Remembering a man he knew well, Jack Welch told a crowd of more than 1,000 that “John taught me one of the most important lessons of deal-making: always let the other person leave with dignity.”

John was John Weinberg, the eminent investment banker and long-serving senior partner at Goldman Sachs who died August 7 and whose memorial service drew a capacity crowd yesterday to Gotham Hall.

Years before Weinberg advised Mr. Welch, a retired General Electric CEO, on GE’s purchase of NBC, it was Weinberg’s dogged determination that had brought GE back onto Goldman’s client list. GE had left Goldman at the death of Weinberg’s father, Sidney Weinberg, who had run the firm between 1930 and 1969.

The story goes that Weinberg visited GE monthly for more than a decade before finally winning back the account. One reason he succeeded was his budding business relationship with a rising young executive at GE, Mr. Welch, who yesterday remembered Weinberg for his determination.

“Whenever people were afraid they couldn’t close a deal, they’d say, ‘I don’t know if we can pull this off. Let’s call Weinberg,” Mr. Welch said.

Weinberg was often disheveled but possessed a bearing born of his tours with the Marines during World War II and his direct link to the roots of Goldman Sachs. He knew where he stood and could shock a room into silence. Sidney Weinberg got his start cleaning the firm’s spittoons, and for John Weinberg, Goldman Sachs was a patrimony.

“My father’s favorite thing in life was talking to his dogs, because they didn’t talk back,” Weinberg’s son, John S. Weinberg, joked. “He saw right and wrong clearly, with no shades of gray.”

While he was serving as co-senior partner with John Whitehead, who also spoke yesterday, Weinberg was famous for refusing to support hostile takeovers, in part because he hated the idea of alienating a future client.

A famous Weinberg-ism was “We’re only as good as our clients think we are,” a retired CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary Paulson, said. The others were “Leave history to the historians. Let’s look forward,” and “Some people grow. Others just swell.”

The program yesterday was an honor roll of Goldman Sachs alumni, including Lloyd Blankfein, the firm’s current chairman and CEO, who came to Goldman when Weinberg engineered the takeover of the commodities trading firm J. Aron & Co.; Mr. Whitehead, who left Goldman in 1984 to serve as deputy secretary of state; Robert Rubin, who went from co-senior partner in the early 1990s to secretary of the treasury; and Mr. Paulson, who took the firm public in 1999.

“John was fiercely loyal,” Mr. Paulson said. “Loyal to his family, loyal to his friends, loyal to Princeton, loyal to the Marine Corps, and loyal to Goldman Sachs.”

Fittingly, the recessional was the rousing United States Marine Corps Hymn, a pledge of loyalty to an institution with a litany of historic engagements, “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”