Alan S Boyd

Alan S. Boyd, the first United States secretary of transportation, who was named by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 to integrate the nation’s sprawling networks of planes, trains, ships and highways into a new superagency, died on Sunday October 18 2020 in Seattle. He was 98. Mr. Boyd was a member of the Civil Aeronautics Board under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and its chairman under President John F. Kennedy. In the Johnson administration, he was the under secretary of commerce for transportation, and then the secretary of transportation from Jan. 16, 1967, to the start of the Nixon administration on Jan. 20, 1969. Mr. Boyd won relatively high marks for a two-year effort to merge dozens of transportation-related federal agencies into a cabinet-level department with 95,000 employees and a more than $5 billion budget. The main holdout was the Maritime Administration, which was not brought into the fold until 1981. It was perhaps inevitable that Mr. Boyd would find a life in transportation. A great-grandfather invented America’s first horse-drawn streetcar on rails, his father was a highway engineer, and his stepfather was a lawyer for a railroad company. Boyd was president of the Illinois Central Railroad; President Jimmy Carter’s chief negotiator for a 1977 air-travel pact with Britain, called Bermuda II, governing fares, air routes and other trans-Atlantic arrangements; president of Amtrak; and finally president of the North American arm of Airbus Industrie, the French jetliner manufacturer.