American four-star general of the United States Air Force. Boyd was a highly decorated combat pilot who served in Vietnam and is the only Vietnam War prisoner of war (1966–1973) to reach the four-star rank (1992). His final Air Force assignment was as deputy commander in chief, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany. He retired from the Air Force in 1995 and remained active in the national security realm, including as a program director of the Council on Foreign Relations and as president of Business Executives for National Security. He was a member of the guiding coalition of the Project on National Security Reform.
Following his retirement from the Air Force in 1995, Boyd served as strategy consultant to Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. From July 1998 he was executive director of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century.
From 1 May 2002 until 31 December 2009 he was the president and CEO of Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a national security public interest group. From 14–17 December 2009 Boyd led a delegation from BENS to Pyongyang, North Korea, to discuss economic issues with officials from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea government. Boyd remained involved with BENS as a member of the board of directors.
Boyd endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election, the first candidate he had publicly ever endorsed.
Boyd married twice and had two children. He died at the age of 83 on 23 March 2022 from lung cancer in Haymarket, Virginia.
Link to Wikipedia biography