Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, Presidential Adviser, Dies

Eisenhower got madder, and Gen. Goodpaster decided he needed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to confirm his analysis, to which the president replied, "Foster, I've lost my last friend."

On reflection, Gen. Goodpaster added: "But I think we both knew that that was our duty, and the president knew it perfectly well. He just was sounding off, and that was part of our role in life, to let him relieve some of the pressure but to make sure that he didn't make that kind of a mistake."

He remained a key adviser through the Suez crisis, the launching of Sputnik and the 1960 Soviet downing of the U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers.

Gen. Goodpaster advanced through a series of sensitive positions in the 1960s on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. President Lyndon B. Johnson used him as an intermediary with Eisenhower for military suggestions in the escalating Vietnam War. "President Johnson asked the question: Can we win in Vietnam and what do we have to do?" Gen. Goodpaster told U.S. News & World Report decades later. "That question came to me."

He advocated a stronger military role to win the war and became frustrated that the political will never materialized. He served as military adviser to the six-man U.S. team involved in the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese in summer 1968 and spent the rest of the year as deputy to Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam.

From 1969 to 1974, he was NATO supreme allied commander and was said to have been greatly displeased when Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the Nixon White House chief of staff, was tapped to replace him. He retired quietly and did not show up for Haig's ceremony, a rare public snub.

In later years, Gen. Goodpaster took special assignments from presidents and held a variety of academic and research center appointments, among them at the Eisenhower Institute in Washington, the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria and St. Mary's College of Maryland. Otherwise, he allowed himself the luxury of salmon fishing in Labrador with his wife.

She had been the prize of one of his bravest military maneuvers, having courted her at a time when her father was West Point's No. 2 official and he a mere cadet.

Survivors include his wife of 65 years, Dorothy Anderson Goodpaster of Washington; two daughters, Susan Sullivan of Alexandria and Anne Batte of Salisbury, N.C.; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.