By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 29, 2006; B07

Charles W. Bray III, 73, a career diplomat and ambassador who served as
a spokesman for the State Department during the Nixon administration,
then became president of a private foundation, died of pneumonia July
23 at his home in Milwaukee.

Mr. Bray was press secretary under Secretary of State William P. Rogers
from 1971 to 1973, handling issues that included selling F-4 Phantom
jets to Greece, opposing French atomic tests and denouncing secret
trials of Jews in the Soviet Union.

He resigned in 1973, joining what former secretary of state Dean
Acheson once called "the most exclusive club in America -- men in
public life who have resigned in the cause of conscience.''

Mr. Bray quit as Rogers was replaced by Henry A. Kissinger, primarily
in reaction to news about the Nixon administration's wiretapping of
three high-ranking foreign service officials. Mr. Bray said he found it
"distasteful" to work for anyone who wiretapped his subordinates,
because loyalty "has to run in both directions."

During the Carter administration, Mr. Bray was deputy director of the
U.S. Information Agency and director of the National Foreign Affairs
Training Center. President Ronald Reagan appointed him ambassador to
Senegal in 1981.

After he returned to the United States, he led a State Department task
force that identified $129 million in budget cuts, found largely by
closing 40 of America's 255 foreign missions.

In 1988, he became president of the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread,
in Racine, Wis., which holds conferences on sustainable development,
education, democracy and families. He went to work rescuing the Frank
Lloyd Wright-designed Wingspread Conference Center from neglect. It was
like "opening up a chest cavity, replacing a few ribs and not
disturbing the remaining flesh," he told the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel. "It's frightfully expensive to deal with the aftereffects of
a genius."

He retired in 1997, then turned to restoring Ten Chimneys, home of
Broadway theater legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, in Genesee
Depot, Wis. The estate was a retreat and refuge for artists such as
Noel Coward, Helen Hayes, Edna Ferber, Charlie Chaplin, W. Somerset
Maugham and others. Mr. Bray, as founding chairman of the organization,
opened the home to the public as a museum and resource for the arts
world.

Throughout his career, he wrote essays for newspapers and journals of
opinion, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Chronicle of
Higher Education and the Milwaukee newspaper, on topics such as
Americans' parochialism, the blossoming of ideas from the political
right and how communities should react to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Bray was born in New York City and in 1955 graduated from Princeton
University, where his father was a psychology professor. At a 1989
reunion, classmate Ralph Nader proposed the Princeton Project 55, which
arranges internships in public service for the school's graduates. Mr.
Bray was the president and chief executive of the project.

After a Fulbright scholarship in England and graduate work at the
University of Maryland, Mr. Bray became a foreign service officer in
the Philippines and Central African Republic. He returned to the
Washington area in 1965 and ran several desks at the State Department.
When he was appointed director of State's press relations office, he
was described as a leader in an activist group of Young Turks who
sought reforms in foreign policy.

He received the President's Distinguished Service Award in 1984 and the
State Department's Distinguished Honor Award in 1988. He was founder of
several community and youth organizations in Racine as well.

His first wife, Eleanor Mauzé Bray, died in 1993.

Survivors include his wife of seven years, Katie Gingrass of Milwaukee;
three children from his first marriage, Charles Bray of Austin,
Katherine Bray-Merrell of Davidson, N.C., and David Bray of Atlanta;
five stepchildren, Charles Gingrass of Milwaukee, David Gingrass of
Napa, Calif., Mary Gingrass-Stark of Nashville, Sarah Gingrass of
Milwaukee and Amy Gingrass of Aspen, Colo.; two brothers, Richard Bray
of Bethesda and Thomas Bray of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; and nine
grandchildren.