Ex-Smithsonian chief Robert Adams, 91, dies

Robert McCormick Adams, the former chief of the Smithsonian Institution who played a critical role in opening new museums and sought to make “confrontation, experimentation and debate” part of the Smithsonian’s mandate, died Jan. 27 at a care center in Chula Vista, Calif. He was 91.

His daughter, Megan Adams, said she did not know the specific cause.

Adams, a tweedy anthropologist and former provost of the University of Chicago, was secretary of the Smithsonian from 1984 to 1994. He succeeded Dillon Ripley, the patrician executive whose 20-year reign transformed a staid grouping of museums into a world-class center of education, amusement and entertainment.

It was an almost impossible legacy to match, and Adams tried to play down comparisons with Ripley. As The Washington Post once reported in a profile, Adams’ notion of a “terrific evening” was soup and a sandwich at home.

The story described him as a “tall, rangy and slightly bowlegged man who looks and talks like a cross between Walt Disney and Walter Cronkite. He dresses sloppily by Washington standards, often has a clump of keys hanging from his belt like a janitor and you get the feeling he’d just as soon hop into a Jeep and be off into the desert.”

Adams oversaw the opening of the National Postal Museum, the National Museum of African Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.