Business Books: Pete Peterson, from Nixon to Blackstone

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, June 4 (Reuters) - Few on Wall Street have had the life experiences of Pete Peterson -- billionaire, former head of Lehman Brothers, co-founder of Blackstone Group LP (BX.N: Quote, Profile, Research), and one-time butt of a joke by Henry Kissinger.

Peterson, who turns 83 on Friday, has been on a glide path from Depression-era dust storms through politics and Wall Street to his current perch as an elder statesman who warns against fiscal irresponsibility.

He traces that path in "The Education of An American Dreamer: How a Son of Greek Immigrants Learned His Way From a Nebraska Diner to Washington, Wall Street, and Beyond" (Twelve, $34.99), a memoir to be published on June 8.

The diner in the title was owned by his father, who won customers in the early 1930s Depression by offering $5.50 worth of food to those who paid $5 in advance.

Peterson recalls unusual details from his early years. He recounted a challenge from his fraternity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to cop a local stripper's G-string. (He was successful.) Shortly after, he was expelled from the school for plagiarizing a paper by Roy Cohn, who would become Sen. Joseph McCarthy's controversial counsel.

He rated himself a "B" for his eight years running photographic equipment maker Bell & Howell Corp, saying his failure to push the company technologically offset success at boosting profit and revenue.

By 1971, he was assistant to President Richard Nixon on international economic affairs. A year later, he became commerce secretary, where he would come to recognize structural flaws in the Soviet economy in the early stages of detente.

Once, sitting next to the actress Ingrid Bergman at a dinner, he wondered aloud why that honor should fall to him.