Lewis E. Lehrman obit

Remembering Lewis E. Lehrman (1938–2026)

 

He was not on the list.

With deep sadness and eternal hope, we announce the death of Lewis E. Lehrman, co-founder and co-chairman of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Lew passed on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 87.

Widely regarded as a renaissance man, Lew was the grandson of immigrants who over the course of an extraordinarily fruitful life achieved success as a businessman, civic leader, policy advocate, and philanthropist, while also making enduring contributions as a writer, historian, public intellectual, and institution builder. His greatest joy and happiness was in his 60-year marriage to his beloved wife Louise, and the family they created together, including five children—Leland, John, Thomas, Eliza, and Peter—fifteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, all of whom survive him. In his autobiography, Lew wrote that “my life—so much of what I cherish—is all about Louise. She made my life worth living.”

In the late 1980s, Lew formed a partnership with his friend Richard Gilder that would eventually create institutions and programs that would touch the lives of millions of people. Under Lew’s strategic direction, and fueled by Dick’s generous financial support, they built the Gilder Lehrman Collection, which would become the largest collection of rare American manuscripts in private hands in the country, and the core asset of their later initiatives. In 1990, partnering with Gettysburg College, Lew and Dick founded the Lincoln Prize, which because of its unprecedented size—$50,000—helped elevate the whole field of Abraham Lincoln and Civil War studies, as well as book prizes across the publishing world. In 1994, they founded the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to conduct their first teacher seminar, on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, led by David Brion Davis at Yale. Over the next thirty years, the Institute would grow and diversify to a point where Lew regarded it as his most important legacy, after his own family.

From childhood, Lew was a person of action and of ideas. A multi-sport athlete and natural leader as a schoolboy, Lew graduated from the Hill School in Pennsylvania and then Yale University, where he majored in History while also pursuing interests in literature, philosophy, and politics. He was awarded a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship in his final year at Yale, before completing an MA in History at Harvard, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Though he suspended his promising academic career to return to help build the family business back home in Pennsylvania, and then to serve in the US Army, Lew never lost his deep interest in history and his passion for ideas at the highest level.

The family business emerged as “Rite Aid,” which went public in 1968, with Lew as President and largest shareowner. The company grew rapidly, growing ten-fold in just eight years. Lew continued as President until 1977, and Chair of the Executive Committee until 1981, when he resigned from all positions in order to run for Governor of New York.

Lew’s campaign for the governorship made history. A political outsider who had never held office, Lew earned the nomination of the Republican, Conservative and Statewide Independent parties and mounted a powerful campaign. To the surprise of many, Lew came within 3% of defeating the Democratic candidate, Mario Cuomo. Analysts afterwards noted that while Cuomo carried heavily Democratic New York City by a wide margin, Lew actually carried 53 of the 57 upstate counties. Significantly, supporters of both men recalled the high level of civility and intellectual exchange that characterized their debates. In later years the two men collaborated on historical projects centered on Abraham Lincoln, whom they both admired ardently.

Through the 1980s, Lew continued to offer policy advice on economic issues to members of the Reagan administration and Republican congressional leaders. At President Reagan’s request, Lew served for three years as the founding Chairman of Citizens for America, a national civic organization focused on economic and defense policies. Meanwhile, Lew remained involved with the Lehrman Institute, a think tank he had founded in 1972 to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the study of public policy and which had partnered with the Association Jacques Rueff to establish a Jacques Rueff Memorial Prize in honor of the French economist and statesman (and former Minister of Finance for Charles de Gaulle). Europe’s most eloquent proponent for the gold standard and monetary order, Rueff had become Lew’s most important intellectual mentor and a close friend during the 1970s. He also served on the boards of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Manhattan Institute where he participated in the development of conservative economic and national defense policies. A steadfast advocate for a return to the gold standard, Lew co-authored with Rep. Ron Paul The Case for Gold: A Minority Report of the U.S. Gold Commission in 1982, a topic to which he would return repeatedly in his later writings. The broad range of Lew’s intellectual and cultural interests is reflected in the other institutions he supported. At various times, he served as Chair of the Yale University Committee on Humanities, and as a trustee of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Morgan Library, and the New-York Historical Society.

A major personal turning point came in the mid-1980s. Having become interested in Christianity while a student at Yale, over time Lew heard a calling to the Catholic Church. Born and raised Jewish, he studied the faith in depth and discussed his decision at length with friends and family, and then, perhaps also moved by meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1983, Lew was baptized and confirmed a Catholic at St. Thomas More Church in New York in 1985. He remained a devout Catholic to the end of his life, inspired by the witness of Pope Leo XIII, St. John Paul II, and St. Teresa of Calcutta, who influenced his thought and writings regarding the Declaration of Independence, the dignity of the human person, and Catholic social teaching.

In 1987 Lew returned to the business world, joining Morgan Stanley and eventually serving as Managing Director and chief operating officer of Morgan Stanley Asset Management. In that role, he oversaw investment portfolios for institutions and individuals, while developing new investment strategies particularly in international markets. Propelled by his success at Morgan Stanley, in 1990 he left to join as Chairman of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, an economic forecasting and political analysis firm and to found his own investment company, Ten Squared, based in Greenwich, which was later succeeded by L. E. Lehrman & Company, the firm he headed until his death.

In 1997, Lew and Dick founded the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale and launched the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, to honor the best book in the field each year. At the same time, they decided to donate their collection of American documents, valued at more than $250 million, to the Gilder Lehrman Institute. They charged the Institute with using the Collection to improve the teaching and learning of American history at every level, from grade school through high school and college, and among the general public. Under the leadership of President James G. Basker, a Barnard College, Columbia University professor whom Lew and Dick recruited to join the effort, the Gilder Lehrman Institute has grown to become the nation’s leading nonprofit working in history and civics education, serving more than 38,000 schools and 107,000 teachers—and through them, more than 12 million K–12 students. It has become a national presence, serving schools in all fifty states.

With Lew’s encouragement, two more book prizes were added, the George Washington Prize in 2005 and the Military History Prize in 2013. Lew served on the boards of all four, every year bringing his wealth of knowledge and keen intellect to the selection process, and then delivering incisive remarks about the winning books at the awards ceremonies themselves. He thrived on the constant flow of new books and ideas, and the company of people who valued them as he did. In 2004, Lew and Dick, with their friend Roger Hertog, sponsored the Gilder Lehrman Institute in partnership with the New-York Historical Society to mount the largest exhibition ever devoted to Alexander Hamilton. To Lew’s delight, Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton won the inaugural George Washington Prize in 2005. And then in 2015 the Gilder Lehrman Institute began a partnership with Lin-Manuel Miranda and his family, and the producers of the Broadway musical Hamilton, to create “EDUHAM,” an educational program that by 2025 had brought the special drama of history through theater into the lives of more than one million students in New York City and across the country.

In these years, Lew also returned to his original vocation as an historian. In 2008 he authored Lincoln at Peoria, an important correction of the tendency among some historians to deny or downplay Lincoln’s opposition to slavery. In 2013, Lew published The American Founders and Lincoln “by littles”, both collections of earlier essays. Meanwhile, he wrote again on economic topics, including the enduring issues of inflation and monetary disorder, producing The True Gold Standard (2012) and Money, Gold, and History (2013). The books kept coming, including two with a focus on the virtues of great leaders in wartime: Churchill, Roosevelt, & Company: Studies in Character and Statecraft (2017) and Lincoln & Churchill: Statesmen at War (2018). Then, while fighting the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease, he offered his final work and autobiography, The Sum of It All (2023), calling special attention to the pivotal moment of his life, meeting his bride-to-be Louise, in a chapter titled “Walking West on East 80th.” One often found Lew happiest writing from and hosting family and friends at the homestead farm that he and Louise so joyfully nurtured over fifty years in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, which lies some 30 minutes from Gettysburg, and whose hallowed battlefield and speech by Lincoln encouraged him to the end.

Lew received many honors in his lifetime, including honorary degrees from Babson College, Marymount University (VA), St. Thomas Aquinas College, Lincoln College (IL), and Gettysburg College. Among other recognitions, he received the Cardinal Cooke Award for service to the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, as well as the William E. Simon Prize for Social Entrepreneurship from the Manhattan Institute and the Alexander Hamilton Legacy Award from the New York State Society of the Cincinnati. Crowning all of them was the National Humanities Medal, presented to Lew in the White House by President George W. Bush in 2005.

Lew remained all his life committed to education through institutions he built and led, and through his own writing, teaching, and mentoring of students of all ages. He lectured and taught at Yale, Oxford, Notre Dame, Gettysburg College, and countless other colleges and schools. At the Gilder Lehrman Collection, he rejoiced in personally showing student groups his favorite documents by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Hamilton, and others. He offered mentorship and encouragement to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other young people, whether the children of friends or the less privileged young people he met while lecturing and making public appearances.

Lew’s character, talent, and warm personality attracted the admiration of all who met him, from presidents and professors, to working people and schoolchildren. Those who worked for him tended to remain loyal and stay with him for many years, even decades. The same was true of his innumerable friendships, formed from childhood through his long career and into the last years of his life. Lew will be deeply missed by all those who knew him, and by the millions of others who benefited from his lifetime of good works.

Lew was supported in his final years by a team of dedicated nurses and caregivers, who were closely attentive to both his physical and spiritual wellbeing. To them the Lehrman family is forever grateful. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer (869 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10065) on Saturday, April 11 at 10:30 a.m.