoke." Kramer went on to quote other Rite Aid officers and directors. Lehrman "took a sleepy little company and breathed life into it," said one company director. Maxwell Rabb, a Rite Aid director and former ambassador to Italy, declared: "Lew's role was at least the equal of anyone else's."
Lehrman was also a managing director of Morgan Stanley in the late 1980s. After Morgan Stanley, in 1991, he established an investment company, L. E. Lehrman & Co. He was also an investor in George W. Bush's Arbusto Energy.
New York gubernatorial campaign
Lehrman was the president of Rite Aid until 1977 and resigned from all positions in 1981 to run for governor of New York the following year. He said that "elective office is the only way to get things done." He was well known for wearing red suspenders in his campaign commercials. On June 16, 1982, Lehrman was chosen as the official GOP designee for governorship, getting "68.88 percent of the weighted votes at a hectic meeting of the Republican State Committee in Manhattan." He would later win the primary and become the Republican candidate for governor.Popular historian Samuel G. Freedman wrote that,
Lehrman's goals, the party went far beyond solvency or an orderly transfer of power. What was needed was a populist uprising with a manifesto to match. Lehrman planned to create both the same way he had created the Rite Aid network, by driving to cities and towns and paying attention to Main Street.
The Republican gubernatorial candidate came into conflict with some top Republican members of the legislature over his tax reduction program. Asked about their differences in the final Inside Albany debate, Lehrman said,
I've put this issue to the voters. I'm not putting it to the legislators. Who rules New York State, 211 legislators or 18 million free people? That's the question. Who rules the government of the State of New York? Is it owned and operated by the politicians and the bureaucrats, or is it owned for the purpose of benefiting the 18 million people who live here? That's the issue.
Running on the lines of the Republican and Conservative Parties, Lehrman was defeated by then-Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo, 51–48%, far less than expected. Cuomo ran on the lines of the Democratic and Liberal Parties, after defeating New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch in the Democratic Party primary election. Lehrman won the Republican nomination in a primary against attorney Paul J. Curran after several other Republican candidates dropped out of the race. Political scientists Peter W. Colby and John K. White noted a sharp upstate-downstate split in the race, with Cuomo carrying a 575,000-vote advantage in New York City. "Lehrman carried the rest of the state by 400,000 votes" and won "fifty-two of the fifty-seven upstate counties."
E. J. McMahon, who covered the race as a journalist, opined:
The debates between the two gubernatorial candidates were sharp exchanges on issues involving the state's economic and crime problems. The public encounters of Mario M. Cuomo and Lewis E. Lehrman in the closing weeks of the 1982 gubernatorial campaign produced a substantive, often lively, at times intense, but consistently civil exchange of ideas.
The New York Times reported after the New York Post debate at the beginning of October, "Lieut. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Lewis E. Lehrman argued without significant interruptions for 50 minutes yesterday in their first debate of the New York gubernatorial campaign. What were to have been two-minute opening statements stretched to 25 minutes as the two—intense but seemingly not angry—alternated ripostes and kept their own informal time limits. At one point, Mr. Cuomo gestured to the four panelists and said, 'Maybe we should let them play.'"
High national and state unemployment hurt Lehrman's campaign. The general election campaign for governor was billed as a "referendum on Reaganomics". However, if the election had been a referendum on Reaganomics and unemployment, Cuomo would have won by a margin reflecting his party's enormous voter-registration edge and allowing room for a few disgruntled Republicans and Independents as well, according to a Princeton University thesis on the gubernatorial campaign. "Instead, Lew Lehrman was able to use technologies such as television and direct mail to campaign 'offensively' on issues which were more favorable for him such as the death penalty, crime, welfare fraud, prayer in schools, and unpopular record of the Carey Administration. Moreover, he was able to blunt the Reaganomics issue by widely publicizing an economic plan of his own." Lehrman was also critical of the national Republican strategy in the election at a time when US unemployment was over 10 percent: "I believe the Reagan Administration should be making a major effort to show clearly how we are going to rebuild the economy and create 20 million jobs in the next 10 years," he told the New York Times. He added: "A slogan like 'Stay the Course' is inadequate."
Lehrman's commercial advertising was large and with strong intensity. The Christian Science Monitor reported late in the campaign: "The ads have aired so frequently that the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing a parrot next to a television set. The parrot says, 'I'm Lew Lehrman. Lew Lehrman for governor!...' In his Borough Park, Brooklyn, campaign swing here recently, one youngster shouted, 'There's the man on TV!'" Cuomo sought to make Lehrman's spending a campaign issue. Lehrman "was a clean slate upon which any image could be drawn through television and radio ads," wrote Cuomo in the Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo. "The polls indicated that neither the gold standard nor Reaganomics would enhance the image—the public knew little of the former and New York State was suffering severely from the Reagan Recession and budget cuts—so these issues were ignored. Instead, television ads—four or five million dollars' worth to begin—depicted Lehrman as a genial family man who knew how to produce jobs—his successful business career was proof—and stop crime—with capital punishment." In his diary, Cuomo complained about Lehrman's high spending on direct mail and television advertising but admitted in late October 1982: "A strange problem has developed. We have more than we can spend—much more!" Cuomo won and would go on to serve three terms as governor before he was defeated for re-election in 1994.