Felix
Rohatyn (right) with Ronald Tauber
(left) and Kenneth Bialkin.
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AMERICAN JEWISH
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The Day
Felix Rohatyn
Saved NYC in a Saloon
By Tim Boxer
 ELIX
ROHATYN, the Wall Street
consultant and former ambassador to France, who accepted the Emma
Lazarus Statue of Liberty Award from the American Jewish Historical
Society in New York, remarked how he had lived a life of
contradiction.
He was both an American and a
refugee. Americans are born free, but he was a refugee, born in
Vienna, who escaped from Nazi persecution in France in 1940 and
acquired freedom by sheer luck.
Even while living in New York he
never felt like he really belonged. That is, not until 1975 when
Gov. Hugh Carey asked him to join with Mayor Ed Koch
in a valiant effort to rescue the city from the brink of bankruptcy.
Those were bleak days, when the only
reaction from Washington was a rank “Drop Dead” on the front
page of the Daily News.
But first Carey had to find Rohatyn.
He searched everywhere. He finally found the financial wizard
hanging out at Elaine’s, the much-celebrated restaurant.
Rohatyn, sympathetic to the city’s
fiscal plight, looked for a phone. Aware of the high profile
clientele packing the celebrity saloon, Carey cautioned, “We
can’t talk here.”
The two powerhouses marched across
Second Avenue to a nondescript watering hole to use the public
phone.
A boozing customer overheard the
conversation and exclaimed, “Look at these two guys. They’re
running the City of New York from a bar!”
That cracked up the AJHS dinner
guests including president Kenneth Bialkin, Henry Kravis, Martin
Lipton and Mortimer Zuckerman.
But it still remained for Rohatyn to
close the circle, which opened when he escaped from Marseille in
1940, with the Gestapo at his heels.
The time came 60 years later when
the mayor of Marseille invited Rohatyn to the dedication of a square
in the memory of Varian Fry.
Fry was a young American who came to
Marseille in 1940 and helped spirit 2,000 artists and intellectuals,
mostly Jewish (among whom were Hanna Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max
Ernst), to safety in America. He did this for a year in the
face of fierce opposition by the State Dept.
“I spoke about Varian Fry,”
Rohatyn said, “and thought about the possibility that our family
might well have been beneficiaries of his efforts. We were there at
the same time, obtained false papers, false visas, and followed the
same itinerary.
“We will, of course, never know.
But I thought that Varian Fry would be pleased to see a square named
after him in Marseille and an American ambassador, who happened to
be Jewish, honoring him in front of the American consulate.
“I had closed the circle.”
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