Business Books: Pete Peterson, from Nixon to Blackstone

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), 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.

Kissinger, a much more celebrated figure who once joked he was the only national security advisor with a fan club, replied that it was because he, Kissinger, was unavailable. "Peterson," Kissinger said, "I'm leaving for Acapulco later on today. Why else do you think you're sitting next to Ingrid Bergman?"

After leaving the White House, Peterson spent a decade running Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc, leaving abruptly after a power-sharing pact with co-chief executive Lewis Glucksman broke down.

The author Ken Auletta has said Peterson spent 50 hours in 1984 patiently recounting his Lehman days for the book "Greed and Glory on Wall Street."

But in his memoir, Peterson spends less than two pages on the 12 days of "furious negotiations" over his exit. He seems to pull his punches, saying the episode left him with only a "fair amount of ambivalence" and a "certain sense of personal betrayal" by Glucksman.

In 1985, Peterson co-founded Blackstone with Stephen Schwarzman, building it through its initial public offering in 2007. He retired as senior chairman last year.

The IPO netted Peterson just over $1 billion, most of which he committed to his own foundation. Peterson is now a vocal critic of wasteful and unsustainable spending and borrowing, and last year helped sponsor the documentary "I.O.U.S.A."

But Peterson does not condemn a lavish 60th birthday party for Schwarzman that is now viewed as a symbol of excess prior to the global financial crisis, saying only that the fete "often detracts" from Schwarzman's "many accomplishments."

He concludes with several pieces of career advice, among them to not be intellectually lazy, to choose battles carefully, to be true to one's own moral compass, and to balance one's business and personal life.

"Affirmation of one's work is great therapy," he says. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Eddie Evans)