Former Nixon ally dies at 97
Frederick B. Dent, a South Carolina textile manufacturer who in the mid-1970s was President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of commerce and President Gerald R. Ford’s special representative for U.S. trade negotiations, died on Dec. 10 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He was 97.
His daughter, Pauline Dent Ketchum, confirmed the death, at the Spartanburg Medical Center, on Monday.
A soft-spoken businessman who advocated free trade and an end to most protectionist tariffs, Dent was commerce secretary from 1973 to 1975, bridging the Nixon and Ford administrations. He became Ford’s trade representative, with Cabinet and ambassadorial rank, from 1975 to 1977, when the Republicans surrendered the White House to the Democrats and President Jimmy Carter.
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 N. Mitchell and John W. Dean III, the White House counsel, of approving in advance the break-in and bugging of telephones at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex in Washington in 1972.
For Dent, it was the first thunderclap of a gathering storm over the Watergate scandal, a series of disclosures of White House criminality that increasingly engulfed the administration over the next 16 months and led in August 1974 to Nixon’s resignation and replacement by Vice President Ford.
As the crisis deepened, Dent, a globe-trotting emissary of American commerce who had admired Nixon’s 1972 travels to the Soviet Union and China and his political and economic overtures to Moscow and Beijing, emerged as a vociferous defender of the president. Speaking to business groups, in congressional hearings, and even on missions abroad, he remained faithful to the last.
He often accused the press of inflating the Watergate affair. Weakness in the dollar, he told a luncheon of sales executives in New York in 1973, was a result of “psychological factors, not economic conditions.” Asked if the Watergate scandal was such a factor, he said, “Watergate is a factor around the world as far as the press is concerned.”
The scion of a family that prospered in textiles, Dent grew up with advantages: a prep school and Yale education, the rushes of collegiate football and yachting, a Navy commission in World War II, 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.
Although he was little known outside the textile industry, Dent began gaining attention nationally in the 1960s when, propelled by his company’s rapid expansion and his growing reputation as a business visionary, he was elected president of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute and became the spokesman for the industry.
In 1969, he was appointed to a Nixon administration commission, headed by Thomas S. Gates Jr., a former defense secretary in the Eisenhower administration, that concluded that 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 ended in 1973.