Claude Brinegar, 82; ushered in 55-mph speed limit in '70s

CLAUDE BRINEGAR (New York Times/File 1973)

LOS ANGELES - Claude S. Brinegar, a former oil industry executive and the nation's third secretary of the Department of Transportation, who helped enact the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit during the Arab oil embargo in the mid-1970s, died of natural causes March 13 at a retirement community in Palo Alto, Calif., according to his family. He was 82.

Named to the transportation post in late 1972, Dr. Brinegar succeeded John A. Volpe, former governor of Massachusetts, in President Nixon's Cabinet. After Nixon resigned, Dr. Brinegar served under President Ford for several months before returning to the private sector in 1975.

Dr. Brinegar was one of several executives from private industry recruited for Cabinet posts at the start of Nixon's second term. A senior vice president of Union Oil Co. of California who headed the company's Union 76 division, he had no previous government experience and had never met Nixon but had a doctorate in economics from Stanford University.

When asked about his qualifications, he emphasized his experience as a consumer.

"I've flown a million miles in the last seven years, and I've sat on the Harbor Freeway for hours in traffic jams," said Dr. Brinegar.

As Dr. Brinegar became secretary, the railroads in the Northeast spiraled into fiscal crisis. With little ado, he plunged into emergency efforts to save the economically vital transportation network.

Conrail was formed from six failing railroads, including the Penn Central. That system, aided by federal investment, kept open the arteries of commerce.

Perhaps nothing with which he was associated, however, was more controversial than the 55 mile-per-hour limit.

Adopted during an oil embargo and endorsed by safety advocates, the limit was mandated by the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which Nixon signed Jan. 2, 1974. The next day, in another conservation measure, Dr. Brinegar began a national effort to promote carpooling.

Dr. Brinegar thought Americans should establish and live by an ethic of energy conservation, said his daughter Claudia Berglund.

But, his daughter said, "he hated the 55 limit."

He had a Porsche, she said, and fantasized about shutting down the Dulles Toll Road to let it rip.

The speed limit was repealed in 1995.

Dr. Brinegar's appointment had been criticized by environmental and consumer groups, which questioned his commitment to public transportation. One of his chief legislative accomplishments, however, was passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, which paid for a national scenic highway program and authorized states to use a portion of their highway trust fund monies for public transit.

Dr. Brinegar was one of the first members of Nixon's Cabinet to criticize the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, saying in a speech to the National Press Club in May 1974 that he was "shocked, offended and discouraged" by the "mess."

A year earlier, he had demanded the firing of Egil Krogh Jr. as undersecretary of transportation after Mr. Krogh admitted that he was a leader of the "plumbers" who had burglarized the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the critic of the Vietnam War.

In his spare time, Dr. Brinegar collected first editions of works by author Samuel Clemens, whose pen name was Mark Twain, and other Twain memorabilia. In 1963, he published an unusual statistical study of word-length frequency in 10 letters often credited to Twain. The study disputed Twain as the writer of the letters.

Dr. Brinegar, who retired to Palo Alto in 1992 and also had a home in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, leaves his wife, Karen Bartholomew, whom he married in 1995 after the death of his second wife, Mary Katharine Potter. He also leaves three children from his first marriage to Elva Jackson: Claudia Berglund of Huntington Beach, Meredith Cross of Washington, and Thomas of Cody, Wyo.; and four grandchildren.

Material from the Washington Post and New York Times was included in this obituary.