Robert Lovett, Former Defense Secretary, Dies

Robert A. Lovett, a self-effacing former railroad executive made secretary of defense by President Harry S. Truman and a wartime leader who played a key role in the formation of an independent U.S. Air Force, died Wednesday at age 90.

Lovett, a lifelong Republican who served under two Democratic Presidents--Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt--died at his home in Locust Valley, N.Y., on Long Island.

He had officially retired from government service in 1953 and at his death was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., a private commercial bank. But he had continued serving on several presidential commissions involved with military matters well into the 1970s.

Lovett was born in Texas, son of the chief counsel for E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific Railroad. In World War I, he was a naval aviator based in England, flying bombing raids against German submarine bases in the North Sea. He won a Navy Cross.

He graduated from Yale University in 1918 and in 1921 entered the business world as a runner for Brown Brothers & Co. He had just married and his father-in-law was a senior partner of the firm.

In 1926, Lovett was elected a Union Pacific director, a position he kept until his business retirement in 1978. He soon moved the Harriman investments into the Brown Brothers firm and worked in Europe for the newly formed Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

There he became concerned over Hitler’s rising militancy and--without any official authorization--prepared a report on America’s air preparedness in the event of war. That report came to the attention of Army Secretary Robert Patterson who named Lovett assistant secretary of war for air in 1941. He served in that role until the end of the war, guarding the Air Force’s autonomy even though that service was then under the command of the Army.

Lovett resumed his business career briefly but returned to Washington in July, 1947, at the behest of Secretary of State George C. Marshall who named him under secretary. The following year, with Marshall out of the country, Lovett made the decision to fight the land blockade the Soviet Union had established around Berlin and fly supplies to the Americans, Britons and French stranded there. The Berlin Airlift forced abandonment of the blockade in May, 1949.

Marshall quit the State Department in 1949 but returned to Washington as secretary of defense in 1950 and again made Lovett his deputy.

When Marshall retired in 1951, Truman named Lovett his successor, a post he held until 1953 and through the Korean War.

Lovett’s wife and two children preceded him in death.