Cooper Steps Down as BankAmerica President : Apparent Victim of Power Struggle Had Held Position at Troubled Bank for Just Over a Year
Thomas A. Cooper, Methodist minister turned cost-cutting banker, resigned Monday as president and chief operating officer of BankAmerica and of its principal unit, Bank of America, after apparently losing a power struggle.
Cooper was president and chief operating officer of the troubled bank for a little more than a year. He was given the same titles at the parent company just last October, when Samuel H. Armacost was ousted as president and chief executive.
The departure of the 50-year-old Cooper does little for BankAmerica’s reputation for management stability.
Sources close to the company said Cooper was upset by last month’s decision by A. W. Clausen, BankAmerica’s chairman and chief executive, to have newly named Vice Chairman Richard M. Rosenberg bypass Cooper and report directly to Clausen.
Clausen to Assume Duties
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” a former Bank of America executive said.
Rosenberg, a 56-year-old veteran of the Seafirst, Crocker and Wells Fargo banks, came to Bank of America last month from the presidency of Seafirst, a BankAmerica subsidiary in Seattle. He now runs BankAmerica’s big retail banking group.
Clausen said Monday that he would assume Cooper’s principal duties, which include overseeing BankAmerica’s world banking and systems engineering groups. There is no present plan to appoint a successor to the position of president and chief operating officer, he said.
Cooper, who also resigned as a director, said in a prepared statement that the parting was “friendly.” He will stay on until next month to smooth the transition.
“The bank’s strategy is tightly focused now, (and) the road to recovery is clearly defined,” Cooper said. “This seems the right time, then, for me to explore a variety of opportunities which exist in banking and allied fields.”
Clausen said Cooper “has played an absolutely critical role in the recovery of Bank of America. He is an excellent manager with the courage to make hard decisions and the ability to deliver substantive results. . . . We respect his decision, thank him for his contributions and wish him every success.”
The flowery praise notwithstanding, analysts and other observers said the departure of a man of Cooper’s stature and abilities rekindles questions about Clausen’s management style.
Many talented bankers quit during Clausen’s previous tenure as head of Bank of America during the 1970s, and some have charged that Clausen cannot tolerate being surrounded by strong subordinates. (Clausen returned to the bank’s top job last October after five years as head of the World Bank.)
A BankAmerica spokesman disputed this view. He noted that Clausen had personally recruited Rosenberg to the bank, adding that the decision to leave was “Cooper’s alone.”
Cooper, an ordained Methodist minister, served two Pennsylvania churches before leaving the ministry. He entered banking in 1962 as a trainee for an assistant branch manager’s job in Philadelphia’s Girard Bank.
He joined Bank of America two years ago as executive vice president and head of the payments division. A veteran of Mellon Bank as well as Girard, Cooper “brought with him a firmness of management, a decisiveness that had been lacking at B of A,” analyst Dan Williams of Sutro & Co. said.
Coming in from the outside, Cooper was unfettered by BankAmerica’s benevolent corporate culture and wielded a sharp ax. He eliminated about 10,000 jobs--including entire layers of management. Clausen has said he will continue to slash expenses.
Cooper is a candidate for several top banking jobs, including the chairman’s position with his old employer, Mellon Bank.
