Robert Bernhard Dies; Last Lehman Partner From Founding Family

(Bloomberg) -- Robert Bernhard, the last partner at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. who was a direct descendant of the firm’s founding family, has died. He was 91.

He died on July 4 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, said his wife, Joan.

For decades before Wall Street firms went public, big-time banking was the purview of family dynasties, as Bernhard’s career and lineage can attest.

His maternal great-grandfather was Mayer Lehman, one of the three Jewish brothers from Bavaria who immigrated to Montgomery, Alabama, where, in 1850, they founded a cotton-trading and dry-goods business called Lehman Brothers. They would move to lower Manhattan, and start trading more broadly, in 1868.

Herbert H. Lehman, governor of New York from 1933 to 1942, was Bernhard’s granduncle. Bernhard’s father, Richard, was a partner at Wertheim & Co. One uncle, Benjamin Buttenwieser, was a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; another was John Loeb, head of Loeb Rhoades & Co.

“By looking at me you can see how we were all interrelated through Wall Street,” Bernhard said in “What Goes Up,” a 2005 book on Wall Street history by Eric J. Weiner, who is now an editor at Bloomberg News.

Bernhard joined Lehman in 1953 and rose to general partner in 1962, serving as director of the investment management division. He left in 1972 to become a partner and member of the executive committee at Abraham & Co., which Lehman acquired three years later.

Lehman was forced into bankruptcy in September 2008, the most prominent victim of the global credit crisis. Joan Bernhard said her husband, who had left the bank decades earlier, “was sad to see it go.”

Bernhard offered himself as a prime example of the tight German-Jewish finance community that Stephen Birmingham wrote about in “Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York,” published in 1962.

“So even before I was born there were tentacles in all these investment-banking firms on Wall Street,” he said, according to Weiner’s book. “That’s the way it was in those days. When they talk about how relationships were important, that’s what they mean.”

Early Life

Robert Arthur Bernhard was born in May 1928, one of two sons of Richard J. Bernhard and the former Dorothy Lehman.

He graduated from Williams College in 1951, having spent his junior year in the U.S. Navy, and from Harvard Business School in 1953. Bernhard joined his father at Wertheim before moving to Lehman -- but not before seeking a job at First Boston Corp., where, he said, he was told: “I think you should go to Lehman Brothers because, you know, we don’t hire Jews.”

He left Abraham in 1972 and became a partner in the corporate finance department at Salomon Brothers, responsible for business development in Sweden and Japan. He became a partner in 1974.

In 1981 he created the investment firm Bernhard Associates, which merged with Orson Munn & Co. in 1990 to become Munn, Bernhard & Associates, Inc., later MB Investment Partners Inc. In 1997 he became a partner of McFarland Dewey & Co.

At various times he was chairman of the board at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a trustee of Lincoln Center and Vassar College, and president of the New York Urban League.

With his first wife, Frances Wells, he had four children: Adele, Michael, Susan and Steven. That marriage ended in divorce. He married Joan Mack Sommerfield in 1970, becoming the stepfather to Timothy and Thomas Sommerfield. They survive him, as do his younger brother, William, and 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

To contact the reporter on this story: Laurence Arnold in Washington at larnold4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Steven Gittelson, Mark Schoifet

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