New Time Warner President Taking On His Biggest Job Yet : Profile: At 46, Richard Parsons already has had careers as government policy-maker, lawyer and bank company chairman. Now he’ll be one of the nation’s most prominent black executives.

Richard Parsons pokes his head out of a conference room and asks if he can have a few more minutes before a scheduled interview.

He’s got a few loose ends to wrap up here at Dime Bancorp--a proposed merger must still be closed--before he can discuss his next career move.

In nearly two dozen years of work, Parsons has already led three lives--as a government policy-maker, lawyer and bank company chairman. He starts a new one in February when he becomes second in command at Time Warner Inc., the huge media-entertainment combine whose businesses extend from publishing to music, movies and cable TV.

As Time Warner’s president, Parsons will also be one of the most prominent black executives in America. “I take it as an additional reason to keep my eye on the ball,” he said.

Friends and colleagues describe Parsons as a smart man who doesn’t flaunt his intelligence but quickly gets to the essence of an issue. They say he has an easygoing manner and an instinct for motivating people to work in concert.

“He is someone who can see the big picture of any situation yet grasp the fine point of the details,” said chairman R. William Murray of Philip Morris Cos. Inc. Parsons serves on the food and tobacco conglomerate’s board.

“Richard will help you get where you are going,” said his sister, Loretta Parsons Poole, an educator in Alaska.

Parsons, an imposing man at 6-foot-4 and about 250 pounds, said he never imagined two months ago he would be selected for the Time Warner presidency, although he had been on the company’s board since 1990.

Gerald Levin had held all three top management titles at Time Warner since chairman and co-chief executive Steven Ross died two years ago. Levin decided only recently to ask Parsons about taking the job.

Parsons, 46, was interested. Dime Bancorp was profitable after a three-year struggle with loan problems. It had agreed to merge with Anchor Savings in a deal to create the nation’s fourth-largest savings bank.

And Time Warner was pushing into new technologies and alliances.

“What Gerry and I talked about was for me to essentially partner up with him in the overall management and direction of Time Warner,” Parsons said.

While Levin would “keep his hands on the business operations” of the various divisions, Parsons said he would focus on relations with Wall Street and “back-office stuff” like legal, financial and administrative issues.

The appointment, announced Oct. 31, appears to have gone over well within the company and on Wall Street. They are happy Levin didn’t pick a company employee, thereby appearing to favor one division over another.

Parsons said the job is broad and diverse enough to be challenging. “This is the first time I’ve ever landed somewhere where I think I could be there the rest of my life,” he said.

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Richard Dean Parsons was born April 4, 1948, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and grew up in the nearby borough of Queens. He was the second of five children. His father was an electronics technician; his mother a homemaker.

Young Parsons’ intelligence was apparent as he skipped two grades and was graduated from high school at age 16. Loretta Poole said their father encouraged them to think for themselves. One of the few acceptable reasons his children could give for leaving the dinner table early, for example, was to look up a word in the dictionary.

Parsons went to college at the University of Hawaii, where he made the college basketball team and worked at a parking garage and a gas company to pay the bills. He met his future wife, Laura, there. But he left school six credits shy of a degree.

Parsons called it “a fun-filled but academically disastrous” experience.

His failure to graduate proved atypical. He enrolled in 1968 at Albany Law School in New York--which admitted him without a bachelor’s degree--and finished first in his class three years later.

“He has a gift for making it look easy,” said classmate Stephen Cleary, now an attorney in Albany.

Parsons caught the eye of people in New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s Administration while working as a legislative intern during law school, and he was hired as an assistant counsel to the governor after graduation.

“It didn’t take long to discover how bright and effective he was,” said Harry Albright Jr., a Rockefeller aide who later recommended Parsons for the top job at Dime Bancorp. “He was the person people turned to when they wanted something done.”

Parsons later moved to Washington to work for then-Vice President Rockefeller and for President Gerald R. Ford’s domestic policy office.

In 1977, Parsons went to work for the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in New York, handling free speech, product liability and banking cases.

By the late 1980s, Albright was head of Dime and recommended Parsons succeed him. The bank’s board hired Parsons in 1988.

Soon after, the real estate market in the Northeast collapsed. As prices sank, so did the value of Dime’s mortgage portfolio. So Parsons engineered a massive restructuring, unloading $1 billion in bad loans while cutting the work force to 2,000 from 3,500. The bank stayed afloat.

He kept employees informed, creating quarterly videotapes to discuss earnings and the restructuring progress. Parsons felt “people would work harder if they knew what was going on behind the numbers,” said David Totaro, chief marketing officer for Dime.

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Time Warner has experienced internal turmoil of its own. The music division was recently caught up in top-level dissent. The parent company considered but then withdrew from talks about buying part of the NBC television network even as it moved toward launching its own network. The company has a huge debt.

Critics say Levin’s plans for state-of-the-art cable television service offering movies, shopping and other communications options are behind schedule.

Parsons said in the interview, “I don’t have any misgivings about the direction of this company.” But he added that the dynamics of the industry require constant re-examination of plans. “Something that was a terrific idea yesterday may lose some of its steam tomorrow.”

Parsons and his wife, a school psychologist, have three children ages 19, 20 and 22. They have a loft in Manhattan and a home in Pocantico Hills north of New York City. He relaxes with jazz and vacations on Block Island off Rhode Island.

Speculation persists that Parsons will eventually get into politics. But he said he wouldn’t want to give up his privacy.

Does he consider himself the heir apparent to the 55-year-old Levin?

“I don’t think so. . . . Gerry wants to have some fun and leave his mark and I want to help him. That wasn’t part of our discussions,” he said.

Earl Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, said he is sure Parsons will get a chance to lead a major company. “He is one of the outstanding businessmen in America. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about him.”