Arnold A. Saltzman

Saltzman was born on October 1, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Russian immigrant father, Isidore, and his wife Dora.[1][2] It was a Jewish family and he had two sisters.[1] He attended Samuel J. Tilden High School in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn.[3] He was elected vice president of the student government,[4] and was named class orator by his senior class.[5]

He then entered Columbia College within Columbia University, majoring in economics and government.[6] He was president of his fraternity, Beta Sigma Rho.[7] He earned a top-level award for his performance on the Debate Council.[8] Saltzman graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in June 1936,[9] at the age of 19.[6]

He married his wife, the former Joan Roth, in a Jewish ceremony on November 21, 1942.[1][10] They raised three children, born between 1945 and 1951.[1] They went on to live in Sands Point, New York.[2] His son, Eric Saltzman, served as a director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.[3][11]

His first job was taken in 1936 with the Premiere Knitting Company,[6] the family sweater business.[1] He then entered government service, working for the Roosevelt administration as a member of the National Industrial Mobilization Committee.[6] He was in charge of the Military Price Control Section of the Office of Price Administration, with $8 billion of defense and Lend-Lease spending under his purview.[6] He was on the Procurement Policy Board, which had representatives from each large government agency.[6] Saltzman joined the United States Coast Guard; by 1943 he was a warrant officer,[12] and then by 1944 he was an ensign in it.[13][14] During the Korean War, he served in the Office of Price Stabilization.[6]

Saltzman returned to business, becoming vice president and then president of Premiere Knitting.[6] In 1957, Premiere was acquired by Botany Mills, a Passaic, New Jersey manufacturer of textiles that was rapidly expanding and diversifying.[15] He became vice president and a director of Botany Industries, an outgrowth of Botany Mills, from 1959 to 1962.[6] Saltzman was president of the Seagrave Corporation starting in 1961.[6] He took a company that mostly made fire-fighting equipment and diversified it via acquisition and other changes into one that did leather processing, made paint and industrial finishes, constructed low-cost houses, and sold mortgages.[6] He remained president of Seagrave into the 1970s.[16] Around 1970, Saltzman also headed a group that had a 24 percent interest in Trans Beacon Corporation, a movie distribution and theater operation that was a remnant of RKO Pictures.[17]

In 1957, Saltzman ran for the board of trustees of the village of Great Neck Estates, New York, on the ticket of the newly-created local Village Party and in opposition to the entrenched local Citizens Party.[18] Saltzman and the other Village Party candidates were defeated by decisive margins.[19]

A lifelong Democrat, Saltzman served five U.S. presidents as envoys on diplomatic missions.[2] He was a trouble-shooter for the U.S. Department of State during the Kennedy administration and Johnson administration years.[20] He helped negotiate the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in the mid-late 1960s.[2]

Saltzman was a hopeful for the Democratic nomination in the United States Senate election in New York, 1974.[21] But he had little support in the New York State Democratic Committee,[21] and instead he was chosen as an unsalaried advisor to New York State's Congressional delegation as it tried to heal internal divisions.[16] In 1976, he served as chair of the federal Advisory Committee on National Growth Policy Processes; it published a report entitled Forging America's Future: Strategies for National Growth and Development.[22]

He was co-author of the 1990 book Bending with the Winds: Kurt Waldheim and the United Nations.[23] In its review, Foreign Affairs magazine said that the book's examination of Kurt Waldheim's career was "meticulously undertaken" and that its recommendations for how the Secretary-General of the United Nations could better be chosen "[make] the book important today".[24]

Still in business, Saltzman headed Vista Resources (which Seagrave had become), a diversified public company, until selling majority interest in it in 1989.[25] He became chair of the Windsor Production Corporation, a privately held oil, real estate, and investment firm.[25] In 1992, he was named by Kyrgyzstan, newly independent of the Soviet Union, as its representative in negotiations for natural-resource arrangements with American companies.[20]

In 1993, Saltzman pleaded guilty in United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York to charges of insurance fraud related to a $610,000 claim before Chubb Insurance on behalf of a leather products company.[20][26] By 2001, there had still been no sentencing hearing in his case, a delay that legal experts said was extraordinary.[26] In 2002, having previously made financial restitution, Saltzman attempted to withdraw that felony plea, have it expunged, and substitute a misdemeanor plea instead, but a federal judge denied the request.[27]

In 2003, Columbia University's Institute of War and Peace Studies was renamed the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.[28] Two endowed chairs under the Saltzman name were also added at that time.[28] Saltzman later said, "Anything that can fight war and promote peace I'm for!"[2]

As a benefactor, Saltzman and his wife played a part in the creation of the Joan and Arnold Saltzman Community Services Center at Hofstra University, where he was a trustee emeritus.[2] The center provides health services both to Hofstra and the local community and additionally provides educational and practitioner experience for Hofstra students.[29]

He was founding president of the Nassau County Museum of Art,[30] having been given the charge in the late 1980s by the county executive, Thomas Gulotta, to revive and reimagine the county's former Fine Arts Museum.[31] For this, Newsday named him one of "23 Long Islanders whose track records say they're worth watching" in 1989.[31] He took a hands-on role in the museum task, to the extent of sometimes coming in direct conflict with the director of the museum.[32] The couple are reflected in the name of the Arnold and Joan Saltzman Fine Arts Building there, where he became chairman emeritus.[2] It was given this name following a large-scale renovation of the central building on the museum.[33] In 2012, Saltzman was the originating force behind bringing a world-class Marc Chagall exhibit to the museum.[30]

Saltzman also served as a trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art and was involved with acquisitions for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[20] In 2012, the library in Port Washington, New York, named its reading room after the couple following a large gift from the Saltzman Foundation.[34]

Saltzman died on January 2, 2014, at his home in Sands Point, New York.[1]

Saltzman was given honorary degrees by Adelphi University in 1985[35] and Hofstra University in 1986.[36]

In 2002, Saltzman was presented with the Order of Honor from the Republic of Georgia, "in recognition of his notable personal contribution to the implementation of international aid programs [and] his active support of Georgia's interest and generous charity work".[37]

• Arnold & Joan Saltzman Fine Art Building at Nassau County Museum of Art
• Joan and Arnold Saltzman Community Services Center at Hofstra University
• Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies