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Steuart Pittman, Head of Fallout Shelter Program, Dies at 93

A family examined a fallout shelter in 1960 on display at the New York Civil Defense headquarters in Manhattan.Credit
William Eckenberg/The New York Times

Steuart Pittman, a Washington lawyer who was appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to create enough fallout shelters to protect every American in the event of a nuclear attack, and who resigned in frustration three years later amid heated debates over the feasibility, the cost and even the ethics of such a program, died on Feb. 10 at his family farm in Davidsonville, Md. He was 93. The apparent cause was a stroke, said his wife, Barbara.

Mr. Pittman was appointed the nation’s first civil defense chief for nuclear war preparedness at the height of the 1961 Berlin crisis, when words like fallout, megaton and radioactivity became alarmingly familiar to every American schoolchild.

Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had made fallout shelters the responsibility of an agency that managed emergency and natural disaster planning.

But Mr. Pittman, appointed assistant secretary of defense for civil defense soon after Soviet and American tanks faced off in Berlin and the wall dividing East and West Berlin started going up, had one mission only. It was to give 180 million Americans access to shelters stocked with enough food, water and medical supplies to get them through the first week or two after a nuclear attack, when exposure to radioactive fallout was most perilous.

From the start, it was a controversial undertaking. Mr. Pittman would later call it one of the most “unappetizing, unappealing and unpopular” jobs ever created.

Many members of Congress balked at the estimated $3 billion cost to the federal government. State and local officials cringed at the matching $3 billion they were expected to provide. There was debate in the White House and the Pentagon over the proper balance between public and private, federal and local, and individual and community control of the shelters.

There were also ethical debates about whether it would be justified to use violence to stop a neighbor from forcing his way into someone’s shelter. Peace activists warned that building too many fallout shelters would hurt the cause of disarmament.

Mr. Pittman, an international investment banking lawyer, had been chief counsel for the Marshall Plan after the war, but had no domestic government or political experience. Still, within a year he had dispatched federal workers to every part of the country to inventory subway systems and public buildings that might be converted for shelter use; established specifications for shelter construction; collected vast amounts of information on public attitudes about shelters; and stocked about 100,000 model shelters in 14 cities.

Photo

Steuart PittmanCredit
Oscar Porter/U.S. Army

During an Armed Services Committee hearing. Representative F. Edward Hebert, a Democrat from Louisiana, told Mr. Pittman: “I don’t know which way we are going, but if we decide not to go ahead, it will be in spite of your valiant efforts, and if we do go ahead, it will be because of those valiant efforts.”

Yet, hard as it was to combat opposition to the program, Mr. Pittman said, it was harder still to contend with the apathy and resignation he encountered.

“I hate to hear people say that they would prefer to die in a nuclear attack rather than face the horrors of survival,” he told U.P.I. in 1961. “This nation was built by people who left Europe to face the unknown hazards of a wilderness continent. Do we no longer have the courage to face an unknown challenge?”

Steuart Lansing Pittman was born in Albany on June 6, 1919, the second of Ernest and Estelle Pittman’s three children. He grew up on the East Side of Manhattan, graduated from Yale in 1941, and worked for two years in Asia for a subsidiary of Pan American World Airways before joining the Marine Corps in 1943. He was sent to China to train and operate with guerrilla groups behind Japanese lines.

Two days after V-J Day, Mr. Pittman was involved in one of the most unusual naval battles of the war, and possibly the last. Mr. Pittman was commanding two Chinese junks carrying guerrillas when they were fired on by a Japanese junk in the South China Sea. Mr. Pittman’s forces counterattacked, killing 43 and taking 39 Japanese sailors prisoner. He was awarded the Silver Star for valor.

Mr. Pittman received his law degree from Yale in 1948. In 1954, he became a founding partner of the firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge (now Pillsbury, Winthrop, Shaw & Pittman), where he remained — with a three-year hiatus to serve in the civil defense post — until he retired in the mid-1980s. He later moved to Dodon Farm, a 550-acre estate in Maryland that has been in his family for more than 300 years.

Besides his wife, Mr. Pittman’s survivors include four children from his first marriage — Andrew, Nancy Pittman Pinchot, Rosamond Pittman Casey, and Tamara Pittman; three children from his current marriage, Patricia Pittman, Steuart Jr., and Romey Pittman; and 15 grandchildren.

His first marriage, to the former Antoinette Pinchot, ended in divorce.

Mr. Pittman resigned as assistant secretary of defense in March 1964 after the defeat of a $190 million budget appropriation to subsidize construction of shelters in hospitals, schools and other nonprofit institutions.

Mr. Pittman had always advocated the building of community shelters, rather than individual ones. But after returning to private life, he and his wife decided to build a fallout shelter at their home in Maryland.

“We started it, anyway,” Mrs. Pittman said in an interview Friday. “But after half a day’s digging, we gave it up.”

Correction: February 22, 2013

An obituary on Thursday about Steuart Pittman, the assistant secretary of defense for civil defense in the Kennedy administration, misidentified the location of a fallout shelter he and his wife decided to build after he returned to private life. It was on his family estate, Dodon Farm, in Davidsonville, Md. — not at their house in the Georgetown area of Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2013, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Steuart Pittman Dies at 93; Led Fallout Shelter Program. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe