Richard V. Allen, President Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser, who was forced to resign after less than a year in office, much of it under a cloud of controversies that muted his voice in contributing to foreign and military policies, died on Saturday in Denver. He was 88.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed on Tuesday by his son Michael, who did not specify a cause. Mr. Allen lived in Denver.
An international business consultant who for decades had cultivated clients in Japan and Portugal, Mr. Allen was a veteran political operative with conservative Republican credentials. He had written books on Cold War communism, been a foreign policy adviser to Richard M. Nixon in his 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns, and was an economic adviser in the Nixon White House.
He had also been a focus of controversy over his political and business affairs. The head of a Grumman Corporation subsidiary told a Senate subcommittee that during Nixon’s 1972 campaign, Mr. Allen had solicited a $1 million contribution to the Committee to Re-elect the President in exchange for promising to help the subsidiary win sales contracts in Japan. Mr. Allen denied the allegation, which was not adjudicated.
And in the fall of 1980, during Reagan’s presidential campaign, Mr. Allen temporarily stepped down as the candidate’s foreign policy adviser after an allegation surfaced in news reports that he had used his connections in the Nixon White House to obtain consulting contracts for himself with foreign governments. Mr. Allen denied that allegation as well. After Reagan’s victory, he was named national security adviser.
His tenure began inauspiciously. On Jan. 21, 1981, the day after Reagan’s inauguration, three Japanese journalists, with Mr. Allen’s authorization, interviewed Nancy Reagan, the new first lady, at the White House. Afterward, one tried to hand Mrs. Reagan an envelope containing a $1,000 honorarium. Mr. Allen, thinking it unseemly, intercepted the envelope.
“I brought it back to my office and told my secretary to make sure this gets turned over to the appropriate officials,” Mr. Allen said in an interview for this obituary in 2019. “Instead, she put it in my safe and forgot about it.”
Soon after that, he moved to another office in the White House. But for eight months, the envelope with the money lay there in his old safe — a potential ethical time bomb or the trigger to a comedy of errors — until new occupants, three military officers, moved into his former office.
“These guys wanted to use the safe, so I gave them the combination and they found the money,” Mr. Allen recalled. “Instead of coming to me, they went to Ed Meese,” he added, referring to Edwin Meese 3d, the president’s chief counsel. “Meese sent it to the Justice Department, and they called in the F.B.I.”
After the news broke, with its hint of scandal, reporters camped out at Mr. Allen’s home in Arlington, Va., and confronted his children as they came out to go to school. That was the beginning of ‘doorstep journalism,’” Mr. Allen said, adding: “It was a new low. One badgered my 5-year-old daughter. I found out about it and secured the name of the reporter, who was fired.”
In the meantime, as the investigation unfolded, Mr. Allen’s status as national security adviser was eroded by his own missteps and by White House infighting. Speeches he gave on Europe and the Middle East appeared to challenge the authority of Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. to spearhead foreign policy. Mr. Haig accused Mr. Allen of trying to undermine him. Mr. Allen denied that, and news reports called the standoff an embarrassing feud.
The president ordered an end to the squabbling, and downgraded Mr. Allen’s influence and policymaking authority. Instead of regular Oval Office meetings with Reagan, Mr. Allen was told to report to the president through Mr. Meese.
After the Justice Department began its inquiry into the $1,000 in Mr. Allen’s safe, the White House and Mr. Allen denied that the money was a bribe. But the circumstances seemed suspicious. The envelope had “$10,000” written on the outside; a piece of paper resembling a receipt also bore the $10,000 figure. Investigators said Mr. Allen had received wrist watches from the Japanese reporters.
Mr. Allen took a leave of absence pending the outcome of the investigation. In December, the Justice Department reported that it had found no criminal conduct by him. It said the $1,000 had indeed been intended as an honorarium for Mrs. Reagan, and that the $10,000 had been travel expenses for the Japanese journalists. The wrist watches were described as innocent gifts from Japanese friends.
“I find this matter to be so unsubstantial that further investigation or prosecution is unwarranted,” Attorney General William French Smith announced.
Despite being cleared of wrongdoing, Mr. Allen was not reinstated as national security adviser. The president’s chief of staff, James A. Baker 3d, and his deputy, Michael K. Deaver, were said to be unhappy with his work. On Jan. 4, 1982, after 348 days in office, Mr. Allen met with the president, who refused his request for reinstatement. He resigned hours later. The president praised his “personal integrity and exemplary service to the nation.”
But in a news analysis, The New York Times reported that Mr. Allen had “often appeared insensitive to Washington’s political currents,” and it quoted an unidentified White House official as saying: “It was decided some time ago that he had to go, but he didn’t do the honorable thing. For someone who spent so much time in Japan, he had to be pushed onto the sword.”
Richard Vincent Allen was born in Collingswood, N.J., on Jan. 1, 1936, one of four children of Charles and Magdalen (Buchman) Allen. His father was a salesman. Richard graduated from St. Francis Preparatory School in Spring Grove, Pa., and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and a master’s degree in political science in 1958, both from the University of Notre Dame.
In the early 1960s, after postgraduate work at the University of Munich in West Germany, Mr. Allen taught at the University of Maryland, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgetown University Center for Strategic Studies.
From 1966 to 1968, he was a senior staff member of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University; he had been a senior fellow of the institution since 1983. He was also a fellow of St. Margaret’s College of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Mr. Allen was the author of several books, including “Peace and Peaceful Coexistence” (1966) and “Communism and Democracy: Theory and Action” (1967). He wrote many articles and research papers for political journals and other periodicals.
After leaving government service in 1982, he founded the Richard V. Allen Company, a Washington-based international consulting services firm, which closed when he retired in 2004.
He married Patricia Ann Mason in 1957, and the couple had seven children. In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by his wife; his sons Mark and Kevin; four daughters, Kristin Muhl, Karen Ready and Kas and Kimberly Allen; one brother, David; 22 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Mr. Allen had a summer home on Long Beach Island in New Jersey.
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