Charles W. Duncan Jr., Energy Secretary in Oil Crisis, Is Dead at 96
|
Heir to a Houston coffee fortune and a former president of Coca-Cola, he joined President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet in 1979 as oil shortages roiled the nation.
By Robert D. McFadden
Oct. 18, 2022
Charles W. Duncan Jr., who got into the energy business as a young Texas roustabout digging pipeline ditches in 1947, and at the height of America’s oil-shortage crisis in 1979 became President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of energy, died on Tuesday at his home in Houston. He was 96.
His son, Charles W. Duncan III, said the cause was complications of a recent fall.
Mr. Duncan was the scion of a Houston family that made a fortune in coffee. He turned the brand, Duncan Coffee, into a rival of Maxwell House before it was acquired by the Coca-Cola Company. He became the president of Coca-Cola, and in Atlanta got to know Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter. They liked each other and saw eye to eye on many forward-looking issues.
After Mr. Carter became president in 1977, he named Mr. Duncan deputy secretary of defense under Harold Brown. As deputy, Mr. Duncan notably asked Congress to end the ban on women in combat, raising the prospect of female volunteers flying fighter planes, joining infantry units and serving aboard destroyers and aircraft carriers — realities that were decades away.
In the summer of 1979, Mr. Carter needed Mr. Duncan for a much more urgent job.
The shah of Iran, a longtime ally of the United States, had been overthrown in the Islamic Revolution, and oil supplies that the monarch had long guaranteed were dwindling. The public had no idea how serious the effects might be. Panic spread. Long lines of cars began to appear at gas pumps, and the governors of Northeastern states warned of a winter home-heating-oil crisis for millions.
Mr. Carter had been aware of the dangers. Months after his inauguration, he had created the nation’s first cabinet-level Department of Energy, its mission to stabilize America’s supplies by exploring new domestic and foreign sources of oil, enacting energy conservation measures and developing nuclear and alternate-fuel technologies.
Mr. Carter named a Republican, James R. Schlesinger, as the first energy secretary. Mr. Schlesinger was a brilliant but abrasive former defense secretary who had ruffled Congress, foreign leaders and even Mr. Carter’s predecessor, President Gerald R. Ford, who had asked for his resignation from the Pentagon. After two years of disorganization, confrontation and controversy in the Energy Department, Mr. Carter dismissed Mr. Schlesinger, too.
The president then chose Mr. Duncan, a fellow Democrat, as his new energy secretary, and he was swiftly confirmed by the Senate in August 1979. Mr. Duncan knew little about energy, but was a quick study who had mastered his Pentagon job in short order. He was even-tempered, businesslike and a superb manager. He soon established a good rapport with Democratic leaders in Congress.
Plunging in, he met with Northeast governors and calmed the worst fears of homeowners in the region by announcing extra allocations of home-heating oil and subsidies for families unable to afford the sharply higher costs. He pushed for greater domestic oil production, and began traveling abroad for talks that soothed relations with most foreign suppliers.
(In November 1979, followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s revolutionary government, seized American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, initiating a standoff that lasted through the Carter presidency. Mr. Carter suspended Iranian oil imports, 4 percent of America’s oil consumption, but the effects were minimal because the United States bought oil elsewhere.)
Mr. Duncan and Mr. Carter put America on an energy diet, imposing oil-import quotas and filling shortages with domestic resources, like coal reserves. They won funds from Congress for a synthetic fuels corporation to produce gasohol for cars, using gasoline, wood chips, corn and alcohol.
They offered loan and price guarantees to get private industry involved, and tax breaks to weatherize homes. No mandatory cuts in gasoline usage were ordered, to the relief of motorists. Lines at the pump began to fade. Energy shortages continued, but proved less serious than anticipated.
“Mr. Duncan gets high marks for his dedication to good management, his tranquil nature and his ability to work with a variety of people, from the White House to Congress to industry and consumer groups,” The New York Times reported in 1980. “He also appears to have smoothed energy relations with other countries, particularly Canada and Mexico.”
With the Carter administration in its final months, Mr. Duncan reported sharp declines in imported oil — a glimpse of hope for oil independence. He attributed a 37 percent decline in imports from a year earlier largely to more fuel-efficient cars and energy-efficient homes and appliances. Alaskan oil, he said, had replaced imported oil, barrel for barrel.
Charles William Duncan Jr. was born in Houston on Sept. 9, 1926, the older of two sons of Charles and Mary Lillian (House) Duncan. Charles Sr. was vice president of the Duncan Coffee Company, which had been founded by his brother, Herschel, in 1918. Another ancestor helped found a Nashville company that produced Maxwell House coffee.
Charles Jr. and his brother, John, grew up in Houston. John became a co-founder and president of Gulf & Western Corporation. Charles attended Houston public schools, including Lamar High School, but graduated in 1943 from Sewanee Academy, a boarding school in Tennessee. Back in Houston, he earned a chemical engineering degree from Rice University in 1947.
That summer he joined Humble Oil and Refining Company (a predecessor of Exxon) and dug pipeline ditches before becoming a company engineer. In 1948, he joined his family’s business, the Duncan Coffee Company.
In addition to his son, Charles III, he is survived by his wife, Anne (Smith) Duncan, whom he married in 1957; their daughter, Mary Anne Dingus; and five grandchildren.
Rising through the executive ranks, Mr. Duncan became president of the renamed Duncan Foods in 1958. On his watch, the company, which had produced grocery staples for markets in Texas and surrounding states, expanded into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Nebraska and elsewhere. Its Maryland Club Coffee became a rival of Maxwell House.
He stepped down as Duncan’s president in 1964, when the company was acquired by Coca-Cola. Mr. Duncan joined the Coke board, ran the new Coca-Cola Foods Division and in 1967 was posted to London as chairman of Coca-Cola Europe, in charge of bottling and other operations in Europe, Asia and North Africa. In 1970, he returned to Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta and served as president from 1971 to 1974.
Those were the years of Mr. Carter’s one-term governorship, and the two men became friends. Mr. Duncan left Coca-Cola in 1974 and became chairman of the Rotan Mosle Finance Corporation.
After his Washington years, he served on many corporate and civic boards and was a trustee of Rice University and its board chairman from 1982 to 1996. In 2007, he and his wife gave $30 million to establish Duncan College, a Rice residential college.
As deputy defense secretary, Mr. Duncan made his overture for women’s roles in combat in 1978. In a letter to the House speaker, Thomas P. O’Neill, he said that nurses had long served on battlefields and that women were already flying helicopters “potentially close” to combat zones. Army, Navy and Air Force secretaries, not Congress, he said, should decide how to define combat.
“Since the word ‘combat’ has been used to include a broad range of activities,” he wrote, “the Department of Defense does not believe that the term provides a useful basis for expanding the opportunities for women in the service.”
It was a first step. In 2013, with congressional and White House approval, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta officially lifted the ban on women in combat.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.
|
Replies are disabled on threads older than 7 days.
|
|