Roger A. Freeman; Economist

Roger A. Freeman, an economist who advised Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, has died at 87.

Freeman, a senior fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution, died Wednesday after a brief bout with stomach cancer.

An expert in public finance, Freeman was a presidential assistant in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and held other government posts.

“Roger Freeman led a life of action and energy that stands as an inspiration to all of us,” said John Raisian, Hoover Institution director.

Raisian described Freeman as “the epitome of the Hoover Fellow, combining scholarly inquiry with outstanding contributions in the public policy arena.”

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Freeman worked to slow or reverse the trend of centralizing the financing and control of education, welfare and other domestic services in Washington, said a statement released by the Hoover Institution.

Freeman was born in Vienna and moved to the United States a year after Adolf Hitler took over Austria. Two weeks after arriving in New York, he wrote an article on chain store merchandising problems for a trade paper that resulted in a job managing the 21-store New York City division of W.L. Douglas Shoe Co.

From there, he became chief financial officer of the western subsidiary of Shoe Corp. of America and was called on in 1949 for assistance in a Washington state budget crisis.

In 1953, he was called to Washington to work with the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations established by Eisenhower. Freeman became a White House assistant in 1955.

He became a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1962 and also served as a special assistant to Nixon in 1969 and 1970.

Survivors include a son, Roger Freeman Jr., and a daughter, Christine Freeman.