Frank Pace Jr.; Ex-Army Secretary

Frank Pace Jr., who was secretary of the Army and budget director under President Harry S. Truman, has died at 75.

Pace, who served as chairman of General Dynamics Corp. and as a director of Colgate Palmolive Co. and Time Inc., died of a heart attack Friday at Greenwich Hospital.

He served as Army secretary from 1950 to 1953. Before that, he had been budget director. Pace was appointed the first director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1968 under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Pace was involved with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the 1950s, serving as chairman of the NATO Defense Ministers’ Conference in Brussels in 1950 and chairman of the American Council on NATO from 1957 to 1960.

Pace most recently served on President Reagan’s task force on private sector initiative, co-chairing a committee on marshaling human resources.

Prescott Bush Jr. of Greenwich, a friend of Pace’s and brother of Vice President George Bush, described Pace as a man whose “ambition was to do everything he did extremely well. That’s why he was such a good public servant.”

Bush worked with Pace on the Robert Taft Institute of Government, an association to promote the two-party system in the United States.

Pace was born in Little Rock, Ark. He graduated from Princeton University as a political science major in 1933 and earned a law degree from Harvard University three years later.

Pace is survived by his wife, Margaret, and three daughters.