Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense during Carter administration, dies at 91

Harold Brown, the defense secretary in the Carter administration who was mandated to cut military spending but instead laid some of the groundwork for the U.S. arms buildup of the 1980s and who helped oversee a disastrous military raid to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, died Jan. 4. He was 91.

His death was announced by the Rand Corp., where he was a longtime member of the board of trustees. The cause and other details were not immediately available.

A onetime physics prodigy who earned a doctorate at 21, Brown became the first scientist to head the Pentagon. His predecessors had been business, political or military leaders accustomed to the ways of massive bureaucracies. In 2015, President Barack Obama named a second scientist, Ash Carter, also a physicist, to run the department.

Brown built his initial reputation as a nuclear weapons designer at what is now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He went on to direct the laboratory, replacing mentor Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist widely recognized as the “father” of the hydrogen bomb. That position and others later held by Brown made him a central figure in the U.S. defense establishment during the Cold War era.

In 1961, he became one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s team of bright, young “whiz kids.” At 33, he was director of defense research and engineering, the third-ranking civilian at the Pentagon. From 1965 to 1969, he was secretary of the Air Force.

Over the decades, he was regarded by colleagues as brilliant, quick to understand a broad spectrum of difficult political and military issues, and supremely confident in his analysis when making hard decisions that likely would cost him friends. In a memoir, former president Jimmy Carter praised his “technical competence” and called him one of his finest Cabinet officers.

Brown also could seem arrogant and distant. Gen. Colin Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then as secretary of state, had worked for Brown as a younger officer.

“I always had the impression that Brown would be just as happy if we slipped his paperwork under the door and left him alone to pore over it,” Powell wrote in his autobiography “My American Journey.”

In the turbulent years of growing conflict in Vietnam, Brown defied easy categorization as a hawk or a dove. He earned the nickname “Dr. No” for his role in helping scrap the B-70 strategic bomber and the Skybolt air-to-surface missile. As the civilian leader of the Air Force, he appeared to recommend the intensification of aerial bombing of North Vietnam, one of the most controversial policies of the war.

He left the Pentagon in 1969 to lead the California Institute of Technology after Richard Nixon’s election as president. Brown returned to the Defense Department when Carter, a Democrat, entered the White House in 1977.

Brown spent most of his four-year tenure mediating between Carter — who, in the wake of the Vietnam War fiasco, promised to eliminate Pentagon waste and to reduce defense spending by 5 percent — and a military establishment that demanded more firepower to counter threats coming from the Soviet Union and the Middle East.

“I think of myself as a pragmatist with a world view,” Brown told Time shortly before he was sworn in as defense secretary in 1977. “I believe in a strong defense; I don’t believe that defense is all there is to national security. Economic strength, political cohesion, good relations with allies are equally part of national security.”

In his 2006 book “SECDEF: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense,” foreign policy scholar Charles A. Stevenson wrote that Brown’s biggest political triumph was keeping the Joint Chiefs of Staff on board amid Carter’s initial streamlining.