PALO ALTO, Calif. — Henry S. Rowen, an American policymaker and Stanford University economist who was president of the RAND Corp. when it helped produce the Pentagon Papers, has died, university officials announced Thursday.
Tom Gilligan, the director of the Hoover Institution, confirmed his death. Rowen, 90, collapsed at the university on his way to an event on Nov. 12. A cause of death has not been released.
A leading scholar on economic growth in the U.S. and Asia and a national security expert, Rowen started his career as an economist at the RAND think tank and later became a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Rowen took the helm at RAND Corp. in 1967. That same year, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara launched a top-secret study of U.S. policies in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
It involved Defense Department and private analysts, including from RAND.
“I’m not sure I’m the only one, but I’m one of the people who said we should really get a record of this thing which has turned out so badly,” Rowen said in 2005. “Some of this might be fleeting material, and we ought to collect it. I don’t know whether this prompted McNamara to do it or not, but in due course a team was assembled.”
Among the RAND analysts was Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly photocopied the project’s documents and released them to The New York Times, which published the first in its series of stories about the findings on June 13, 1971.
When Ellsberg was arrested on charges of conspiracy, espionage and theft of government property, Rowen knew that RAND’s reputation was in jeopardy, and he resigned.
He said in a statement at that time: “Maintaining vitality in institutions and in people is brought about by change – RAND and I are no exception.”
To this day, Ellsberg says he regrets how his actions affected Rowen.
Born on Oct. 11, 1925, in Boston, Massachusetts, Rowen earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s in economics from Oxford University.
He is survived by his widow, Beverly Griffiths, six children and nine grandchildren.
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