Felix Rohatyn recalls joining the ITT board.

• Position: DIRECTOR MEMOIR - Reprint

Harold Geneen invited me to serve on the ITT board. It was a board filled with accomplished, even celebrated individuals. George Brown, of Texas's Brown and Root, the man who had nearly single-handedly financed the early elections of Lyndon Johnson; John McCone, who had served as director of the Atomic Energy Commission and then of the CIA; and Eugene R. Black, a former head of the World Bank--all were members of the ITT board. This was heady company for a young investment banker, and I was deeply flattered to have been chosen.

[Lazard Senior Partner] Andre Meyer decided, however, that it was too heady company. It wasn't just that I was young or not sufficiently a member of the Wall Street establishment. Rather, he explained to me with some delicacy, a Jewish refugee like myself would never be fully accepted on the board of what was then a very Waspy, deliberately blue-blooded company.

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He had suggested to Geneen that rather than young Rohatyn, it would make more sense to offer the board membership to another Lazard partner. Mr. Meyer's choice was a man who had been the CEO of a large company and who, not so coincidentally, carried himself with a Protestant aristocratic grace shared by many of his fellow Brook Club members. With deep but silent disappointment, I resigned myself to Mr. Meyer's logic.

Geneen, however, refused to see things in such a narrow way. He rejected Mr. Meyer's suggestion. In fact, he made it clear that if Lazard...