1. Roswell Gilpatric was born in 1906 in Brooklyn, the son of Wall Street attorney Walter Hodges Roswell Gilpatric, an Amherst College graduate born in Warren, Rhode Island, and the former Charlotte Elizabeth Leavitt, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, born to American missionary parents in Osaka, Japan.
On his mother's side Roswell Gilpatric was related to Harvard College astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose father was the Congregational minister George Roswell Leavitt.
Roswell Gilpatric graduated from Yale University in 1928, Phi Beta Kappa; and then from Yale Law School in 1931, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Gilpatric owed much of his political cachet to his special relationship with the celebrated lawyer, diplomat and investment banker Robert A Lovett, to whom Gilpatric was a protege.
Roswell Gilpatric served as Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1951 to 1953.
Roswell Gilpatric joined the new Kennedy administration in 1961 as part of the wave of Kennedy appointments.
Roswell Gilpatric's appointment was unusual: he was one of the few Pentagon leaders handpicked by the new president.
Roswell Gilpatric often took a hard line against the Communist threat, and was not above using force in other matters of international security.
Roswell Gilpatric was a member of a special task force which hatched "Operation Mongoose", a dirty tricks campaign aimed at destabilizing the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba.
When it came to the admission of China into the United Nations, for instance, Roswell Gilpatric argued forcefully in a letter to The New York Times, written during his Eisenhower years, that the United States should stop trying to block the Communist country's admission into the international governing body.
Roswell Gilpatric did not always face an easy task while acting as go-between for the Pentagon generals and the White House.
Roswell Gilpatric was awarded an honorary degree by Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, citing his years of government service, as well as his part-time residency in Maine.
Roswell Gilpatric sometimes attracted the attention of the press in his personal life, and he was often linked romantically to former First Lady Jackie Kennedy.
Gray claimed that outraged by such behavior, Roswell Gilpatric tipped off Nixon administration officials to the identity of the official.
In Gray's version of events, Gilpatric called his acquaintance former Attorney General John Mitchell and told Mitchell that the informer was FBI official W Mark Felt, the same official later identified by other sources to be Deep Throat.
Roswell Gilpatric had never mentioned knowing John Mitchell, his son told The New York Times.
Roswell Gilpatric served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and was a longtime trustee of the New York Public Library, New York University and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Roswell Gilpatric served as a vice chairman and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and chaired the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 100th Anniversary Committee.
Roswell Gilpatric was a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Roswell Gilpatric had many clients; they included the Graham family of The Washington Post Company, on whose board of directors he sat.
Roswell Gilpatric was a lecturer at Yale Law School, and a member of Yale University Council from 1957 to 1962.
An avid tennis player and sailor, Roswell Gilpatric had three children.
Roswell Gilpatric died of prostate cancer on March 15,1996, in New York City, and was buried in Somesville, Mount Desert Island, Maine, where he had a summer home.