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George E. Doty in 1964.
George E. Doty Sr., a former partner at Goldman Sachs and longtime watcher of the investment bank’s finances, died on Tuesday at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 94.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, though he had suffered a heart attack several years earlier, his son William said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Doty joined Goldman in 1964 as a partner and quickly became head of its administrative department. The position gave him oversight of some of the firm’s most important internal affairs, including the amount of money executives had to contribute upon making partner.
“From the day of his arrival, Doty was powerful,” wrote Charles D. Ellis in “The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs.” He said that Mr. Doty commanded one of the biggest shares of the firm’s profits.
Behind his post was a keen accounting mind that understood how Goldman’s finances interlocked. Within the firm, he was known as a conservative accounts keeper who closely scrutinized expenses and ordered that partner tax returns be prepared through Goldman.
“We wanted everyone to focus on the firm’s work all the time,” Mr. Doty told Mr. Ellis. “We didn’t want anyone to be worried about paying off debts. Our policy and our practice were simple: ‘Mother’s lookin’!'”
Mr. Doty was also known as a generous donor to Catholic nonprofit organizations, including his alma mater, Fordham University. In addition to being a consistent benefactor, he served as chairman of its board of trustees.
George Espy Doty Sr. was born Feb. 15, 1918, in New York City, the fourth of six children of George E. and Lillian Doty. He graduated from the Collegiate School in 1934 and attended Fordham, earning money on the side as a clerk for the city’s Department of Sanitation. Mr. Doty graduated in 1938 and earned a master’s degree from Columbia in 1939.
He began his career as an accountant at Price Waterhouse. In 1942, he enlisted in the United States Navy. After returning from World War II, he worked at Richards & Ganley and then at Lybrand, becoming a senior executive whose client list brimmed with major financial institutions.
Among those clients was Goldman, then a much smaller partnership with ambitions of becoming bigger. Mr. Doty was recruited by John C. Whitehead, a top Goldman executive who served in his Naval Reserve unit, and with whom he had held many long business conversations.
Over time, Mr. Doty and his financial conservatism served as a counterweight to the risk-taking of Goldman’s managing partner, Gus Levy. “I was brought in at least partly as the counterbalance and to try and prevent us from getting too exposed,” he told William Cohan in the book “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.”
Yet he could be magnanimous. Upon his induction as a Goldman partner in 1982, a young Goldman deal maker named Henry M. Paulson Jr. informed Mr. Doty that he would hold off on building an addition to his home in Barrington, Ill., to fulfill his partner capital obligations. But Mr. Doty told the future Treasury secretary to put in a smaller amount of money and finish the construction on his house, Mr. Cohan wrote.
Like many Goldman executives of that era, Mr. Doty favored keeping a low profile. When the firm was considering moving in the late 1970s, he authorized the construction of a massive but unassuming brick headquarters at 85 Broad Street in Lower Manhattan. Such was the nature of the office, known as 85 Broad, that The New Yorker once derided it as “one of the most forgettable buildings in New York.”
The interior was plain as well, with much of the furniture recycled from the firm’s old offices down the street, according to The New York Observer.
Still, one prominent example of risk-taking stood out during Mr. Doty’s career. He championed Goldman’s 1981 takeover of the commodity trading firm J. Aron & Company in an effort to catch up with competitors’ trading expansions. But the deal proved rocky soon after it closed, and Mr. Doty subsequently led one of Goldman’s first mass layoffs, in which he dismissed nearly 100 J. Aron staff members.
Mr. Doty retired from Goldman in 1984, becoming a limited partner. By that time, however, he had begun developing another reputation as a major religious philanthropist. A devout Catholic who attended 7:30 a.m. Mass before going to work, Mr. Doty and his wife, Marie, became impassioned donors to charity.
The two donated several million dollars to Fordham over the years, including $1.5 million to renovate the school’s church and $1 million to set up the Marie Ward Doty University Chair for the Aging.
In perhaps their crowning philanthropic achievement, Mr. Doty and his wife, who died in 2008, led the renovation of the Great Dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. By the 1960s, the dome of the church, which Catholics venerate as having been built over the site of Jesus’s tomb, was in serious disrepair.
It was Marie Doty, disturbed by the poor condition of the dome, who prompted her husband to pursue a restoration campaign, according to their son William. After about three years of construction, the dome of the church was completed on time by the end of 1996, according to the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.
In addition to his son William, Mr. Doty is survived by a sister, Joan O’Rourke; three daughters, Anna Marie Paine, Barbara Doty and Virginia Doty; another son, George Doty Jr.; 16 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.