Secretary of Commerce Crushed by Horse, Dies

Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige, a prize-winning rodeo performer, died Saturday after a horse he was riding in a practice session reared back and fell on him. Baldrige, one of three remaining members of President Reagan’s original 1981 Cabinet, was rushed by helicopter to a hospital here but died after 90 minutes of surgery.

Dr. Naran Patel, a trauma surgeon at John Muir Hospital, said the 64-year-old Baldrige died of cardiac arrest caused by extensive internal bleeding in the lower abdomen.

The accident occurred at 1:15 p.m. at a friend’s ranch in Brentwood, about 20 miles to the northeast in Contra Costa County. Baldrige, who appeared in several professional rodeos each year, was getting ready to compete in the county fair’s rodeo Saturday night with the ranch’s owner, Jack Roddy, a longtime friend and roping partner.

A witness to the accident, cowboy Don Jesser, said he watched through a ranch house window as Baldrige and another cowboy practiced “teaming” on a calf.

Accident Described

Baldrige, an expert at roping the heels of a calf, successfully performed his specialty and then turned the rope loose, as is customary, said Jesser.

Jesser and other witnesses said that Baldrige then started reining in the horse, but the horse jerked backward, its front legs flying into the air, eventually toppling over and landing directly on Baldrige.

“I turned around and said to somebody, ‘My God, a horse just went down on one of the cowboys,’ ” Jesser said. “I didn’t know who it was.”

Jesser said that he had seen cowboys thrown off by horses that either lurched forward or tripped, but had never seen a horse fall backward onto the rider.

The horse, which Jesser described as a well-trained, 1,250-pound thoroughbred, landed so hard that the saddle horn pushed Baldrige’s belt buckle all the way to his backbone, doctors said later.

The horse was not injured.

Jesser said that several of the 10 to 15 people who were nearby ran to Baldrige, who was unconscious and not breathing. One of them, a volunteer firefighter, began administering first aid, but without success.

Within minutes, Dr. Bert D. Johnson, a friend of Baldrige’s, arrived. He had come to practice his rodeo riding, Jesser said.

Johnson, a Stanford University gynecologist, joined the volunteer firefighter in administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation for about two minutes. Only then did Baldrige begin to breathe and regain consciousness, Jesser said.

Jesser and other witnesses said that Baldrige was moaning softly, asking to sit up, and not bleeding externally.

At the hospital, Baldrige was “coherent, he was having a great deal of difficulty breathing . . . he told us that he was in severe pain,” said Dr. Bruce Baldwin, the hospital’s director of emergency services.

Efforts by Surgeons

Because his condition was so serious, Baldrige was rushed into surgery. However, despite the transfusion of more than 10 pints of blood, doctors could not stop the internal bleeding caused in part by tears in Baldrige’s organs. Eventually Baldrige’s blood system lost its ability to clot, doctors said.

Manual open-heart massage was tried to no avail when Baldrige’s blood pressure dropped drastically. He was pronounced dead at 3:50 p.m.

Seven hours after the accident, at the Contra Costa County fairground’s rodeo arena, a riderless black horse was led around the arena at the start of the evening’s events by Jack Cook, vice president of the Cowboy Hall of Fame, which made Baldrige a member in 1984.

The horse carried the boots and spurs Baldrige had worn earlier in the day.

Public address announcer Mel Lambert, in a breaking voice, told an audience of several hundred that Baldrige was born in the city, but learned to “ride and rope like a real cowboy.”

Praise From President

In a statement issued by the White House, President Reagan praised Baldrige as a talented and dedicated public servant and a loyal member of his Cabinet whose common sense and wisdom were respected by all who knew him.

“Mac and I shared a special affinity for the West and I will greatly miss his friendship,” the President said. “Nancy and I are truly saddened and extend our deepest sympathies to Midge (Baldrige’s wife) and the Baldrige family. They will be in our thoughts and prayers in the time ahead.”

The White House said arrangements for the return of Baldrige’s body to Washington and his funeral were incomplete, pending decisions by his family.

The death of Baldrige is not likely to affect U.S. economic policy. Although his agency handled politically volatile issues--including the trade deficit and the sale of sophisticated U.S. technology to the Soviet bloc--Administration policy in such sensitive areas is formulated chiefly by the White House.

Moreover, Baldrige was not a high-profile official who took the lead in espousing Administration stands, choosing instead to concentrate on running his department, which he reportedly did with a firm hand.

Tough Line on Japan

He did voice support for a tougher line against Japan to ease the U.S. trade deficit, but the Administration’s point man on international trade issues is U.S. special trade representative Clayton K. Yeutter.

One area where the Administration is certain to feel Baldrige’s loss will be in its fight with Congress over a massive bill that would require retaliation for unfair foreign trade practices, a measure that Reagan has vowed to veto because he says it would start a trade war. Baldrige was one of the many Administration officials to support this stand against the legislation, which a House-Senate conference committee will consider this fall.

That Baldrige should die under a falling horse was a jolting irony. His love of rodeo--and his success as a gritty competitor even in middle age--was one of the rare flamboyancies of the Reagan Administration.

While still in prep school, Baldrige worked as a cowhand on ranches in Nebraska and Nevada, and kept it up when he attended Yale.

He also kept at it as a millionaire Connecticut businessman, practicing at an indoor ring for occasional forays into rodeo competition that made him a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Assn.

Lanky Six Footer

The competition left its mark on Baldrige, a graying, lanky six footer who moved with a horseman’s grace and talked in a flat drawl.

When he got to Washington, he admitted to fractures of “an ankle, a shoulder, an arm,” but insisted that he broke those bones before “I started to ride gentler horses.”

Injuries continued, however. He almost lost the tip of an index finger when it got jammed in the rope of a saddle horn while winning a first prize in a calf-roping event at a rodeo in 1984.

“I won $100 but it cost me $400 in medical bills,” he quipped.

Two years later, he sprained a finger in another rodeo but shrugged it off.

“It’s the year of the older athlete,” he said.

His Washington office was filled with mementoes of his lifelong passion: bronze statues of cowboys, a coiled lasso, a saddle he won at a 1978 rodeo and a collection of belt buckles won in roping contests.

Son of Congressman

Baldrige was the son of an Omaha lawyer and one-term Nebraska congressman who had the misfortune of running for reelection as a Republican in 1932. He attended Hotchkiss School in Connecticut before entering Yale, where he majored in English. He graduated in 1943, entered the Army and rose from private to battery commander, serving in the Pacific with the 27th Infantry Division.

After the war, he found work as a foreman in a Connecticut iron foundry, became its president in 1960 and, in 1962, became executive vice president of the then-ailing Scovill Manufacturing Co. in Waterbury, Conn. He became the brass-milling firm’s president, then its board chairman, and headed a reorganization that turned the firm into a diversified international company with 23,000 employees and annual sales approaching $1 billion.

Service as Connecticut chairman for George Bush’s unsuccessful presidential bid in 1980, followed by a stint as co-chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign in the state, was Baldrige’s springboard into the Reagan cabinet.

Baldrige came down with viral pneumonia last December and was hospitalized in Albuquerque. He was flat on his back for nearly four weeks, but said in April that he had made a full recovery. He said he had quit smoking and begun jogging two miles a day.

In an interview in April, Baldrige joked that “the luck of the draw” was responsible for his continued presence in the Reagan Cabinet. The only other original members who remain are Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr.

Deluged With Complaints

As the ambassador of business and industry to government in a business-oriented Administration, Baldrige was deluged with complaints of unfair import competition almost from the day in January, 1981, when he took over the Department of Commerce, where 38,000 employees operate the U.S. Weather Service and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration along with the Census Bureau and a host of economic services.

He insisted that he was basically a free-trader, telling an interviewer that “free trade is absolutely necessary to the future economic well-being of the world,” but adding that “occasionally we have to insist on fair trade because, literally, our fair-trade laws are the bedrock on which free trade stands.”

As such, he argued for a tougher trade policy at a time in Reagan’s first term when the President and his top advisers held that it would upset the international economic apple cart. Baldrige’s advice was largely ignored.

But events moved the secretary’s way. Last spring, as American manufacturers angrily denounced the flooding of the U.S. market by under-priced Japanese computer chips, Baldrige pushed successfully for imposition of retaliatory sanctions against Japanese electronic companies.

He also successfully opposed a plan by Japan’s Fujitsu Co. to acquire the Fairchild Semiconductor Co., arguing that such foreign control of an American high-technology firm could threaten national security.

Baldrige married Margaret Trowbridge Murray in 1951, and is survived by his wife and their two daughters. He also is survived by a brother, Robert, and a sister, Letitia, who served as a social secretary in the White House for Jacqueline Kennedy.

Times staff writer Imbert Matthee reported from Walnut Creek and Don Irwin from Washington.