Paul O’Neill wasn’t the type to put on airs.

The plain-speaking former Treasury secretary and retired head of aluminum giant Alcoa was as comfortable in a corporate board room as he was donning blue jeans and hiking several blocks from his home in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood to have breakfast with the locals, according to acquaintances.

O’Neill, 84, died Saturday at his home after battling lung cancer for the past few years, according to his son, Paul Jr.

“There was some family here, and he died peacefully,” the son told The Associated Press. “Based on his situation, it was a good exit.”

O’Neill headed Pittsburgh-based Alcoa from 1987 to 1999. He served as Treasury secretary from 2001 to late 2002. He was forced to resign after he broke with President George W. Bush over tax policy and later produced a book critical of the administration.

After leaving the cabinet, O’Neill returned to Pittsburgh.

“He was very principled, not afraid of speaking truth to power even when it got him into hot water,” said Michael D. Rich, president and CEO of RAND Corp., the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.

Rich said O’Neill was instrumental in convincing RAND to establish its third American location in Pittsburgh in 2000.

“He was a major proponent of Pittsburgh,” Rich said. “When he left Washington, he could have lived anywhere, but he and his wife, Nancy, chose to go back to Pittsburgh. His enthusiasm was infectious enough that it made us want to have a presence there.”

‘Regular guy,’ Treasury secretary, Bono’s friend

O’Neill was a “regular guy,” according to Torrence “Tod” Hunt Jr. of Shadyside, a great-grandson of Alfred E. Hunt, co-founder of the Pittsburgh Reduction Co., which later became Alcoa.

Hunt said O’Neill, while serving as Treasury secretary, didn’t like having a Secret Service escort when he returned to Pittsburgh and did so only after President George W. Bush told him he had to following the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

“He’d come home and he’d walk up to Pamela’s Restaurant on Walnut Street and have breakfast in his blue jeans,” Hunt said.

He said O’Neill developed a close relationship with Bono, front man for the Irish rock band U2. The pair worked to deliver clean drinking water to Africa and toured the continent focusing attention on poverty and combating diseases such as AIDS.

Hunt remembered attending a U2 concert in Pittsburgh’s former Civic Arena and Bono acknowledged O’Neill from the stage.

“I was there at the concert and all of a sudden he mentions Paul O’Neill,” Hunt said. “Paul wasn’t there, but Bono mentioned Paul O’Neill as a good friend.”

O’Neill was known at Alcoa as an “iconic leader” who stressed employee safety above all else.

“He challenged us that a safe work environment is not only possible, but expected,” said Roy Harvey, Alcoa’s president and CEO. “His legacy of caring for people lives on at Alcoa, along with his strong commitment to integrity and excellence that drives our company today.”

Reduced blood infections, ‘changed the world’

Karen Wolk Feinstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, said O’Neill used his expertise in workplace safety to develop procedures, with backing from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, that hospitals across the globe have adopted in preventing blood infections.

Feinstein and O’Neill founded the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, a consortium of hospitals, medical societies and businesses studying ways to improve health care delivery in Western Pennsylvania.

“Paul O’Neill brought quality engineering to health care,” Feinstein said. “Up until that time, people said you can’t use these industrial techniques in health care. As it turned out, in our first experiment with Paul, we got about 33, 35 hospitals in our region to agree to try to reduce central line infections.

“We were able to reduce central line infections in the hospitals in our region by 68%. I think it changed the world.”

Morgan O’Brien, the former head of Peoples Gas, said O’Neill was smart and universally well-respected and well-liked. O’Brien said he sought O’Neill’s advice about a proposed partnership between Peoples and the problem-plagued Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority.

The deal with PWSA never happened, but O’Brien said O’Neill was a supporter and gave good advice.

“Part of his legacy was that he took his special leadership skills that earned him wonderful success in business and shared for the greater good in his public service,” O’Brien said. “He was engaged until the end in making this community a better place for all. He will be missed, but his legacy of giving back will live on in others following his lead.”

Recalling his years as Treasury secretary

After leaving the Bush administration, O’Neill worked with author Ron Suskind on an explosive book covering his two years in the administration. O’Neill contended that the administration began planning the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein right after Bush took office, eight months before 9/11.

O’Neill depicted Bush as a disengaged president who didn’t encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one discussions with Cabinet members. He said the lack of discussion in Cabinet meetings gave him the feeling that Bush “was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.”

He said major decisions were often made by Bush’s political team and Vice President Dick Cheney. O’Neill had been recruited to join the Cabinet by Cheney, his old friend from the Gerald Ford administration. But it was Cheney who told O’Neill that the president wanted his resignation. It was part of a move by Bush to shake up his economic team and find a better salesman for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.

When the book, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill,” came out in early 2004, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan discounted O’Neill’s descriptions of White House decision-making and said the president was “someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities.”

O’Neill said his purpose in collaborating on the book, for which he turned over 19,000 government documents to Suskind, was to generate a public discussion about the “current state of our political process and raise our expectations for what is possible.”

Before joining Alcoa, O’Neill had been president from 1985 to 1987 of International Paper Co., a firm he had joined in 1977.

After graduating with an economics degree from California State University in Fresno in 1961, O’Neill joined the Veterans Administration in Washington, working as a computer systems analyst. He later received a masters of public administration degree from Indiana University and moved to the Office of Management and Budget. He rose to become deputy director of OMB from 1974 to 1977, providing budget guidance to then-President Gerald Ford.

It was at OMB that O’Neill developed close working relationships with Cheney, who served as Ford’s chief of staff, and Alan Greenspan, who was head of Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers. Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve during the time O’Neill was Treasury secretary.

O’Neill’s blunt speaking style more than once got him in trouble as Treasury secretary, sending the dollar into a tailspin briefly in his early days at Treasury when his comments about foreign exchange rates surprised markets. In the spring of 2001, O’Neill jolted markets again when, during Wall Street’s worst week in 11 years, he blandly declared “markets go up and markets go down.”

He was more focused on the traditional Treasury secretary’s job of instilling confidence during times of turbulence later that year when he led the effort to get Wall Street reopened after 9/11. O’Neill also was instrumental following the attacks in beefing up the government’s programs to disrupt financing to terrorist groups.

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)