Retired Army Lt. Gen. Edward L. Rowny, a hard-line arms control adviser to five presidents who resigned from the military in 1979 to campaign successfully against the strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviets, passed December 17, 2017. He was 100. The Fund for American Studies, where Gen. Rowny had established a scholarship fund for students from Poland to learn about American democracy and free-market economics, announced the death but did not provide additional information. Gen. Rowny built his reputation as a seasoned combat officer. He commanded battalions in Italy during World War II, helped Gen. Douglas MacArthur plan the 1950 landing on the Inchon beachhead during the Korean War and led a regiment in brutal winter combat. He later championed arming helicopters for battle, creating a sky cavalry that he helped implement in Vietnam for counterinsurgency operations. And he rose to quasi-diplomatic positions with NATO during the Cold War.
Dubbed a "scholar-general" by the New York Times, he began studying the Russian language and Soviet negotiating technique at Yale University in the late 1940s - experience that positioned him to play a meaningful role in U.S. nuclear policymaking.Gen. Rowny, who worked in arms control under every president from Richard M. Nixon to George H.W. Bush, became one of the most outspoken and controversial members of the U.S. team sent to Geneva to work on agreements over strategic, or nuclear, arms. He spent much of the 1970s as the Joint Chiefs of Staff's representative to the second round of strategic arms limitation talks, known as SALT II. In the ideological battle over negotiating positions and tactics, he worked with proponents of increased military spending - including future President Ronald Reagan, defense official Paul H. Nitze and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, D-Wash. - to defeat the SALT II treaty. The agreement imposed restrictions on the construction and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and slowed proliferation of multiple nuclear warheads on those missiles. Read More