Harold Brown, defense secretary who oversaw failed hostage-rescue raid, dies at 91

By John Otis January 5 at 4:11 PM

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 at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. He was 91.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a daughter, Deborah Brown.

A onetime physics prodigy who earned a doctorate at 21, Dr. 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, Ashton B. Carter, also a physicist, to run the department.

Dr. 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 his mentor Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist widely recognized as the “father” of the hydrogen bomb. That position and others later held by Dr. Brown made him a central figure in the U.S. defense establishment during the Cold War.

In 1961, he became one of Defense Secretary Robert S. 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.

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