DENT A DEFENDER OF FREE TRADE AND BOSS, RICHARD NIXON.
Commerce secretary under Nixon
Frederick Baily Dent, a softspoken South Carolina textile manufacturer who in the mid-1970s was commerce secretary to President Richard Nixon and trade representative for President Gerald Ford, died Dec. 10 in Spartanburg, S.C. He was 97.
In April 1973, two months after being sworn in as commerce secretary, Dent learned that his assistant secretary, Jeb Stuart Magruder, a former White House and Nixon campaign official, had resigned abruptly, accusing Attorney General John Mitchell and John Dean, the White House counsel, of approving the break-in and bugging of phones at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex in Washington in 1972.
As the crisis deepened, Dent emerged as a vociferous defender of the president.
The scion of a family that prospered in textiles, Dent grew up with advantages: a prep school and Yale education, collegiate football and yachting, a Navy commission in the Second World War, an assured future behind his father as president of a South Carolina textile mill, and Republican connections that included Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Seen as a business visionary, he was elected president of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute.
In 1969, he was appointed to a Nixon administration commission that concluded the national interest would not be adversely affected by ending the military draft and replacing it with all-volunteer armed forces. As the war in Vietnam wound down, conscription was officially ended in 1973.
As commerce secretary, he proved a spirited advocate of free trade, while accepting the need to protect sensitive sectors. Dent’s tenure coincided with an Arab oil embargo and rising inflation, and he responded to oil shortages and spiking gas prices by establishing a National Industrial Energy Conservation Council.
Frederick Baily Dent was born in Cape May, N.J. on Aug. 17, 1922, to Magruder and Edith Baily Dent (there is no relation to Jeb Magruder).
In 1944, he married Mildred Harrison. He is survived by two sons, two daughters, 14 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. His wife died in 1997.