John L. Weinberg

Weinberg was the son of Sidney Weinberg, a banker at Goldman Sachs, and was born and grew up in the Westchester County suburb of Scarsdale. He was educated at Deerfield Academy. He graduated with an A.B. in economics from Princeton University in 1948 after completing a senior thesis titled "Status and Functions of Corporate Directors."[2] He then attended Harvard Business School. He had served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marines in World War II and was recalled for the Korean War.

He joined Goldman Sachs in 1950 and rose to become a senior investment banker and chairman of the management committee, running the firm from 1976 to 1990.[3] At Goldman, he resisted taking the firm public, and during his tenure, Goldman refused to work on hostile takeovers.

He was a director of the Seagram drinks group, newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder, and the chemical firm Du Pont. He was a trustee of Princeton and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He endowed the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

He hired a man to keep his name and his firm's out of the press, and kept him off the full-time payroll (though he sat full-time at a desk in head office) so that if, improbably, a comment did slip out, it could be honestly dismissed as not coming from a Goldman Sachs employee.

He died of complications following a fall at the age of 81. He and his wife Sue Ann Gotshal, daughter of Sylvan Gotshal (1897–1968),[4] lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and had two children, son John S. Weinberg[5] and daughter Jean Weinberg Rose,[6] and five grandchildren, Annie, Peter, and Jack Weinberg and Johnny and Emily Rose.[7][8] His son followed family tradition with Goldman Sachs and was vice chairman from June 2006 to October 6, 2015.[9]