By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 20, 2006; B04
G. William Miller, 81, an engineer, lawyer and corporate executive who served as Federal Reserve chairman and treasury secretary during the Carter administration and oversaw the corporate bailout for Chrysler, died March 17 at his home in Washington. He had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative lung ailment.
Early in his career, Mr. Miller was credited with turning the small, Rhode Island-based textile-manufacturing company Textron Inc. into a global conglomerate. Its goods included Sheaffer pens, Speidel watchbands, Polaris snowmobiles and the Bell UH-1 "Huey" helicopters that were essential military hardware during the Vietnam War.
Involvement in Democratic politics led to his appointments by Carter. He oversaw the U.S. central bank from 1978 to 1979, when stagnant growth and high oil prices, inflation and unemployment were being dubbed "stagflation."
At first he spoke of a broad agenda to tackle inflation and unemployment, but he was soon chided by some Wall Street observers for being overcautious.
During his brief tenure, he was said to act too slowly in increasing interest rates while inflation became unwieldy, but Mr. Miller spoke of concern that higher interest rates would prompt a major downturn in the economy. His successor, Paul A. Volcker, was credited with far greater skill in taming inflation through a major increase in interest rates.
As Treasury chief from 1979 to 1981, he became a key advocate for the $1.5 billion loan guarantee program that saved Chrysler and thousands of jobs there. This prompted criticism of rewarding mismanagement and not allowing fair play between the U.S. auto industry and creeping competition from Japan.
"The administration does not favor, as a general proposition, government aid to private corporations," Mr. Miller said at the time. But he added that under a restructuring plan at Chrysler, he staved off substantial unemployment, welfare payments and lost income taxes.
"If we don't have Chrysler," he said, "part of the market for fuel-efficient cars that it could serve will be picked up by foreign suppliers, and we would lose it forever for the United States."
He also supervised the freezing -- and partial unfreezing -- of $12 billion in Iranian funds held in the United States during the Iranian hostage crisis, when militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held American diplomats hostage for 444 days.
After his government service, Mr. Miller founded G. William Miller & Co., a Washington private investment company that he likened to a discreet, Swiss-style merchant bank.
George William Miller was born March 9, 1925, in Sapulpa, Okla. His father, a businessman, moved the family to the Texas Panhandle town of Borger to start a furniture store during an oil boom. When his business failed during the Depression, his father found work in a carbon black plant.
After attending a junior college in Amarillo, Tex., Mr. Miller graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., with a bachelor's degree in marine engineering. He was a 1952 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley's law school.
Recruited to the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, he played a major role in helping Textron acquire a larger manufacturer. In 1956, Textron's chief executive hired Mr. Miller as assistant secretary overseeing acquisitions. Rapid promotions followed, and by 1968, he was chief executive.
He continued an aggressive series of acquisitions and expanded operations to Europe and Asia. In 1974, the year he assumed the Textron board chairmanship, he hosted a Soviet trade delegation at his headquarters in Providence.
Textron largely weathered the recession of the early 1970s through its diversification of products. He kept a tight control on costs that gave the company a generally conservative reputation, but he also invested to a significant degree in research and development that made his goods, especially the defense equipment, a high-demand commodity. By the mid-1970s, he was leading a multibillion-dollar corporation.
While advancing in business, he became active in civic life and political organizations. He pushed for hiring reforms toward blacks and other minorities as chairman of an advisory council to President Kennedy's Committee of Equal Employment Opportunities.
In 1978, he succeeded Fed Chairman Arthur F. Burns, a career economist whom the president had declined to reappoint after some testy exchanges about the bank's independence.
Mr. Miller, a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, was the first corporate leader chosen to direct the central bank. He also was viewed as far more in sync with White House economic policy.
After his government service, he held many directorships and board positions. He was treasurer of the American Red Cross; a trustee and director of the Washington Opera; and chairman of the Washington-based H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. He also was chairman and chief executive of Federated Stores Inc. from 1990 to 1992.
In 1946, he married Ariadna Rogojarsky, a Russian emigre whom he met in Shanghai during his Coast Guard service. She survives him, along with three sisters and two brothers.
