Richard P. Godwin, 82; Defense Official Worked to Reform Procurement System
Richard P. “Dick” Godwin, a longtime Bechtel Corp. executive who had a brief and stormy tenure during the Reagan administration as the Defense Department’s first undersecretary for procurement, has died. He was 82.
Godwin died March 3 in San Rafael, Calif., of complications from progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative, Parkinson’s-like disease.
The Pentagon’s buying practices came under close scrutiny in the mid-1980s after reports surfaced that the military was paying vastly inflated prices for spare parts and such items as toilet seats and hammers. President Reagan appointed Hewlett-Packard Chairman David Packard to head a commission to look into the situation. That panel recommended vast changes in procurement practices.
Congress then drafted a statute creating a job for a single bureaucrat who would be responsible for everything the Pentagon buys. Under that centralized system, the various chiefs of each branch of the service would, in theory, lose their authority to decide what weapons systems should be purchased.
In 1987, Godwin was selected to carry out the task as the third-ranking official in the department under Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, also a former Bechtel executive, and Deputy Secretary William Howard Taft IV. Godwin’s goal was to employ commercial business practices instead of military or bureaucratic ones to improve and simplify acquisitions.
But a year later he resigned, saying that Weinberger and Taft had failed to give him adequate support to carry out the reforms. In testimony later before the House Armed Services Committee, Godwin said that he generally found Pentagon officials to be 95% supportive of his efforts but that “everyone who was in the system has a 5% problem, and that was in part that impinged upon what they were doing.”
“Everybody agreed that these changes were desirable ... so long as we didn’t make any change,” he said.
Over the years, many of the Packard Commission reforms that Godwin was pushing were adopted. Among those were more competition among suppliers, more use of commercial products, creation of a code of ethics for vendor companies and appointment of program officers to watch over contracts.
Godwin, a native of Clifton, N.J., was raised in New Britain, Conn. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Yale and was an officer in the Navy during World War II.
After the war, Godwin had a varied career as a machine tool designer, a metallurgist, a reactor engineer for the Atomic Energy Commission and project director for the development of the Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship.
He joined Bechtel in 1961 and served in a variety of capacities, including manager of the scientific development department, manager of corporate planning and development, and president of Bechtel Group Inc., one of Bechtel’s key operating companies.
He was elected a vice president in 1971 and a director in 1976.
After leaving the Pentagon, he retired to Northern California and created a vineyard on the Moss Oak Ranch in Healdsburg.
He is survived by two sons, Richard of Rockville, Md., and Kent of Santa Rosa, Calif.; two daughters, Lauren Godwin DeConde of Novato, Calif., and Peggy Godwin Bettini of San Rafael, Calif.; nine grandchildren; a brother; and a sister.
Instead of flowers, the family suggests that donations be sent to the Society for PSP, Woodholme Medical Building, Suite 515, 1838 Greene Tree Road, Baltimore, MD 21209.
