Childe Harold Comes of Age

Harold Brown has always been in a hurry. He graduated at age 15 from New York's Bronx High School of Science, finished Columbia at the head of his class by age 17, had his doctorate in physics from Columbia by 22. Two years later he was a protege of Edward Teller, a leader in developing the hydrogen bomb. As one of Robert McNamara's "Whiz Kids" and research director of the Defense Department by the time he was 33, he was nicknamed Childe Harold. Now a mature 49, the brilliant scientist-manager was near the top of Jimmy Carter's talent list from the first.

Brown's choice as Defense Secretary pleased many bureaucrats at both the Pentagon and State Department. Some military men regard him as too "soft," but others see him as an effective administrator with a superb grasp of weapons systems. As one of his first official acts, Brown is expected--but not certain--to advise Carter to go ahead with production of at least some B-l bombers. Says a friend of Brown's: "He wants to maintain a strong defense, but without hatchet-waving histrionics." At the same time, Brown will push hard to break the current impasse on the second round of Strategic-Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) with the Soviet Union.

Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brown is a pragmatist suspicious of prevailing views. Says an old friend, Rand Corp. Economist Charles Wolf: "If exposed to hard-line views, he is likely to take softer ones, and if exposed to soft-line views he is likely to take harder ones." Says Teller: "Harold is a realistic, nondoctrinaire person."

In 1960 Brown succeeded Teller as director of the University of California's Livermore Laboratory. A year later he moved to Defense, first as director of research and, from 1965 to 1969, as Secretary of the Air Force. Because of his skepticism about many weapons projects, he was nicknamed Dr. No, for the James Bond character. He helped kill the B70 bomber, which was vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. He also was involved in two expensive mistakes: the FTX fighter-bomber, and the Air Force's C-5A transport, whose construction resulted in cost overruns of $2 billion.

As a participant in many Viet Nam War decisions, Brown in March 1968 advised stepped-up bombing to force the Communists to negotiate a settlement. At that time other strategists were urging the U.S. to wind down the war. Last week he described the war in retrospect as "a tragic time in which many mistakes were made--and I was not without my share of them."

Jewish and raised in The Bronx, Brown is a nonsmoker and only drinks an occasional Tom Collins. He has a close-knit family life with his wife Colene and daughters Deborah, 21, and Ellen, 20. Every morning he swims laps in his backyard pool for precisely 30 minutes. Reserved in public, Brown can be arrogant. But Pentagon officials approvingly recall that during the '60s he got along well with uniformed officers and Congressmen after overcoming their initial suspicions of him as an insufferable boy wonder.

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