Clay T. Whitehead

Clay T. "Tom" Whitehead (November 13, 1938 – July 23, 2008 ) was a United States government official who served as Special Assistant to the President from 1968-1970; Director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP) from 1970 to 1974 during the Nixon administration; Director of the Ford Transition Team immediately before Nixon's resignation; and an operative in the White House during the initial phases of the Ford transition. Whitehead pioneered a policy of competition across the telecommunications industries, which later was reflected in legislation and regulations in the United States and around the world.

Whitehead was born in Neodesha, Kansas, the eldest of four children of Clay B. and Helen Hinton Whitehead.

As a young boy, he was interested in telecommunications, spending hours on his ham radio talking to amateur radio operators around the world. He practiced photography with a darkroom of his own design and built his own celestial telescope for studying space.

He graduated from Cherokee County High School in Columbus, Cherokee County, Kansas 1957.

He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his undergraduate and master's degrees in electrical engineering, in 1961 respectively, and a Ph.D. in management in 1967. In addition, Whitehead engaged in extensive studies in economics, which almost qualified him to write a dissertation in the field, but instead decided finally to leave MIT.

From 1958 to 1960 he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, between 1958 and 1960 under the MIT cooperative program developing experimental design of pulse and analog electronic equipment.

Before joining the Nixon campaign in 1968 as an expert on budget policies, Whitehead was a RAND Corporation economist and defense analyst.

Between 1969 and 1970, Whitehead served as Special Assistant to President Richard Nixon. In this capacity, he crafted the “Open Skies” domestic satellite policy that allowed any qualified private company to launch communications satellites, thereby deregulating the monopoly model for the technology. The policy enabled cable television networks including C-SPAN, CNN, and HBO to prosper and created a ripple effect that ultimately led to sweeping and lasting changes in the telecommunications landscape.

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