Gerard C. Smith

Who was Gerard C. Smith?

Gerard Coad Smith was the chief U.S. delegate to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1969 and the first U.S. Chairman of the Trilateral Commission. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 16, 1981 by President Jimmy Carter.

Smith was born in New York City. His father, John Thomas Smith, was a lawyer who served as general counsel of General Motors Corporation for many years. Gerard Smith attended Yale Law School and became a practicing attorney in New York City. During World War II he served as a procurement officer for the Department of the Navy in Washington, D.C. In 1950 he returned to government service as a special assistant to Thomas E. Murray, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Smith became an expert in the international aspects of the use of nuclear energy and helped brief the members of the AEC on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953.

In 1954 Smith transferred to the Department of State and became a special assistant for atomic energy matters to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He continued to work on the international aspects of atomic energy and followed the disarmament negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union which were being handled by Harold Stassen. In 1957 Smith was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning, and became director of the policy planning staff. In this position he was responsible for developing policy on a wide range of international matters, much of which related to sensitive areas of east-west relations such as Berlin.