July 27, 2006

 

Charles Bray, 72, Spokesman for Nixon’s State Department, Is Dead

By DENNIS HEVESI

Charles W. Bray III, the press secretary for Secretary of State William P. Rogers during tumultuous times in the Nixon administration, died Sunday at his home in Milwaukee. He was 72.

The cause was pneumonia, his son David said.

Mr. Bray, who later became an ambassador, was the State Department’s chief spokesman for much of the Vietnam War and during border disputes between India and Pakistan and continuing American tensions with the Soviet Union.

But President Richard M. Nixon had come to rely more heavily on the counsel of his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, than on the State Department. On Aug. 25, 1973, Mr. Rogers sharply criticized the White House after discovering that it had ordered the wiretapping of three high-ranking State Department officials, among more than a dozen officials and reporters wiretapped without court orders because of the president’s perception that they were national security threats.

By then, it had already been announced that Mr. Kissinger, who had helped coordinate the wiretaps, would be replacing Mr. Rogers as secretary of state. Mr. Bray, saying he would find it “distasteful” to work for someone who had condoned wiretapping his friends, announced that he would resign as press secretary.

Mr. Bray was later deputy director of the United States Information Agency under President Jimmy Carter and, from 1981 to 1985, ambassador to Senegal under President Ronald Reagan.

Charles William Bray III was born on Oct. 24, 1933, in Princeton, N.J., the son of Charles W. Bray II and Katherine Owsley Bray. His father was a professor of psychology at Princeton.

Mr. Bray graduated from Princeton in 1955. In 1989, he attended a class reunion where Ralph Nader proposed the creation of the Princeton Project 55, a corporation that supports summer internships and yearlong fellowships for Princeton graduates. Mr. Bray was named president of the project, which as of last year had placed more than 1,200 graduates at more than 300 nonprofit organizations.

From 1988 to 1999, Mr. Bray was president of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wis., a nonprofit group that holds conferences on sustainable development, environmental issues and education. He was also the first chairman of the Ten Chimneys Foundation in Genesee Depot, Wis., outside Milwaukee, which restored the estate of the Broadway legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and opened it as a museum.