Kenneth W. Dam, who was deputy secretary of point out when the Soviet Union commenced to implode all through the Reagan administration, and who choreographed a world-wide chokehold on funding for terrorist groups as deputy treasury secretary below George W. Bush, died on Might 31 at his household in Lengthy Grove, Unwell. He was 89.
His dying was confirmed by his son, Eliot.
Educated in a 1-room schoolhouse in Kansas, Mr. Dam turned a whole professor at the College of Chicago Regulation University in 1964 and served by means of 2004, when he was named a senior lecturer and professor emeritus.
He was the university’s provost from 1980 to 1982 when Reagan recruited him to be deputy to Secretary of Point out George P. Shultz, his previous colleague at the College of Chicago.
He and Mr. Shultz ended up credited with restoring balance to the Point out Division next the tumultuous tenure of Alexander M. Haig Jr. (who famously, and erroneously, declared, “I am in control below, at the White House” just after President Reagan was shot in 1981).
They assisted pave the way for détente in between the United States and the Soviet Union, laying the groundwork for Washington’s embrace of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika beginning in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Dam was recalled to Washington from his Chicago professorship and sworn in as deputy to Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill much less than a thirty day period just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. He was then assigned to coordinate intercontinental initiatives by 130 nations to discover and eradicate the resources of financing for terrorist teams.
His portfolio also incorporated economic solutions, taxation and economic advancement in developing nations.
Hanna Holborn Gray, a previous president of the College of Chicago, below whom Mr. Dam served as provost from 1980 to 1982, described him in a statement as “the most honest-minded of men” who “brought an admirable quiet and extraordinary judgment to it all.”
A proficient negotiator and an economics scholar, he also served as the arbitrator under the collective bargaining agreement amongst the Countrywide Basketball Association and its gamers from 1996 and 2001 and again in 2012.
He was IBM’s govt vice president of law and exterior relations from 1985 to 1992.
In 1992, United Way of The usa capitalized on Mr. Dam’s popularity for probity following the corporation was shaken by revelations, in news stories and from an inside investigation, of price account abuses that had backed the lifestyle of its longtime president, William Aramony. Mr. Dam was named interim president, charged with imposing economic oversight over the group to restore its creditability.
Kenneth Willard Dam was born on Oct. 8, 1932, to Oliver and Ida (Hueppelheiser) Dam in Marysville, Kan., near the Nebraska border. He was a grandson of immigrants from Germany and Denmark. His father was a grain and rooster farmer.
Mr. Dam served in the Army as a typist for a yr following he completed significant university and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kansas in 1954. He went on to graduate initially in his course at the College of Chicago Regulation School in 1957, then clerked for Charles E. Whittaker, an affiliate justice of the United States Supreme Court and a fellow Kansan. (Justice Whittaker served from 1957 to 1962.)
Mr. Dam practiced law in New York and returned to the University of Chicago as an assistant law professor in 1960. When touring through Europe he grew to become keenly interested in the United States’ job in rebuilding countries and their economies ravaged by Planet War II.
He was named a entire professor in 1964 and later directed the school’s legislation and economics method.
His bridging of economics and legislation caught the attention of Mr. Shultz, who was then a professor of industrial relations and afterwards grew to become dean of the university’s Graduate Faculty of Company. He lured Mr. Dam to Washington in the early 1970s just after Mr. Shultz grew to become director of the Business office of Management and Price range in the Nixon administration.
Mr. Dam was the office’s assistant director for countrywide protection and global affairs from 1971 to 1973, when he was named government director of Nixon’s White Home Council on Financial Policy. In that article he was dependable for coordinating U.S. domestic and intercontinental financial plan.
Mr. Dam was the author of several textbooks, which includes “The Policies of the Global Video game: A New Search at U.S. Global Economic Policymaking” (2001) “Economic Policy Further than the Headlines,” with Mr. Shultz (1998) and “The Principles of the Activity: Reform and Evolution in the Intercontinental Monetary System” (1982).
In 1962, he married Marcia Wachs. In addition to his son, Eliot, he is survived by his wife a daughter, Charlotte Dam and two grandchildren.
When Mr. Dam initial arrived in Washington immediately after regulation faculty in 1957, “there was however a minimal bit of the farm boy about him,” Norman Dorsen, a fellow Supreme Court clerk and later a New York University professor and president of the American Civil Liberties Union, informed The New York Times in 1982.
“He was not notably unsophisticated, but he considered the planet from a extremely good Middle American perspective,” Mr. Dorsen claimed. He extra, nonetheless, that following 25 a long time as a regulation professor, college official, writer, environment traveler and world-wide economic expert, the guy who was named deputy secretary of point out experienced small of the farm boy left in him.
“He shed it pretty rapid,” Mr. Dorsen reported.
