Tom Reed, co-founder of Clos du Bois winery and former Air Force secretary, dies at 89

He was the ultimate Cold War insider who did his best to keep the U.S. and the former Soviet Union from ushering mankind to a nuclear Armageddon.

The father of the hydrogen bomb called him one of the nation’s “most creative designers of thermonuclear devices.”

He was a prolific author who advised three presidents.

And his entrepreneurial skills helped put Sonoma County wines on the map.

Former Air Force Secretary Tom Reed, the Cold Warrior, engineer, author, real estate developer and partner in Geyserville’s former Clos du Bois winery died Feb. 11 in Santa Rosa. He was 89.

“He loved his country, and he loved Sonoma County,” said his wife, Kay Reed. “This is really where he wanted to be when he left Washington.”

Reed was not just an inner-circle observer of the American-Soviet arms race, but a high-level strategist who had led the development of two nuclear devices at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In a sobering 2004 interview with Terry Gross of National Public Radio, Reed said that for the United States to prevail in the development of nuclear weapons was essential to deterring the Soviet Union from deploying theirs.

Gross invited Reed onto her show to discuss his then-new book, “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,” the decades-long struggle for military superiority that paused with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.

Gross asked Reed, “What’s the closest we came to nuclear war that you were able to discover through the research for your book?”

Reed replied, “I think it happened over and over. The whole point of the book is … throughout the Cold War, over and over we came perilously close to the use of nuclear weapons or an incident that would have led to such.”

Though the Cold War had passed, Reed said the threat of a nuclear attack on America certainly had not. He recalled to Gross that in February 1993, terrorists detonated beneath the World Trade Center a Ryder van loaded with an explosive made of fertilizer. A massive explosion killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

Reed said he and others at the Livermore lab studied the attack and concluded it was conceivable that the terrorists could have managed instead to build and detonate a five-kiloton nuclear bomb.

“Five kilotons at the World Trade Center, that’s a third of Hiroshima,” Reed told Gross. “Five kilotons at the World Trade Center means everyone south of Central Park is dead. It means radiation all over Manhattan. That is a very distinct possibility.”

He added chillingly, “There are terrorist groups that would like to use weapons against the U.S. The technology is proliferating.”

A 2012 book of fiction by Reed and Sonoma County author Sandy Baker, “The Tehran Triangle,” imagines terrorists paying 1,300 pounds of gold for an equal amount of weapons-grade uranium, then moving to unleash a bomb in the heart of America.

Reed also co-authored the 2009 book, “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation.” In 2014 he released, “The Reagan Enigma: 1964-1980.”

Throughout his working years, Reed toggled between government service and private business.

In 1965, the Air Force veteran founded a corporation in San Rafael that mounted agricultural, recreational and construction projects in California and Colorado. In 1975, he was appointed Secretary of the Air Force under Republican President Gerald Ford, and he remained at the post into the Democratic presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Reed’s entrepreneurial pursuits were on a grand scale. In the early 1970s, he partnered with marketing whiz and fellow Cornell University alum Frank Woods in the development of a ski resort in Breckenridge, Colorado.

About that same time, Reed and Woods began growing wine grapes in Sonoma County’s Alexander and Dry Creek valleys. Woods would recall that they sold grapes to esteemed vintner Rodney Strong, who hit a hard patch in 1974 and could not afford to buy the grapes he’d contracted for.

Strong made Reed and Woods an offer: He would take the grapes he’d ordered from them and make wine that they could sell. The partners then opened a winery with a fancy French name, Clos du Bois. By the late 1980s it was selling more than 200,000 cases a year and helping to put Wine Country on the map.

When Reed and Woods sold Clos du Bois in 1988 to the Hiram Walker liquor company, it was one of the largest winery acquisitions in state history. Clos du Bois was resold several times before E. & J. Gallo Winery laid off most of the Geyserville winery’s workers and shut it down in 2021.

In 1982, Reed, then an ex-secretary of the Air Force, returned to government work as special assistant for national security to President Reagan, by then a close friend. Reed abruptly resigned from the post the following year.

The resignation came after Reed, and also Woods, were accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of unlawfully profiting from insider stock trading. The commission alleged that the pair purchased stock in the AMAX mining company upon learning in March 1981 that Standard Oil would make a bid to acquire it. Reed’s father, Gordon Reed, was then a director of AMAX.

The insider trading charge alleged that the stock trade netted Reed about $427,000 and Wood about $49,000. Without admitting nor denying the charges, Reed and Wood settled the SEC complaint by agreeing to place the profits in escrow accounts for paying off any judgments that might result from private lawsuits.

In 1984, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Reed on charges of securities fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of justice in connection with the same alleged insider stock trading. A federal jury found him not guilty in December 1985.

Reed said to a New York Times reporter as he left the courtroom, “I’m delighted. This jury has confirmed what I have said since March of 1981.”

Thomas Care Reed was born March 1, 1934, in New York City. He grew up in Connecticut and in 1956 graduated first in his class at Cornell with a mechanical engineering degree. Having trained with ROTC in college, he entered the Air Force as a 2nd lieutenant.

Reed started out with the U.S. Air Force Ballistic Missile Division. After earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, he went to work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, established in Alameda County in 1952 to address the Soviet threat by advancing nuclear weapons technology.

Reed was credited as the designer of two thermonuclear devices that were tested in the Pacific Ocean in 1962, eliciting the compliments from Edward Teller, the father of the American H-bomb program. Following his Air Force service, he founded Supercon of Houston, a high-tech company that produced superconductors.

He turned to politics in 1966, becoming Northern California chair of Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan’s first run for governor. Reagan won, and he named Reed his chief of personnel. Reed would later campaign and work for Reagan as president.

The former Kay Riddle was a secretary in Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign when she met Reed. They married in 1987.

Kay Reed said she believes her husband was proudest of what he was able to do to help win the Cold War over the U.S.S.R. while he served as a national security assistant to Reagan in the early 1980s. She said, “That was when Reagan decided it was time to end the Cold War and to end it not by détente and not by war, but economically.”

Reed’s wife said he was also hugely proud to have served as the 11th secretary of the Air Force. She noted, “He was the first Air Force secretary who had ever worn a blue (USAF) suit.”

Tom and Kay Reed lived in Alexander Valley for decades before moving only about a month ago to a retirement community in Santa Rosa.

“He would have turned 90 the first of March,” Reed said. She added that he’d struggled with kidney failure but ultimately succumbed simply to old age.

Tom Reed is also survived by daughter, Carolyn Reed Ellis of Napa; sons, Gordon Reed of Buffalo, New York, and Andrew Reed of Santa Rosa; and six grandchildren.

His family plans a celebration of his life this summer in Alexander Valley.

The family suggests, in lieu of flowers, donations to the scholarship fund of the Rotary Club of Healdsburg Sunrise, P.O. Box 302, Healdsburg CA 95448.