John Macy Jr., Adviser to Lyndon Johnson, Dies

John W. Macy Jr., a White House adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, head of several federal programs under three other Presidents and the first chief of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, died Monday at his home in nearby McLean, Va. He was 69.

Macy had been hospitalized most of the last six months with a heart ailment, a family member said.

Since retiring from the government in 1981 after heading the Federal Emergency Management Agency for two years, he had worked as a private management consultant.

During World War II, Macy was a personnel specialist for the War Department. After the war, he was director of personnel and organization at the newly created Atomic Energy Commission’s facilities at Los Alamos, N.M., and was later an assistant undersecretary of the Army in the Harry S. Truman Administration.

From 1953 to 1958, Macy was executive director of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 named him chairman of the commission, a job he held until 1969 after Richard M. Nixon’s election.

During Johnson’s presidency, Macy also kept an office at the White House, advising Johnson on personnel matters.

In 1969, Macy was named by the board of the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting as its president. The corporation funnels federal money to public broadcasting stations and producers.

Macy resigned from that job in 1972 under mounting pressure from the Nixon White House, which saw him as a obstacle to its efforts to redirect the corporation away from financing public affairs television programming.