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Home Town Tuxedo Park
Date of Passing Nov 02, 2008
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Henry Loomis
WWII Navy Veteran, Asiatic Theater of War, 13 Battle Stars Lieutenant Commander, Bronze Star, Former CIA, Head of VOA and PBS
Mr. Loomis graduated first in his naval training class and, in addition to teaching radar, served as a radar officer with carriers, air squadrons and battleships. He received the Bronze Star and Air Medal.
Henry Loomis (April 19, 1919 - November 2, 2008) was appointed director of the Voice of America in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, resigning from the post in 1965 after policy conflicts with President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was appointed by Richard Nixon in 1972 to serve as president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Loomis was born on April 19, 1919 in Tuxedo Park, New York. His father, Alfred Lee Loomis built a fortune financing public utilities and sold out just before the Wall Street crash of 1929. Alfred Loomis set up a physics laboratory in an old mansion where Henry worked with his father as a teenager on brain-wave research, including participating as a volunteer in his father's experiments. The two men later took part in pioneering research on radar.
Loomis attended Harvard University and left in 1940 during his senior year to enlist in the United States Navy. Harvard granted him an undergraduate degree in 1946 based on his radar instruction while in the Navy.
In the navy, he was on the staff of the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Pearl Harbor, at the time of the attack by the Japanese. Loomis was responsible for the creation of training materials for radar, and worked with pilots and officers on ships to help overcome their wariness of the technology and develop their skills in its use. Loomis was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and left the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
Late in the war, Loomis had a chance meeting with United States Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a cousin of Loomis', and Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. In a discussion about potential target cities in Japan for the atomic bomb being developed, Loomis dissuaded them from targeting Kyoto, citing the city's art treasures he had learned about while studying Japanese history at Harvard.
He attended the University of California, Berkeley after the war, where he took graduate courses in physics, including work as an assistant with Ernest Lawrence at the school's radiation laboratory. He spent four years as assistant to the Dr. James Rhyne Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led the research and intelligence functions at the United States Information Agency. Loomis later directed the staff of Dr. Killian, who had been appointed as the President's science advisor.
He served for 13 years on the board of the not-for-profit Mitre Corporation, which was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked with the Central Intelligence Agency and United States Department of Defense after graduating from Berkeley.
Other Comments:
During his WWII Naval Service
The Executive Officer of VS-l0 (Scouting Squadron Ten), LT William I. Martin, was very interested in the development of aviation radar. Torpedo Ten received a replacement TBF with ASB-l radar and LT Martin requested the opportunity to develop its potential for sector-search operations. The Ship's Radar Officer, LT Henry Loomis, volunteered to assist Martin in this project, and by 1 December 1942 they had 15 hours of experimental radar flying time. They recognized its capability as well as its limitations, but this was the seed that started the development of night-carrier operations. Improvements in new types of aviation radar were soon forthcoming from the engineers at MIT and the electronic industry.
World War II ended in 1945, and by the time Henry left the service the following year, he had survived Pearl Harbor Day, attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander and won awards including a Bronze Star, Air Medal and Pacific Ribbon with 13 battle stars.
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Mr. Loomis quit as VOA director in 1965 after a falling-out with President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. Johnson demanded that VOA keep quiet about American planes flying over Laos. Believing that VOA had an obligation to report the news, Mr. Loomis resigned in protest.
Obituary, Henry Loomis
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Last Updated: Jun 10, 2010
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Henry Loomis, Who Led Voice of America, Is Dead at 89.
Published: November 13, 2008
Henry Loomis, who extended the reach and defended the independence of the Voice of America as its director in the late 1950s and early 1960s before resigning in a clash with President Lyndon B. Johnson, died on Nov. 2 in Jacksonville, Fla., where he lived. He was 89.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Pick's diseases, said his wife, Jacqueline.
Mr. Loomis was also president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 1970s.
A physicist by training, Mr. Loomis became director of the Voice of America in 1958, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Determined to expand its operations, he increased the Voice of America's broadcasting power and set up transmitters in previously unserved countries like Liberia and the Philippines.
Convinced that English was becoming the pre-eminent international language, he began broadcasting programs for less-than-fluent foreign listeners in Special English, a simplified language that relied on a core vocabulary of 1,500 words. Scripts were read at a deliberate pace of nine lines a minute.
Mr. Loomis was still in the post in 1965 when the Voice of America came under increasing pressure from the White House not to report awkward foreign-policy news, notably the growing military involvement of the United States in Southeast Asia. Mr. Loomis resigned, and in an accusatory farewell speech said, "The Voice of America is not the voice of the administration."
Henry Loomis was born in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. His father, Alfred, amassed a vast fortune financing public utilities. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, which left him untouched, Alfred Loomis indulged his fascination with science by setting up a physics laboratory in an old mansion in Tuxedo Park. Henry worked with his father on brain-wave research while still a teenager, and later took part in the laboratory's pioneering research on radar.
Mr. Loomis left Harvard in his senior year to join the Navy, which assigned him to the staff of the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. He created radar training schools and accompanied airplane pilots and ships' officers to demonstrate how to use the new technology, which was initially regarded with some suspicion.
After leaving the Navy with the rank of lieutenant commander and a Bronze Star, Mr. Loomis did graduate work in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and spent four years as assistant to the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking a series of government jobs relating to science and technology.
In 1972 President Richard M. Nixon appointed Mr. Loomis to be president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit organization created by Congress to be responsible for channeling money to public television stations. In an effort to decentralize public television, he set about wresting control over programming and production from the Public Broadcasting Service, the network that distributes programs to local stations. He also redirected money to local stations rather than national programming.
Friction between the two bodies was never resolved. Mr. Loomis left the job in 1978, as the Carter administration began restoring power to PBS. He returned to private life, indulging his outdoor passions: sailing, hunting and riding to the hounds.
In 1946 he married Mary Paul MacLeod. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1974 he married Jacqueline Chalmers.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by the children from his first marriage, Henry S. Loomis of Denver; Mary P. Loomis of Hyde Park, Vt.; Lucy F. Loomis of Aiken, S.C.; and Gordon M. Loomis of Waxahachie, Tex., as well as four stepchildren, Charles J. Williams IV of Orlando, Fla.; John C. Williams and David F. Williams, both of Jacksonville; Robert W. Williams of Cary, N.C.; 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.