John H. Rubel

Who is John H. Rubel?

John H. Rubel was a business executive in the early post-World War II years of the defense electronics industry, later serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration. He is regarded as one of Robert McNamara's so-called whiz kids and was an early proponent of geosynchronous communications satellites.

Rubel was born in Chicago to a well-to-do Jewish family of German origins. Following the death of his father in 1927, he moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he attended public schools and graduated from Los Angeles High School. His undergraduate degree, in engineering, was from Caltech, in 1942.

Both to avoid the draft and to contribute to the war effort, Rubel moved to Schenectady, New York, where he was a junior engineer at General Electric. Immediately after the war, he returned to Southern California to work for Lockheed Corporation as an engineer.

In 1948, Rubel joined what was essentially a start up company within Howard Hughes' industrial empire, an organization that eventually became Hughes Electronics. By 1956, at the age of 36, he was directing most of the avionics business and managing 2000 people.