William T Golden

William T. Golden was born on Oct. 25, 1909, in Manhattan. His father was a wool trader who became a banker. Growing up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, he wanted to be a physicist but found that he disliked mathematics. He studied English and biology at the University of Pennsylvania. After a year at the Harvard Business School, he headed to Wall Street in 1931 to work for Harold Linder, an investment and a management consultant he met at Harvard. In World War II, he helped develop war plans in the Bureau of Ordnance of the Navy in Washington. He went to sea to test a device he invented to control antiaircraft guns. When the war ended, Lewis Strauss, with whom he had worked in the Navy, asked him to be his assistant at the new Atomic Energy Commission. In the ’50s, with his financial career flourishing, Mr. Golden plunged into his second life, as a philanthropist. Mr. Golden and Mr. Linder, who became president of the United States Export-Import Bank and ambassador to Canada, owned neighboring weekend estates in Olivebridge, overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir. Mr. Golden donated land for a park there and helped establish a center for the elderly. Mr. Golden loved to be outdoors hiking, camping and horseback riding. In 1989, when he bought from Harvard the Black Rock Forest in the Hudson Highlands, which was threatened by development, Mr. Golden explored its nearly 4,000 acres by horseback. He later turned over the forest to a consortium to preserve it. He was on the boards of businesses like the National U.S. Radiator Corporation and its successors, where he was chairman for 18 years; General American Investors; and Block Drug. In 1991, under the auspices of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, of which he was chairman with Dr. Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel laureate microbiologist, Mr. Golden initiated a series of twice-yearly meetings of science advisers or ministers from the G7 nations. Mr. Golden also waged a 30-year campaign to install a science adviser in the State Department. The first person in the post was Norman P. Neureiter, appointed in 2000. Surviving are his wife, Catherine Morrison, whom he married this year. His first wife, Sibyl Levy, died in 1983. Two daughters from that marriage, Sibyl Rebecca Golden of New York and Pamela Prudence Golden of Tucson, also survive. A second marriage, to Jean Taylor, ended in divorce.