Ex-Sen. Symington, First AF Chief, Dies

Stuart Symington, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, two-time presidential aspirant and the first secretary of the Air Force, died of heart failure at his home here Wednesday.

He was 87 and had been ill with “angina and weakness of the heart,” said a son, James Symington, a Washington lawyer and former Missouri congressman.

The Democrat served in the Senate from 1953 until he chose not to seek reelection in 1976. He had been reelected handily in 1958 and 1964, but in 1970 his margin dropped to about 37,000 votes over his Republican opponent.

Symington first became widely known in 1954, when, as an outspoken opponent of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, he took part in a Senate Government Operations subcommittee’s investigation of a dispute between McCarthy and the Department of the Army. The hearings were televised to a nation fascinated by the feud.

In the televised bouts McCarthy called him “sanctimonious Stu,” while Symington suggested that McCarthy needed to see a psychiatrist.

Earlier, he had held various posts in the Truman Administration. He became the first Air Force secretary in 1947, when the air wing was made a separate branch of service, and served until 1950. Previously, he had been assistant secretary of war for air in 1946-47.

In 1956 and 1960, he was a favorite-son candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.

He came from a family long affiliated with the Democratic Party. His grandfather, another Stuart Symington, fought as a Confederate major at the Battle of Gettysburg.

The future senator joined the Army at 17 during World War I and was discharged as a second lieutenant in 1919. He was graduated from Yale University after having borrowed money to go there.

His first job was as an iron molder at the family’s railroad equipment plant in Rochester, N.Y., and over the years he worked for battery, radio and iron and steel firms before serving as chairman of Emerson Electric Co. in St. Louis from 1938 to 1945.

In 1941, the War Department sent him to England to study airplane armaments, and in July, 1945, after he had become a millionaire industrialist, President Harry S. Truman nominated him as chairman of the three-member Surplus Property Board, charged with disposing of billions of dollars in surplus war materiel.

When the Air Force became a separate service, Symington became secretary under the newly formed Defense Department. He subsequently was chairman of the National Security Resources Board and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corp.

As Air Force secretary, he urged development of a larger air wing at a time when Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal and other officials favored a balance with land and sea forces. He resigned in 1950 in a protest against budget cuts.

Symington was regarded as a pragmatist, and this outlook resulted in dramatic changes of position over the years on two major issues: defense spending and the Vietnam War.

For much of his Washington career, Symington was known as a “big bomber and big missile man,” and, in the early phases of the Vietnam War, as a hawk. But, as defense expenditures mounted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became a critic of ever-larger Pentagon budgets and an opponent of a number of costly and elaborate weapons projects.

In the 1970s, he became increasingly concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and became a vocal advocate of arms control.

In the Senate, he served on the Armed Services Committee. In 1956, he began sounding the alarm that the Soviets were beating the United States in the missile race.

“Stuart Symington was a Renaissance man,” former U.S. Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton (D-Mo.) said in St. Louis Wednesday. “He could do anything, in any discipline, and do it very well: business, sports, executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

“When I went to the Senate in 1968, he became my political father. I made a lot of mistakes. I would have made even more if Stuart Symington hadn’t stopped me.”

Symington’s first wife, Evelyn, died in 1972. After leaving the Senate, he married Ann Hemingway Watson of New Canaan, the widow of a grandson of the founder of IBM, and moved to this wealthy Connecticut community.

Besides his son and wife, Symington is survived by another son, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.