When you consider that “leading the free world” was the expressed ambition of Adam Neumann, the departed head of the failed WeWork, the goal of simply becoming the president of the United States, shared by various very wealthy men, some with little qualifying experience, seems comparatively modest.

Born in Vienna, Felix Rohatyn was never going to be president. But neither did he hold the aspiration, according to his son Nicolas. He had no intention to run for mayor or governor or for the Senate offices he might have reasonably held. He was content to do the unglamorous work of negotiating and number crunching, of policy rather than personal profile.

His vision of political life was the vision of commitment to a cause — in his case, the restoration of the city he loved to a place of economic vitality. He was appointed to the positions he held, elected to none of them.

He had hoped to become secretary of the Treasury at some point, a goal that had eluded him. His was not the agenda of someone who imagined his name would be known to every fourth grader in the year 2150. I would challenge anyone between the ages of 10 and 90, to quickly — or even slowly — recite the names of the last five treasury secretaries.

It is fashionable for a certain kind of New Yorker to lament the turn the city has taken over the past 20 years, to become nostalgic for the value system of a prior time. Felix Rohatyn certainly lived well — on Fifth Avenue and in Southampton. He did not take his cues from the ranch-house ways of Warren Buffett. But he rejected much of the excess of what came to distinguish New York, beginning in the 1980s — the self-serving habits and misplaced priorities.