Martin Anderson, GOP presidential adviser, proponent of ending the draft, dies at 78
Martin Anderson, a conservative and libertarian-leaning intellectual who was a key adviser to Republican presidents and was credited with providing many of the ideas and arguments that created Americas all-volunteer military, died Jan. 3 at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 78.
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Dr. Anderson had been a senior fellow since 1971, announced his death but did not cite a cause.
During the presidential campaign years of 1967 and 1968, Dr. Anderson provided GOP candidate Richard M. Nixon with proposals that helped end the military draft and replace it with the volunteer force that in recent generations has been the basis of American defense and the underpinning of American foreign policy.
Dr. Anderson also was the first domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, becoming known as a member of the close circle of aides who set the ideological tone for Reagans administration in the 1980s.
One of the pioneering chroniclers of American politics, Theodore H. White, noted Dr. Andersons prominent position in Washingtons highest councils, those places where ideas intersect with actions.
In his book America in Search of Itself, White described Dr. Anderson as having been enlisted from the academic world to become in time Reagans Seeing Eye dog . . . a one-man warehouse of facts . . . guiding [Reagan] to that growing minority revolting against the dominant liberal ideas that reigned on American campuses.
A bespectacled man with a skeptical glance who swam against prevailing currents of academic opinion, Dr. Anderson over the years held many titles in Washington that suggested his proximity to power but did not always reveal the influence he wielded.
In the Nixon White House from 1969 to 1970, he was special assistant to the president and later a special consultant to the president. After being Reagans chief adviser on domestic policy, he served as a member of the presidents Economic Policy Advisory Board from 1982 to 1989.
From 1987 through 1993, during the later Reagan years and throughout the succeeding administration of President George H.W. Bush, Dr. Anderson sat on the presidents General Advisory Committee on Arms Control.
In addition, he was a trustee of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and, from 1993 to 1998, served on the California Governors Council of Economic Advisers.
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Martin Anderson, GOP presidential adviser, proponent of ending the draft, dies at 78