Brad grew up on the north shore of Long Island. His father was Chairman of the Discount Corporation, which at one point funded (inter alia) one-fourth of the federal government debt. Brad attended the rather well-heeled Greenville School: it was a world not unlike that in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz”; one of his classmates was Gloria Vanderbilt. The school not at all to his liking, Brad rebelled. His father sent him to the renowned Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York (one of the settings of Regarding Henry with Harrison Ford). He flourished at the school; discipline was quite strict, and its sagacious headmaster took him in hand. He played football and hockey, plowed fields, and planted asparagus. Quite simply, the school “turned me from a boy into a man.” (As Hemingway writes in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Becoming a man is not a matter of an 18th birthday.”) Later in life, Brad would serve as Trustee of the Millbrook School for 28 years and receive its first “Most Distinguished Alumnus” award. (Now an elderly man, the headmaster once remarked to him during a school dinner, “The naughty and rebellious ones such as you were by far the most interesting.”)
Brad graduated during World War II. Rather than enroll in Princeton, where he had been accepted, he enlisted in the Navy. Following Officer Training School, he served on an LST (Landing Ship Tank) II, the “magic carpet” that transported soldiers and Marines. (The soldiers quite enjoyed riding motorcycles round inside the LST!) At the end of the war, Brad disembarked in San Francisco and hitchhiked home. (As he went, he attended a lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona. Following the lecture, he asked Wright whether he would design a solar house for him. Wright did so; but as the house would have cost $100,000 to build—a colossal sum at the time—it remained only a plan!)
Brad now entered Princeton. The dormitories full, he slept in Baker Rink his first night. He was then one of three in a two-man room. (One of his roommates would soon drop out; he later became a renowned photographer.) While at Princeton, Brad was a member of the Cottage Club, one of the eating societies at the University. On graduating in 1948 with honors in economics, Brad received a scholarship to study international investing at Leeds University over the summer; he took a berth on the Queen Elizabeth, in steerage, for $200. Till now, Brad had been in all-male settings—the Millbrook School, the Navy, Princeton: it was now time to be with women.
The headquarters of the newly created Marshall Plan were in Paris. Together with a passel of other young men from Ivy League schools, Brad joined the headquarters as a messenger, through which role he met a great many people. One day, while making his rounds, he happened to meet his sister’s former roommate at Vassar; she induced her boss to interview Brad, who offered him a position at once. In his new role, Brad dispensed funds to projects in Morocco, Portugal, and Iceland. (In the latter country, he aided a hotel, a fishing vessel, and a power plant, all of which did quite well.) Within a short while, he became Assistant Director of the Overseas Territory Division—Europe was still very much a colonial power—overseeing the distribution of funds in Africa.
Two years later, an American officer who had been with the resistance in Yugoslavia put Brad in touch with one of his former British comrades who was now Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. St. Antony was a new college; it had been funded by Antonin Besse, a French merchant who had founded a trading empire in Aden, Yemen. (Besse had also smuggled arms into Ethiopia and then aided Montgomery in North Africa; he funded the college because he felt the best smugglers were British, and he attributed their skill to the British system of higher education!) The Warden invited Brad to St. Antony’s to study international investment in Africa. Brad wrote his thesis on “Cecil Rhodes’s dream,” a railroad from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo; to conduct research, he–joined by his new wife–hitchhiked for six months from the Cape to Egypt. (Brad’s most efficacious technique: he would place his wife on the road-side of a tree and hide on the other; once the male driver stopped to give his wife a lift, Brad would leap out and join them!) Their trip was chockfull of adventures—staying with the British High Judge of Uganda, being warned not to stay at the storied Shepheard Hotel in Cairo (the hotel was burned down that very night), and so on.
Brad and his wife now returned to the United States. He was recalled into the Navy—the Korean War having begun—and, following Officer Training School, served as an Officer of Naval Intelligence (as a Full Lieutenant) for four years in Washington. He then joined the investment banking firm of F. Eberstadt & Co. in New York City, its eponymous founder a fellow Princetonian. (Brad was to find Wall Street chockfull of fellow Cottage members and fellow messengers from the Marshall Plan.) Quite unusual for the time, Eberstadt bought and sold companies—superb training for a young investor. When the firm spun off its investment banking division, Brad and his fellow partners bought that division, creating their own investment banking firm, New York Securities. They began a series of acquisitions–acquiring, for instance, a trucking company with funds from the U.S. Steel pension fund. The firm flourished.
While Brad was with this firm, one of his friends from Paris became President Nixon’s Chief of Personnel. He recruited Brad to become the first President of a new organization spun off from the Agency for International Development, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In his new role, Brad reported to President Nixon; one of his board members was Paul Volker, who would become a close friend. When Brad became President, the Corporation had $200 million in assets–and $1 billion in losses. President Salvador Allende had seized the copper mines of American corporations in Chile, all of which OPIC had insured; Brad negotiated a plan with Allende for paying off the losses of these corporations.
After two-and-a-half years, Brad returned to Wall Street. He now founded his own firm, Bradford Ventures, backed by the Bessemer Securities Corporation–the firm of Henry Phipps of Carnegie Steel—as well as European investors. His firm engaged in leveraged buyouts (LBOs): it would buy American companies, greatly improve those companies, and then take them public or sell them. The firm, which Brad ran for 25 years, was exceedingly successful.
Throughout his career, Brad has hunted and fished throughout the world, often running great risks in doing so. For an outdoors magazine, he once wrote an article entitled “Nine Lives,” having almost been killed nine times. For instance, once while wading through a river in the wilds of Argentina, he found himself sinking into quicksand. As he went deeper and deeper, he noticed a nearby log and hurled himself at it: it held. (“You were fortunate,” his Irish/Argentinian guide later remarked: “That log was not supposed to be there.”) On another occasion, his car was surrounded by the Mau Mau in the countryside of Kenya: the Mau Mau Uprising had just begun. Thinking quickly, he threw a handful of money out the window; as the Mau Mau scrambled for the bills and coins, he slammed down the accelerator. The following week, a British fisherman was hacked to death in that very spot. On yet another occasion, Brad was with an inexperienced guide on a remote Canadian river. While in the middle of the river, during a storm, their canoe flipped. With the greatest of difficulty, Brad was able to retrieve the canoe, without which they would have been lost. By the time they arrived at their camp, hypothermia had set in. “It was rather cold,” he commented laconically.
Brad’s children—he has four—grew up on a farm off Pretty Brook Road, where they raised horses, cows, chickens, and other livestock. Brad had a simple rule: only once the animals had eaten could the children themselves eat—a fine lesson in responsibility! Dinner was a time for tutelage: while the children ate, Brad would sketch out his business deals on a chalkboard. Quite naturally, one of his children became a veterinary surgeon—and another took over his firm!
Brad was a Trustee of Princeton Health for 20 years or so. He continues to serve on the System’s Investment and Finance Committees. He has included a gift to Princeton Medical Center Foundation in his will. Why a gift by will? “One needs a certain ‘reserve’ while one is alive. Once one no longer needs that reserve, it can go to one’s children and charities.”
And why a gift at all? Brad is quite passionate on this point: “One must give back to society so that its institutions can continue; after all, it is this society and these institutions that have given one the life one has had. Society and its institutions have nurtured and sustained us; if we do not nurture and sustain them in turn, we have quite simply failed. Without our support, society and its institutions will simply rot away. As we take from society, we must give back to society; giving is always better than taking.
“My father used to say, ‘Those who foresee the events of tomorrow, control those events.’ I foresee clearly that the hospital will need support in the future. This is a revolutionary time for health care: stem-cells, for instance, are transforming the field. The hospital will most certainly be a part of that revolution, that transformation. We must give so that tomorrow’s children will have an even better life, even better health care.”
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