Murray L Weidenbaum

Was President Ronald Reagan’s first chief economic adviser elevated government regulation of business to the forefront of public policy debate, but resigned unhappy about the administration’s budget-making. Mr. Weidenbaum, a wry and slightly rumpled figure who had long shuttled between government and academic posts, previously at Washington University in St. Louis, proved to be one of the administration’s least doctrinaire members, neither full-throated supply-sider nor strict monetarist. As an assistant secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon, he had led a revenue-sharing initiative, which was briefly effective. But he wound up helping President Reagan dismantle the program when revenue sharing did not displace a proliferation of separate grants and payments to state and local governments voted for by Congress. Though fiscally conservative, Mr. Weidenbaum was more moderate than some of his peers in the White House. He was generally aligned with administration pragmatists like the budget director, David A. Stockman, and the chief of staff, James A. Baker III. Stepping down in August 1982, a time when Mr. Reagan’s popularity had plummeted and the country was sinking into a deep recession, Mr. Weidenbaum was replaced by Martin S. Feldstein. Stepping down in August 1982, a time when Mr. Reagan’s popularity had plummeted and the country was sinking into a deep recession, Mr. Weidenbaum was replaced by Martin S. Feldstein. Stepping down in August 1982, a time when Mr. Reagan’s popularity had plummeted and the country was sinking into a deep recession, Mr. Weidenbaum was replaced by Martin S. Feldstein. Mr. Weidenbaum received a master’s degree from Columbia University, then joined the New York State Department of Labor as a junior economist. Laid off under New York State’s “last in, first out” policy, he found work in Washington at the Bureau of the Budget. During a leave to pursue doctoral work at Princeton, he met Phyllis Green. They married in 1954. Mr. Weidenbaum had an early, formative stint in the military industry. The General Dynamics Corporation in Fort Worth hired him as an economist and had him analyze the operations of the B-58 supersonic bomber. Moving to Boeing, in Seattle, he developed forecasts of the military market. After Boeing, he moved to the Stanford Research Institute in California to continue studying the military industry. That was followed by a turn in Washington as the staff director of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers. He moved to St. Louis in early 1975 when Washington University created the Center for the Study of American Business and recruited him to be its first director. He was there when Mr. Reagan lured him back to the White House. Besides his son, Jim, he is survived by two daughters, Laurie Stark and Susan Juster-Goldstein, and six grandchildren.