Richard C. Leone *69

Richard Leone, a longtime president of the Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund), and a prominent figure in Democratic administrations in Trenton, N.J., died July 16, 2015. He was 75.

Leone graduated from the University of Rochester in 1962, and in 1969 earned the first Ph.D. awarded by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. In 1973 and 1977, he managed the successful gubernatorial campaigns of Brendan T. Byrne ’49, and at 33 was New Jersey’s youngest treasurer.

Leone became president of the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1980, and in 1985 he became a managing director at Dillon Read & Co. Republican Gov. Thomas H. Kean ’57 appointed Leone to the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. From 1990 to 1994 Leone was chairman under Kean’s Democratic successor, Jim Florio.

Later, Leone often criticized the governors of New York and New Jersey for turning the Port Authority into a political bartering agency where professionals were replaced by patronage.

From 1989 to 2011, Leone was president of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public-policy research organization focusing on inequality, voting rights, civil liberties, and opposing privatization of Social Security. From 1993 to 1996, he was an APGA board member.

Leone is survived by his wife, Meg Cox; two children; a granddaughter; and his first wife, Anita Osper.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.