Formerly chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and state treasurer of New Jersey. He also was president of the New York Mercantile Exchange and a managing director at Dillon Read and Co., an investment banking firm.

He served as the president of The Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund) from 1989 to 2011.

Dick was a policy visionary, raising concern about the challenges confronting average Americans long before most politicians and the media began to recognize them. At the helm of TCF, he focused on reducing income and wealth inequality, strengthening social insurance, enhancing voting rights, improving our educational and health care systems, and resisting arguments once popular in both parties that unfettered market forces always serve the public interest.

He led the charge against the privatization of Social Security in the 1990s, initiated programs that helped shape the Help America Vote Act in the wake of the controversial 2000 presidential recount, and conceived the first full-length book to raise questions about how the government’s response to the attacks of 9/11 unnecessarily abridged fundamental civil liberties.

For him, public policy wasn’t a job—it was a mission. He was always two steps ahead on key debates, supporting work that was intellectually rigorous and exclusively oriented toward improving the lives of ordinary Americans.