Samuel R. Pierce Jr. believes in balance.
As a mediator, he struck agreements between contentious foes. As an attorney, he tempered theory with practicality. As a citizen, public service with private enterprise.
Even as a student, athletic prowess and academic achievement received equally prominent attention. He was a star halfback at Cornell University -- and made Phi Beta Kappa.
It is a quality that served him well as a black New York attorney. It also brought him to the attention of President-elect Ronald Reagan who hopes to redress the lack of balance between government and individual industriousness in many federal programs.
Pierce, Reagan's second choice for secretary of housing and urban development, met with Reagan Thursday and came away with the job.
Reagan's initial pick, Philip V. Sanchez, took himself out of consideration for what he said were financial reasons. But Reagan sources disclosed that in their checks for conflict-of-interest, they encountered a 'personal problem' that disqualified Sanchez.
'He's a rare human being,' Theodore Kheel, a labor lawyer and law partner, said of Pierce. 'He has the ability to walk a tightrope or deal with a variety of situations and come out with the respect of everybody.'
Pierce, 62, was a chief counsel to the Treasury Department in the Nixon administration. He also was an assistant district attorney and an assistant U.S. attorney during the early 1950s and later worked for the Labor Department and a congressional subcommittee.
He served as chairman of the board of internal inquiry for Haryou Act, an anti-poverty agency. While he criticized the agency's fiscal disarray, he developed reforms for the agency's operations in the 1960s.
After a brief stint as a state judge, he joined the Manhattan law firm of Battle, Fowler, Jaffin, Pierce and Kheel. He has been with the firm for 25 years.
In April, he served as one of three members of an mediation panel formed as part of an unsuccessful effort to avoid a strike by 35,000 transit workers in New York City in April. The panel's work was not criticized though it failed to bring the city and its workers to agreement without a strike.
Pierce is a member of the board of directors of Prudential Life Insurance and U.S. Industries and a member of the board of trustees of Cornell University.
He is a graduate of New York University Law School and Yale Law School.
Pierce is married to Dr. Barbara Wright, and they have a daughter, Victoria, 30.
