Fresh Playing Fields

By John S. DeMott

In a mid-career reverse, a general goes to Wall Street

Wall Street has snared its share of bristling talent but rarely a catch like the new general partner that Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb Inc. announced last week: Brigadier General Pete Dawkins, 45, U.S. Army (ret.). As head of Lehman Brothers' public finance group, the former All-America halfback will work with states and municipalities in raising money, a position that will allow him to make friends and influence people around the country. His salary and bonuses will easily exceed $100,000 a year. Dawkins has never worked on Wall Street, but Lehman Brothers bought a name and a remarkable track record.

To college students of the 1950s, West Point's Peter Miller Dawkins headed the Who's Who of his era. He was, in drumfire order, first captain of the corps of cadets, president of his class of 1959, captain of the football team, Heisman Trophy winner and a "star man," ranking in the top 5% of his class academically. No other West Pointer has mustered all those honors, before or since. After Dawkins married Judith Wright in 1961, he studied philosophy, politics and economics as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he excelled at Britain's own game, rugby. Then he enrolled at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School: in 1969 he earned a master's degree and he then returned to Princeton for a doctorate in public affairs in 1979.

Outside the classroom, his military career marched smartly ahead. He rose rapidly in the Army, winning combat decorations in Viet Nam and later helping the Pentagon set up the Volunteer Army. At 43, he became the youngest brigadier general on active duty at the time, strengthening a long-held presumption among peers and superiors that Dawkins would one day inevitably be Army Chief of Staff.

Dawkins' personal style is less brassy bluster than civilian silk. At Washington dinners and cocktail parties, he adroitly works a crowd and makes friends readily. Says retired Colonel Junius J. Bleiman, now an assistant dean at the Woodrow Wilson School and one of Dawkins' instructors during his days at West Point: "He is easy to get along with. There is really no pomp to Peter."

But there is the capacity for the hard, calculating decision: in July, after a 24-year career, Dawkins resigned from the Army, wife Judi in attendance at the farewell ceremony at Fort Myer, Va. The move did not surprise his parents, Henry, a dentist now retired, and Frances, who lives in a condominium in Bloomfield Hills, a comfortable Detroit suburb not far from Royal Oak, where Pete grew up. Says Frances: "He said there was an optimum age to make a change, and this was it."

Dawkins' decision appeared to be largely a matter of timing. While recuperating from back surgery last year, Dawkins saw his future parade before him. "With weeks to look at the ceiling," he says, "you take a more reflective view. Even as much as I enjoyed life as a soldier, I realized there were lots of other parts to life." He would have had to retire from the Army, at his pace, after 35 years of service, which would have made him 56--possibly too old, he felt, to embark fresh on a new line of endeavor but too young in his view to drop out of an active working life.

The job of Army Chief of Staff certainly would have had its rewards. "I'm a competitive person," he admits. "I always want to be the best, to go as far as I could go, although I didn't sit around thinking about being Chief of Staff." But would it have been rewarding enough for Dawkins? Says a Pentagon colonel, a close colleague: "When you are already a general in this building, being Chief of Staff is not the most desirable thing you can imagine." Though his Lehman Brothers' salary is at least twice his Army pay, money had little to do with his decision, claims Dawkins' longtime friend Tom Brokaw of NBC. Says he: "The military put a lot of constraints on his personal life because he had to move so often. But the main issue to him has always been public service."

Dawkins insists that "in no way was I disillusioned with the Army." The decision to resign was a "fork in the road," he says, that turned into "a very busy intersection" with many job offers. Investment banking had a special allure, one that Dawkins believes offers an opportunity to develop a variety of expert skills. His friends predict that he will establish the obligatory Wall Street base and then go into politics. He leans to the Republican side, though he maintains close contact with the Kennedy clan. Says Dawkins: "I am very serious about doing something with my life. I'm very interested in public policy. But I'm also interested in business. One thing at a time." --By John S. DeMott.

Reported by Bruce W. Nelan/Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Bruce W. Nelan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.