Department of Defense Nomination of Thomas B. Ross To Be an Assistant Secretary.

The President today announced his intention to nominate Thomas B. Ross to be an Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs). Ross was previously Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.

He was born in New York City on September 2, 1929. He attended public elementary school and Fordham Preparatory School in New York. He received a B.A. degree in English from Yale University in 1951.

During and after the Korean war-from 1951 to 1954--Ross served as a naval officer, first on the U.S.S. Monterey, a training carrier in Pensacola, Fla., and then on the U.S.S. Hornet, an attack carrier in the Pacific.

He began his newspaper career in 1955 with the International News Service as its State capitol reporter in Atlanta, Ga. In 1956 he ran the INS bureau in Hartford, Conn., and in 1957 joined the Washington bureau, where he was assigned to the Pentagon.

When INS merged with the United Press in 1958, Ross worked briefly for UPI, moving to the Chicago Sun-Times later that year. From 1958 to 1968, he was the newspaper's national security correspondent, covering the Pentagon, the State Department, and related agencies.

Between 1968 and 1970, Ross was a foreign correspondent for the Sun-Times, based first in Beirut and then in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1970 to become Washington bureau chief.

While with the Sun-Times, Ross covered most of the foreign trips of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, and of several Secretaries of State and Defense.

He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1963-64. He is the coauthor of three books: "The U-2 Affair" (1962), "The Invisible Government" (1964), and "The Espionage Establishment" (1967).

Ross married the former Gunilla Ekstrand in 1963. They have three daughters.