Roy Ash 1918-2012

in Featured The New Nixon by Jonathan Movroydis — January 12, 2012 at 4:55 pm | 0 comments

Roy Ash, former Nixon White House Budget Director and Chairman of President’s Advisory Council on Executive Reorganization, died last month. He was 93. Bloomberg has more:

Roy L. Ash, a co-founder and president of Litton Industries Inc. tapped by President Richard Nixon to help make the government more efficient, then to oversee the budget, has died. He was 93.

He had Parkinson’s disease and died Dec. 14 at his home in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing his wife, Lila.

Ash was Nixon’s fourth and final budget director, appointed in February 1973 to succeed Caspar W. Weinberger. He kept the post through Nixon’s resignation and the start of Gerald Ford’s presidency, departing in February 1975.

Ash and Charles “Tex” Thornton bought control of an electronics company headed by Charles Litton in 1953. Thornton, with whom Ash served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, intended to turn the company into a diversified leader in science and technology, according to a New York Times obituary of Thornton in 1981.

Under Thornton’s leadership, with Ash serving as a senior executive until becoming president in 1961, Litton grew to be one of the leading U.S. military contractors. Annual sales increased from $3 million in 1953, when it specialized in microwave tubes, to $1 billion in 1966, when its 5,000 products ranged from oil drilling rigs to credit cards, the Times said. Northrop Grumman Corp. bought Litton in 2001 for about $5.1 billion.

Joining Nixon

Ash remained Litton’s president until 1972. He began working with Nixon in 1968 and a year later was named chairman of the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Reorganization, which became known as the Ash Council. Its recommendations including reconstituting the Bureau of the Budget into what became the White House Office of Management and Budget — which Ash would go on to lead.

Ash told the Los Angeles Times in 1977 that the intent in creating the OMB “was not to build an empire. I’m one who believes the least government is the best government. My goal was to impose managerial responsibility on the spending of more than $300 billion a year.

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