Sam Brown (activist)

Sam W. Brown, Jr. was a political activist, the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Sam W. Brown, Jr. was born July 27, 1943 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs where he was, in his own words, "the outstanding ROTC cadet." In his childhood, he wrote, "it never occurred to me that America could be wrong." Brown attended the University of Redlands in California, where he was first the president of the young Republicans and then the student body president. In 1967 Brown was the chairman of the National Student Association's national supervisory board. In 1967 Brown ran for president of the National Student Association and lost. Brown received a B.A. from the University of Redlands in 1965, an M.A. from Rutgers University in 1966, pursued graduate studies at Harvard University Divinity School from 1966–1968, and was a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics, Harvard University, in 1969.

In 1967, Ramparts magazine reported that the CIA had been using the National Student Organization (NSA) for intelligence gathering abroad. As revealed by the then president of the organization, Phil Sherburne, in a conversation with the organization's finance director, Michael Wood, the CIA had been funneling money to the organization through various charity fronts in exchange for covert cooperation from students in the NSA's international programs. As spokesman for the national NSA's national supervisory board at the time, Brown was particularly appalled by the predicament of members of the NSA's international programs: "The fantastic pressures these people were under were simply incomprehensible to me... The agony of these people who were trapped and were unable to break this relationship was awful." Brown said that the supervisory board had no knowledge of the CIA's involvement until it was reported, announced that the NSA would assist in any investigation of the CIA's role, and said "The United States Government owes an unconditional apology to the N.S.A. for using the N.S.A. in this duplicitous manner."

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