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At 27, Rogers was the youngest person ever to be named assistant to the President Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library
John F. W. Rogers is known on Wall Street for four initials and an enviable fact of corporate geography. The F. and W. stand for Francis and William, though why Rogers uses them both is one of several mysteries he has either gone out of his way to cultivate or never seen fit to explain. “Why does he have that extra initial that everybody else doesn’t have?” asks Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs.
If Blankfein truly wanted to find out, he could walk three feet and ask. Rogers’s office in Goldman’s lush, $2.4 billion downtown Manhattan headquarters is right next to Blankfein’s and a few steps away from that of Goldman President Gary D. Cohn. Prior to Blankfein and Cohn’s arrival at the top of the Goldman food chain, Rogers sat next to Hank Paulson, the previous Goldman CEO (1999-2006) whose appointment as U.S. Treasury Secretary Rogers helped grease. Prior to Paulson, Rogers sat next to Goldman CEO Jon Corzine (1994-99). “He is an extraordinarily loyal person,” says former Goldman colleague Jud Sommer, who is now the senior adviser to government affairs at UnitedHealth Group. “But that is a pretty extraordinary segue for any human being in any setting, anywhere, at a professional level.”
Beyond Rogers’s ability to adapt, the inference is that Goldman Sachs is not made up of ordinary human beings in an ordinary setting or profession. It’s made up of incredibly competitive people in one of the world’s most cutthroat businesses. The average partner serves just eight years. And unlike Blankfein, Cohn, Paulson, Corzine, and dozens more at Goldman whom he has served and outlasted, Rogers is not a dealmaker or trader. He has no revenue-generating responsibilities and strives to have virtually no public profile. Yet many of those who follow Goldman’s Kremlinology describe Rogers, 55, as the single most powerful person at the firm over the past decade. One Goldman partner, who asked not to be named because he fears damaging his relationship with Rogers, describes him as Colossus bestriding the globe.
In April 2011, Blankfein promoted Rogers to be one of 11 “executive officers” at Goldman, a title without much substance other than that it forced Rogers for the first time to share in the pain of public disclosure. (He has Goldman stock worth around $30 million and options worth several millions more.) The press-shy Rogers’s work portfolio includes responsibility for press and public relations and the firm’s government affairs office in Washington. He also oversees Goldman’s considerable philanthropic efforts, which the firm has not been shy about using to try to counter the barrage of criticism levied against it in the wake of the financial crisis. “He’s a major fixing agent … in the chemical sense,” explains Lucas van Praag, a former British naval officer and current Goldman partner who heads press relations and reports to Rogers. “He makes sure that the DNA Goldman knows and loves stays in place.”
When he’s not globe-trotting with Blankfein, Rogers commutes every week between Washington, where he owns an $8.4 million home on Embassy Row, and New York, where he stays in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South. His wife, Deborah Lehr, a former senior negotiator on China trade policy in the Clinton Administration, lives in D.C. with the couple’s two young children.
Rogers is of average height, doughy, and a year or two away from needing a full comb-over of his flaxen hair. He can be charming and witty, but seldom conspicuously so. His passing resemblance to the late Sir Alec Guinness in the actor’s portrayal of John le Carré’s über-spy, George Smiley, is widely remarked upon within Goldman. Others find a more modern, less sinister analog: Michael Clayton, the George Clooney character who called himself a corporate “janitor.” (Full disclosure: Without Rogers’s approval in 2010, it is unlikely I would have been permitted access to Goldman’s current and former senior executives for my book about the firm.) Rogers is unfailingly described by friends and foes as a master tactician with a long record of behind-the-scenes accomplishments, yet his indispensability stems in large part from how little he cares about being recognized for those accomplishments.
©2011 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
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