Richard Beattie, a mergers lawyer who helped pioneer private equity takeovers — work that was immortalized in the much-lauded book “Barbarians at the Gate” — and who served in Washington and New York City government, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
His daughter Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen said the cause was cancer.
Over nearly six decades at the white-shoe New York firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, the soft-spoken Mr. Beattie — Dick, as he was widely known — became one of Wall Street’s most-sought corporate advisers.
He helped put together AOL’s $165 billion takeover of Time Warner in 2001 and JPMorgan Chase’s $58 billion acquisition of Bank One in 2004, and advised the board of the insurer American International Group on its $85 billion federal bailout during the 2008 financial crisis.
He went on to serve as Simpson Thacher’s chairman from 1991 to 2004 and as senior chairman until his death.
But his earliest and most enduring claim to fame was in the late 1960s, when he presciently recognized that private equity firms — corporate takeover artists who used debt to buy companies — would become a major force on Wall Street.
As a young associate, Mr. Beattie was introduced to Henry R. Kravis, who would go on to be one of the top names in leveraged buyouts. Mr. Beattie became Mr. Kravis’s go-to counsel on ever-larger takeovers, culminating in the $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco, completed in 1989, that was chronicled by the journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in the book “Barbarians at the Gate,” published that year. For a decade, the transaction held the record as the biggest leveraged buyout.
Mr. Beattie was featured heavily in the book, negotiating finer legal points for KKR late into the night — at one point, he fell asleep, sprawled out on the floor of another law firm’s office — and seeking out intelligence on a rival bid for Nabisco.
“Dick was always by our side,” Mr. Kravis, who once tried to lure Mr. Beattie to KKR, said in an interview.
He was also deeply involved in government and philanthropic work. He took a break from corporate law in the late 1970s to work in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, becoming general counsel for what was then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services).
After rejoining Simpson Thacher, Mr. Beattie served on the New York City Board of Education and founded a nonprofit to help the city’s public schools.
“I’ve been very fortunate to move within the public sector and the private sector,” he told the magazine The American Lawyer in 2011. “Once you become successful, it’s important to give back.”
Richard Irwin Beattie Jr. was born on March 24, 1939, in New York City to Richard Sr., a photographer, and Ruth Beattie. He grew up in Rye, N.Y., where he played quarterback in high school.
Enrolling in Dartmouth, he became the first in his family to attend college, according to his daughter Ms. Frelinghuysen. After he graduated in 1961, he joined the Marines for four years, becoming the pilot of a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft. He was known as “Night Fighter,” Ms. Frelinghuysen said, because of his willingness to volunteer for nighttime missions.
In the middle of his military service, in 1963, he married Diana Lewis. Two years later, he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. While studying for his degree, his daughters Lisa and Nina were born.
Joining Simpson Thacher after graduating in 1968, Mr. Beattie quickly became involved in the nascent business of corporate takeovers. The next year, he met Mr. Kravis, then a star banker at Bear Stearns.
When Mr. Kravis, together with his cousin George R. Roberts and Jerome Kohlberg, broke away from Bear Stearns to form KKR in 1976, Mr. Beattie continued to advise him on deals. In the process, Mr. Beattie helped turn Simpson Thacher into a law firm of choice for private equity financiers, securing other clients like Blackstone, Stephen A. Schwarzman’s firm.
Clients and colleagues described Mr. Beattie as a steadying presence at the negotiating table, one who never raised his voice in anger. He later served on several boards, including those of Harley-Davidson and the investment bank Evercore, which one of its founders, Roger Altman, a longtime friend of Mr. Beattie’s, ran out of Simpson Thacher’s Manhattan office in its early days.
“He commanded respect, with a calm intellect and judgment,” said Ralph L. Schlosstein, a friend and fellow former Carter administration official who later helped found the money-management firm BlackRock and who served as co-chairman and co-chief executive of Evercore.
Mr. Kravis, Mr. Beattie’s best-known client, also became a friend. The two shared a love of fishing and horseback riding. When Mr. Kravis’s son Harrison died in a car accident at the family ranch in Colorado in 1991, Mr. Beattie flew with him to bring the body home.
“He was there the whole way with me,” Mr. Kravis recalled. “When he was a friend, he was a friend.”
Beyond corporate law, Mr. Beattie took a keen interest in government and education. At the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, where he worked from 1977 to 1979, he focused on civil rights matters and helped create Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds.
In 1980, he was called on to help spin out the Department of Education as a separate cabinet agency; he worked as director of the transition under Shirley M. Hufstedler, who became the first education secretary. Decades later, he served in Bill Clinton’s administration as a special envoy to Cyprus.
Education was also a focus of Mr. Beattie’s philanthropic efforts. In the 1980s, he was asked by Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York to join the city’s Board of Education. In 1989, Mr. Beattie founded New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit that championed smaller public schools in New York; its board was stocked with Wall Street leaders.
“Dick was passionate that public education was the source of upward mobility in our society,” said Mr. Schlosstein, who serves on New Visions’ board.
Mr. Beattie also served on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
In addition to Ms. Frelinghuysen, he is survived by his wife; his daughter Nina Beattie; his younger sister, Evelyn Lewis; and six grandchildren.
David Tatel, a retired federal appeals court judge and another Carter administration veteran, said there was only one way to describe Mr. Beattie.
“The right word is giant,” he said. “There were giants in the ’60s and ’70s. There are very few giants left today. Dick was one of them.”
