Roy Ash, Litton Co-Founder Who Ran Budget Office Under Nixon, Dies at 93
Roy Ash, Former Budget Director For Nixon and Ford
Roy Ash, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Nixon and Ford administrations, has died at 93. Photo: Gerald Ford Museum & Library via Bloomberg
Roy Ash, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Nixon and Ford administrations, has died at 93. Photo: Gerald Ford Museum & Library via Bloomberg
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. (NOC) 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.”
That was the approximate federal budget outlay when Ash ran OMB in the mid-1970s; in 2012, it’s projected to top $3.7 trillion.
Roy Lawrence Ash was born on Oct. 20, 1918, in Los Angeles, according to biographical information on the website of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Top of Class
After serving in the U.S. military, he earned a master’s in business administration from the Harvard School of Business in 1947, graduating first in his class, according to a biography on the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum website. He never attended college as an undergraduate.
After Harvard, Ash worked at Bank of America National Trust & Savings Association in San Francisco and as chief financial officer of Hughes Aircraft Co. in Culver City, California.
Following his work in federal government, Ash led Addressograph-Multigraph (later AM International) from 1976 to 1981. He was vice chairman of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee from 1980 to 1985 and a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1979 to 1985.
Along with his wife of 68 years, Ash is survived by sons Charles, James and Robert, daughters Loretta Danko and Marilyn Hanna, plus nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, according to the Los Angeles Times.
To contact the reporter on this story: Laurence Arnold in Washington at larnold4@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Charles W. Stevens at cstevens@bloomberg.net
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