Lewis E. Lehrman, who as a young man helped expand a family-owned Pennsylvania grocery business into Rite Aid, for years one of the nation’s largest drugstore chains, and then used his personal fortune to mount a surprisingly strong, though losing, bid to become the governor of New York in 1982, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 87.
His death was announced by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which he co-founded in 1994. He had lived with Parkinson’s disease for many years.
Tall and dapper and given to campaigning in shirtsleeves and his trademark red suspenders, Mr. Lehrman sought the governorship as a Reaganite Republican whose conservative, if not antiquated, economic proposals made him an odd duck in a state party that had been dominated by relative moderates like Nelson A. Rockefeller and liberals like Jacob K. Javits.
He espoused a flat 10 percent income tax for everyone and proposed tying American currency to the value of gold instead of letting it fluctuate against other currencies on foreign exchange markets. The United States had dropped the gold standard in 1933.
Though a neophyte on the New York political stage, Mr. Lehrman had one thing the party desperately needed in 1982 after Mr. Rockefeller’s death — the money to finance a vibrant campaign. Mr. Lehrman had holdings of about $60 million at the time (roughly $200 million today).
He had made that money when his brother-in-law, Alex Grass, led the transformation of a small Lehrman family-owned discount chain into Rite Aid, at one point the largest drug and beauty supplies chain on the East Coast. (In 2023, the company, saddled with huge debts and facing hundreds of opioid-based lawsuits, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It closed its remaining stores last September.)
With characteristic zeal, Mr. Lehrman crisscrossed the Northeast scouting locations and leasing outlets as Rite Aid grew tenfold in eight years during his time there. From 1969 to 1977, when he served as president, the chain expanded from 69 to 648 stores and from $47 million in sales to $455 million. At the same time, he used his talents as an enthusiastic if brash pitchman to lure investors, and for many years they — and he — saw Rite Aid’s stock soar.
“He was like a Pied Piper,” Bruce Greer, a financial analyst, told The New York Times in 1982.
That year, Mr. Lehrman used more than a tenth of his personal fortune to finance a campaign against the Democrat-Liberal nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. In their first debate, Mr. Cuomo suggested that Mr. Lehrman, a Pennsylvanian until five years before, was something of a well-heeled carpetbagger.
“It’s a candidacy without a history in this state, without governmental experience in this state and, indeed, and again respectfully, without a proven commitment to the people of this state,” Mr. Cuomo said.
“The election,” Mr. Cuomo said at another point, “raises the question of whether the leadership of the greatest state in the nation can be earned or can be bought.”
Mr. Lehrman responded by picturing Mr. Cuomo as something of a Johnny One-Note who repeatedly tried to tie Mr. Lehrman to President Ronald Reagan without advancing a program of his own. “Beyond negative criticism of a man in Washington, what are your solutions?” Mr. Lehrman retorted.
He portrayed himself as a leader whose entrepreneurial skills would be an asset for him as the state’s chief executive. He also said he’d be tougher on crime than Mr. Cuomo. Campaigning in New York City, which had recorded more than 1,800 homicides the year before, Mr. Lehrman, a proponent of the death penalty, accused Mr. Cuomo of supporting criminal justice policies that would have “the effect of coddling criminals.”
On Election Day, Mr. Lehrman came close to winning, falling short by only 180,000 votes, or two percentage points. Though journalists speculated that he might run again, to unseat Mr. Cuomo in 1986, and even regarded him as a dark horse in the 1988 presidential campaign, he never officially sought political office again.
Instead, he concentrated on selling his conservative ideas to a national public. At the urging of President Reagan, who once considered him for secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Lehrman formed a group called Citizens for America. Its mission was to promote the so-called Reagan Revolution, which introduced policies like “supply-side economics,” based on the theory that deep cuts in taxes and a stripping away of federal regulations would yield enough consumer spending, job creation and economic growth to finance the federal budget.
With the energy of a disciplined jogger, Mr. Lehrman spent months hopscotching around the nation giving speeches and talk-show interviews, breaking bread with conservative activists and forming branches of Citizens for America in 200 Congressional districts.
“You just don’t know where a campaign of ideas is going to lead,” he said, differentiating his role from that of a political candidate, even though skeptics thought running for president in 1988 was precisely what Mr. Lehrman had in mind.
Citizens for America also championed anti-communist guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan. Mr. Lehrman even traveled to the Angola bush to meet with the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, and gave framed copies of the Declaration of Independence to rebels there and in other countries.
Afterward, he partnered with another wealthy conservative businessman, Richard Gilder, to form the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in 1994. It sponsored lectures by historians and traveling exhibits and nurtured history instruction in public high schools, offering field trips.
And it played a major role in reinvigorating the New-York Historical Society (now the New York Historical) on Central Park West in Manhattan, stabilizing its finances and recruiting people like the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns onto its board and Dr. Louise Mirrer, a medievalist and City University administrator, as its president.
Mr. Lehrman and Mr. Gilder also moved their priceless collections of historical documents and artifacts — including signed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment banning slavery — into the society’s basement, opening a vault there for the archive and a reading room for scholars.
Some historians specializing n New York were troubled that the society seemed to be soft-pedaling its mission of emphasizing New York history in favor of a more national focus that would gratify Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman. The society mounted a well-attended exhibition on slavery that, critics said, seemed influenced by Mr. Lehrman’s views. Slavery, he had said, “was an institution supported throughout the world, but Americans took the initiative in destroying it.” He deplored the belief, as he put it, that “American history consists of one failure after another to deal with the issue of slavery.”
To accusations that the institute was ultimately interested in promoting regressive ideas, Mr. Lehrman replied: “The scholars we have sponsored — well, the vast majority — are more on the liberal side than on the conservative side.”
Lewis Edward Lehrman — called Lew by friends and headline writers — was born on Aug. 15, 1938, in Harrisburg along with his twin brother, Gilbert. His father, Benjamin, ran a wholesale grocery business spawned by his own father, Louis, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who started out peddling shoelaces and sugar. His mother, Rose (Herman) Lehrman, was a stylish woman who had a strong interest in the arts. Lewis grew up with two sisters, Lois and Barbara.
In explaining his deep interest in history in interviews, Mr. Lehrman would recall trips his elementary school classes took to Gettysburg, where his teacher would encourage students to search the battlefield for bullet remnants.
For high school, he shifted to the Hill School, an elite boarding and prep school in Pottstown, Pa. He was admitted to Yale, where by his sophomore year he had settled into serious study and won a Carnegie teaching fellowship. After two years of teaching at Yale and Harvard, he determined that his restless disposition would not mesh with the pace of a life of instruction and scholarship; instead, he moved full time into the family business.
By then, under the stewardship of his brother-in-law, Mr. Grass, that business had already begun opening discount drugstores. Mr. Lehrman accelerated the expansion, though he sometimes suggested in his gubernatorial campaign that he was responsible for founding Rite Aid, a claim that drew a public rebuke from Mr. Grass.
In 1966, Mr. Lehrman married Louise Stillman, the daughter of Charles Latimer Stillman, a former executive and finance chairman for Time Inc. A onetime New York Junior League debutante, she was Episcopalian and he was Jewish, and when questioned about their intermarriage during the 1982 campaign, they said that their five children had attended services of both faiths and would choose a religion that they wished to associate with when they got older. In 1985, Mr. Lehrman converted to Roman Catholicism, angering some of his Jewish political supporters. He declined to offer an explanation, saying his decision was a private matter.
His wife survives him, as do their five children, Leland, John, Thomas, Eliza, and Peter; 15 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Lehrman left the presidency of Rite Aid in 1977 at the age of 39, though he remained a company director until his run for governor. In later years, he was a managing director of Morgan Stanley, and in 1991, he established his own investment firm, LE Lehrman & Co.
While pursuing a career in finance, he continued to follow his interest in history and economics by writing three books on Abraham Lincoln, several on monetary policy and the gold standard, and one on the alliance between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, an admiring study published in 2017.
Promoting that last book, Mr. Lehrman revealed something of his credo as a historian in an interview with his local newspaper, Greenwich Time. “The one thing about the past,” he said, “is it’s always present.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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