Richard Blum was the kind of financier who not only enjoyed accumulating his fortune but seemed to take even greater pleasure in putting it to good use. The lifelong San Franciscan earned his first million by age 30. When he died on Feb. 27 of cancer, at 86, his works, wide interests, and numerous philanthropies had enjoyed the benefit of his moneymaking prowess for a half-century and more.
The son of a dealer in the clothing trade who specialized in robes and raincoats, Blum seems to have been driven from a very early age, especially after his father died when Blum was 8. He put himself through the University of California at Berkeley. While earning a master’s degree in business administration, Blum joined the brokerage firm of Sutro & Co. where, six years later, he became a partner.
Blum had a flair for theatrical gestures as well as an instinct for shrewd investment. In 1968, he prompted Sutro to purchase the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for $8 million. Four years later, when Blum and his partners sold their property for $40 million to the toymaker Mattel Inc., he presided over the deal-signing formalities at the Colosseum in Rome. In 1975, he founded his own investment management firm, Blum Capital Partners.
Blum’s causes and interests were many and varied and generously funded by a personalized style once described in a profile as “aggressive straight shooter with boundless drive and a disarming ‘Lt. Columbo’ style that might seem to border on the bumbling but is actually quite effective.” He was a longtime patron of the Democratic Party, locally and nationally, chairman of the University of California Board of Regents, and civic benefactor, human rights activist, long-distance runner, and mountaineer.
It was mountaineering, in fact, that sent him to the Himalayas where, after leading a partial ascent of Mt. Everest, Blum found himself entranced by the culture and people of the region. In 1981, he established the American Himalayan Foundation, which builds schools and hospitals in Tibet, and, later, the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, which focuses on solutions to global poverty. His long friendship with the Dalai Lama led him to the co-chairmanship of the World Conference on Religion and Peace. At his death, he was Nepal’s honorary consul in San Francisco.
It was politics, however, that brought Blum to wider public attention in his hometown, and politics of a particularly personal sort. As chairman of Mayor George Moscone’s Fiscal Advisory Committee, in the late 1970s, Blum first encountered the president of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, Dianne Feinstein, when he briefed her on an economic report. Blum was divorced and the father of three daughters, and Feinstein was nursing her neurosurgeon husband, who died of cancer in April 1978. The following November, when Moscone was assassinated and the widowed Feinstein succeeded him as mayor, the first telephone call she reportedly placed was to Richard Blum.
They were married in 1980.
For the next four decades, Blum was Feinstein’s principal patron, adviser, and financial supporter. And while Feinstein is a year away from becoming the longest-serving female senator in American history, it is sometimes forgotten that her path to that milestone was not always smooth. She had lost two previous campaigns for mayor before winning election as the incumbent, with Blum’s help, and in 1983, he underwrote her victory over a recall effort. The couple spent $3 million of their own money on her 1990 campaign for California governor, losing to Pete Wilson. But with Blum’s timely assistance, Feinstein won a U.S. Senate seat in 1992.
Yet politics can be equally as unforgiving as business. Decades of generous contributions to Democratic candidates found the ailing Blum this past year petitioning President Joe Biden for a diplomatic appointment in order to maneuver Feinstein into giving up her seat. In the words of the New York Times, “members of [Feinstein’s] own Democratic caucus had been grumbling that her mental acuity had diminished and that she had become too accommodating to Republicans.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
