NEW YORK — Robert H.B. Baldwin, a Wall Street maverick who presided over the transformation of Morgan Stanley from a prestigious but staid old investment bank into a modern, competitive financial services corporation in the 1970s and early '80s, died Sunday at a nursing home in Skillman, N.J.. He was 95.
His son Robert Jr. confirmed the death.
At the start of Mr. Baldwin's tenure, Morgan Stanley's partners and clients wore old-school neckties, lunched at the same clubs, and relied on sure things: underwriting bonds, genteel integrity, assured profits.
But as Morgan Stanley's gentlemanly mystique gave way to new regulations and cutthroat competition, Mr. Baldwin liked to remind his associates that he had worked his way through Princeton, and that his grandfather had been a railway conductor.
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In short, that he was not really one of them.
A tough, brusque, often polarizing leader who struck colleagues as being out of place at Morgan Stanley, he was widely credited with pulling the firm out of its white-shoe rut into an era of enormous growth and painful change.
The reshaped firm was less focused on exclusive services for blue-chip clients and more on the rough-and-tumble of securities trading, mergers and acquisitions, and money management.
As president from 1973 to 1982 and chairman until he retired at the end of 1983, Mr. Baldwin expanded Morgan Stanley into a full-service financial brokerage and changed a culture that had been entrenched for decades.
Mr. Baldwin, a protégé of Perry Hall, the managing partner from 1951 to 1961, recognized the flaws in the corporate facade long before he took over. Until incorporating in 1970 and 1971, the firm was run like a 19th-century business, with many partners who bothered little about long-range planning, modern management techniques, or even detailed budgets.
Morgan Stanley's tweedy underwriters dealt almost exclusively with the chief executives of corporate America — American Telephone, General Electric, Exxon, DuPont, and major corporations — playing golf, taking leisurely lunches, giving advice, and managing the sales of bond and stock issues without dickering over commissions or competing in open markets.
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Those relationships were not abandoned under Mr. Baldwin. But after the Securities and Exchange Commission abolished fixed commissions on stock trades in 1975, changes were inevitable.
For Morgan Stanley, which sold blocks of stock for institutions at set fees, the new rule meant a need to compete for commissions. It had to get down on trading floors and skirmish for bids and prices.
Mr. Baldwin created a trading operation from scratch, and hired a big staff for it. The firm had long looked down on the trading-floor crowd as coarse. Now it needed traders with quick wits, stamina, and guts.
To get closer to clients, Morgan Stanley gave up its hallowed headquarters in Wall Street and moved to midtown Manhattan. It opened offices in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It rented Madison Square Garden sky boxes to entertain clients at Knicks and Rangers games.
Mr. Baldwin named dozens of new executives whose expertise was in equities and hostile takeovers, not social relationships. The firm also began taking startups as clients, handled initial public offerings of stock and moved into "wealth management" for private clients.
Growing pains nibbled at Morgan Stanley's integrity. In 1980, two former employees were charged with using confidential information to profit in stock trades. And in 1983, the firm, after long refusing to do business with the Teamsters union, began managing its $4.7 billion pension fund, long a target of corruption charges.
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By the time Mr. Baldwin stepped down, Morgan Stanley's staff had grown tenfold to 2,600 and its capital to more than $300 million from $7.5 million in 1970. It was still one of the most prestigious names on Wall Street. But historians said the cost had been great.
"Bob Baldwin probably saved the firm and destroyed its soul," Ron Chernow wrote in "The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance" (1990). "This new Morgan Stanley was a monument to his force and clear vision, a brilliant adaptation to altered circumstances. Yet he badly politicized a firm long unified by a special esprit de corps."
Robert Hayes Burns Baldwin was born on July 9, 1920, in East Orange, N.J., to John Frank and Anna Burns Baldwin.
He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1938. At Princeton, he ran a laundry to pay his way. He studied economics, played football, basketball and baseball, and graduated in 1942 with high honors. In World War II, he was a naval officer on two aircraft carriers.
In 1949, he married Geraldine Gay Williams. They divorced. In 1981, Mr. Baldwin married Dorothy Tobin Ayres.
Besides his son Robert, he leaves another son, Whitney; three daughters, Janet K. Baldwin, Deborah Baldwin Fall, and Elizabeth Baldwin Maushardt; two stepchildren, Mary Ayres Hack and W. Dillaway Ayres Jr.; and 13 grandchildren.
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