John F. W. Rogers

Rogers was born in Seneca Falls, New York on April 15, 1956 where his father owned a wholesale frozen foods business and his mother was a dental hygienist. He is a graduate of the George Washington University.[3]

Rogers has held numerous posts in U.S. government including research assistant for President Gerald Ford's director of communications David Gergen, assistant to President Ronald Reagan (at twenty-seven, the youngest person to receive that responsibility), and when Reagan's chief of staff James Baker became Secretary of the Treasury, he took Rogers with him to the Treasury where Rogers was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury from 1985 to 1987. From 1991 to 1993, during George H. W. Bush's administration, he served as Under Secretary of State for Management.[3]

In 1994, Rogers joined Goldman Sachs in the Fixed Income Division and eventually became the Chief of Staff to CEOs Jon S. Corzine, Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, and David M. Solomon. He was made a partner in 2000,[4] and "has no revenue-generating responsibilities and strives to have virtually no public profile."[1] He is said to have been United States Treasury Secretary Paulson's closest advisor while at Goldman,[4] as well as a member of United States Secretary of State James Baker's inner circle.[3]

In 2011, CEO Lloyd Blankfein named Rogers one of the eleven executives of the firm.[3] As of 2019, he was executive vice president, chief of staff and secretary to the Board of Directors at Goldman as well as serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council, the American Atlanticist international affairs think tank.[5]

Rogers owns a home on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. and is married to Deborah Lehr, with whom he has two children. Lehr, a journalist with Huffington Post,[6] was a former senior negotiator in the Clinton Administration on China trade policy.[7] In 2018, Rogers and Lehr attended President Trump's state dinner with President Emmanuel Macron of France.[8]

According to a 2006 profile in The New York Times, Rogers, who is interested in historic preservation, "does not welcome public scrutiny"[4] and hates being photographed.[1] His friends "compare him to the George Smiley character in John le Carré's spy novels. Mr. Rogers, a slight, retiring man with a preference for tan raincoats, brings the kind of technical staff expertise and, his friends say, the ability to gravitate toward the seat of power in bureaucracies that recall Le Carré's spymaster."[4]