Defense secretary who oversaw failed hostage-rescue raid
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, Ashton B. 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 his 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.
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.By all accounts, Brown’s biggest failure as defense secretary was the botched effort in April 1980 to rescue the U.S. hostages in Tehran.
Called Operation Eagle Claw, it was to be an audacious, two-night raid involving two staging areas in the Iranian desert and personnel from four service branches. With little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough to free the Americans, Brown called it “the best of a lousy set of options” and recommended going forward.
Amid mechanical problems, a dust storm and the collision of a helicopter with a transport plane that killed eight U.S. servicemen, the raid was aborted. The incident highlighted deficiencies in the U.S. military command structure that Brown had tried to address.