Robert Abercrombie Lovett

Robert Abercrombie Lovett was born on 14 September 1895 in Huntsville, Texas. He graduated from The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1914 and went on to Yale University.

While still at Yale he joined the First Yale Unit, a group of undergraduates who learned to fly and were taken into the Navy together when the United States entered the First World War. He went to Europe as a naval aviator and flew patrol and bombing missions with the British naval air service. In 1918 he helped organize the Navy's Northern Bombing Group and later commanded a Navy air squadron. As a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve Force he flew raids over the enemy lines in Belgium against the submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge, and raids in support of the Allied armies as the Germans fell back across Belgium in October and November 1918. For this work and for organizing the group he received the Navy Cross. He reached the rank of lieutenant commander. He came home convinced of the reach of the bomber.

He took his Yale degree in 1918, studied law and business at Harvard from 1919 to 1921, and became a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York.

In 1941 he became Assistant Secretary of War for Air and oversaw the growth of the Army Air Forces through the Second World War; he received the Distinguished Service Medal in September 1945. He was Under Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1950, and Secretary of Defense from September 1951 to January 1953.

Lovett died on 7 May 1986 in Locust Valley, New York, aged 90, and was buried in Locust Valley Cemetery.