Former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter died of a sudden heart attack in Boston on Monday evening. He was 68.
“It is with deep and profound sadness that the family of former Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter shares that Secretary Carter passed away Monday evening in Boston at the age of 68 due to a sudden heart attack,” Carter’s family said in a statement Tuesday.
Carter served as Secretary of Defense under President Barack Obama from February 2015 to January 2017. He was also a public policy professor who directed the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School until his death.
Carter “dedicated his professional life to the national security of the United States and to teaching international affairs to students,” his family said in a statement. “He was a beloved husband, father, mentor and friend. His sudden loss will be felt by all who knew him.
As the nation’s 25th defense secretary, Carter specifically opened up all military combat positions to women and ended a ban on transgender troops serving in the military — a policy that stood for nearly a year before former President Donald Trump reinstated the ban.
The former defense secretary has publicly expressed his more hawkish views on war, taking a more aggressive stance than others in the Obama administration during the campaign to defeat Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. He called for the “permanent defeat” of the Islamic State, early in his tenure beginning a reorganization of the United States’ counter-Islamic State campaign that eventually succeeded in helping Iraqi forces capture and hold Islamic State strongholds.
Carter served presidents of both parties in five administrations—his first political appointment to the Pentagon came from former President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, when he served as assistant secretary of defense for global strategic affairs. Carter held several other roles within the Pentagon, including Deputy Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
He also served as a member of the State’s International Security Advisory Board, Defense Policy Board, Defense Science Board and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Counterterrorism Science and Technology.
Carter began his career as a physicist in 1976, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and medieval history from Yale University. He was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship by the University of Oxford, where he completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1979.
Carter had a long academic career in addition to government work. He served as professor and director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Carter rejoined Harvard as a professor in 2017 and became director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs — the new name for the center he previously led at the school.
“He believed that his deepest legacy was what he taught thousands of students with the hope of making the world a better and safer place,” his family said in their statement.