Paul W McCracken

Moderate Republican who served as an economic adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents and who led President Richard M. Nixon’s largely unsuccessful effort to tame the rising inflation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His father, a farmer, and his uncle, an economics teacher, encouraged him to study economics at William Penn College (now University) in Oskaloosa, Iowa. He graduated in 1937 and then taught for three years at Berea College in Kentucky, where he met Emily Ruth Siler, a student teacher. They married in 1942, the same year Mr. McCracken received a master’s from Harvard in economics and went to work at the Commerce Department in Washington. From 1943 to 1948 he was a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, while completing a Ph.D., also at Harvard. Then he joined the faculty at what is now the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Mr. McCracken was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1956 to 1959 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. While a professor, Mr. McCracken served two Democratic presidents: John F. Kennedy, as a member of a task force on the domestic economy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, as part of a commission on budgetary accounting. Working for Nixon, Mr. McCracken was confronted with an inflation rate that had been rising since 1965, a byproduct of the deficits that the federal government had amassed during the Vietnam War. Mr. McCracken returned to Michigan at the end of 1971. He was the Edmund Ezra Day distinguished university professor of business administration until his retirement in 1986. He is survived by two daughters, Linda Langer and Paula McCracken. His wife died in 2005.