Henry D Owen

Henry David Oyen was born on Aug. 26, 1920, in Forest Hills, Queens. He simplified the spelling of his surname to Owen as a young man. Mr. Owen studied in Switzerland and in New York, graduating from the Birch Wathen High School, a Manhattan private school, before enrolling at Harvard. He graduated in 1941 and served in the Navy during World War II. From 1952 to 1968, Mr. Owen worked as an economist in the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, sometimes referred to as the department’s think tank. He was its chairman from 1966 to 1969 and recruited Mr. Brzezinski, then a professor of foreign policy at Columbia University, to work on his staff. Mr. Owen was director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution from 1969 to 1977. He was later a consultant to investment firms including Salomon Brothers and was co-founder of the philanthropic group Capital Partners for Education. Mr. Owen played an important, though largely unheralded, role in establishing an informal discussion group for business and intellectual leaders known as the Trilateral Commission, which was officially founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the foreign policy expert who later became national security adviser to President Carter. “He had a lot to do with framing the original concept” of the Trilateral Commission, Mr. Brzezinski said in an interview on Thursday. “In his quiet way, he was profoundly influential.” Among those who have been commission members are Mr. Carter, Dick and Lynne Cheney, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Henry A. Kissinger, Richard C. Holbrooke, Madeleine K. Albright, Robert S. McNamara, Paul A. Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Paul D. Wolfowitz. In addition to his son Chris, Mr. Owen is survived by his wife of 55 years, Hertha; another son, Francis; and five grandchildren.