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Charles W. Bray III, the press secretary for Secretary of State William
P. Rogers during tumultuous times in the Nixon administration, died
Sunday, July 23, 2006, at his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the age
of 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 August 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 October 24, 1933, in Princeton,
New Jersey, 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.
Mr. Bray's first wife, Eleanor Mauzé Bray, died in 1993. Besides his
son David, of Atlanta, he is survived by his second wife, Katie
Gingrass; two brothers, Richard, of Bethesda, Maryland, and Thomas, of
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; another son, Charles, of Austin, Texas; a
daughter, Kathy Bray-Merrell of Davidson, North Carolina; and four
grandchildren.
NY Times -- DENNIS HEVESI
