Roswell Leavitt Gilpatric (November 4, 1906 – March 15, 1996) was a New York City corporate attorney and government official who served as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1961–64, when he played a pivotal role in the high-stake strategies of the Cuban Missile Crisis, advising President John F. Kennedy as well as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy on dealing with the Soviet nuclear missile threat. Gilpatric later served as Chairman of the Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation in 1964. Early life and career Gilpatric was born in 1906 in Brooklyn, the son of Wall Street attorney Walter Hodges 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. Charlotte Leavitt was a college classmate and lifelong friend of Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to a Presidential Cabinet. 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. Gilpatric attended Poly Preparatory Country Day School from 1917 to 1920, when the family moved to White Plains, where he attended high school for two years before transferring to the Hotchkiss School, where he was a member of the remarkable class of 1924 that included Charles W. Yost, Paul Nitze, and Chapman Rose. His duties as a scholarship boy, which included waiting on tables and cleaning rooms, kept down his participation in extracurricular activities at Hotchkiss, but he was a member of the Cum Laude Society. He 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. Following his graduation, Gilpatric went to work for the New York City law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he became a partner and where he practiced when not serving in government. 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 protégé. Gilpatric served as Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1951-1953. During 1956 and 1957, Gilpatric was a member of the Rockefeller Brothers' Special Studies Project. Gilpatric was a childhood friend of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric joined the new Kennedy administration in 1961 as part of the wave of