Academic Revival
To restore his academic standing, Peterson worked at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. He later concluded that his job had involved tracking atomic-bomb components for the top-secret Manhattan Project. He attended Northwestern University and graduated summa cum laude in 1947.

At the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, on his way to a master’s degree in 1951, Peterson listened to economist Milton Friedman explain the power of free markets “unhampered by interference and Keynesian manipulations,” as Peterson recalled. In his later careers in Washington and on Wall Street, Peterson honed a contrary view.

“If Milton were alive today,” he wrote in his memoir, “I would be inclined to say, ‘Milton, I must say to you that today’s real economies may be more complicated than you would seem to suggest.’”

Peterson joined the advertising firm McCann-Erickson as director of marketing sales in 1953 and was head of the Chicago office two years later, at 27. In 1958 he became an executive with a McCann-Erickson client, Bell & Howell, a maker of movie, microfilm and audiovisual equipment. Promoted to CEO in 1963, he carried out layoffs and cost-cutting and attempted to diversify the company to keep up with innovations in home movie making.

At the invitation of George Shultz, a friend from business school who was Nixon’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peterson moved to Washington in 1971 to become assistant to the president for international economic affairs, a new post.

‘Economic Kissinger’
He attended the August 1971 meeting at Camp David that resulted in Nixon ending the gold standard as part of his so-called New Economic Policy. By the time Peterson released a study of world trade and monetary issues, he was known as the “economic Kissinger,” a flattering comparison to the influence of Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Peterson was one of five Cabinet secretaries purged by Nixon after his 1972 re-election victory.

He considered himself a Rockefeller Republican, “conservative on fiscal matters and moderate or liberal on social issues,” though his worry about escalating federal spending transcended party loyalty.

Peterson became an outspoken critic of pairing tax cuts with large increases in military spending. In an analysis of rising Social Security spending published in the New York Review of Books, he called for limiting cost-of-living increases, taxing some benefits and gradually raising the retirement age.

Concord Coalition
With former Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, Peterson founded the Concord Coalition in 1992, to advocate what it calls “generationally responsible fiscal policy.”