Chloe Wellingham Aaron

Chloe Wellingham Aaron, who, when she became senior vice president for programming at PBS in 1976, was “believed to be the highest-ranking woman executive at the network level in the history of television,” as the announcement of her hiring put it, died on Feb. 29 2020 at her home in Washington. She was 81. Emily Eliza Wall, her goddaughter, said the cause was cancer and related complications. Chloe Wellingham was born on Oct. 9, 1938, in Santa Monica, Calif., to John and Grace (Lloyd) Wellingham. Her mother was a real estate broker, and her father was an interior designer. After graduating from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1961, she earned a master’s degree at George Washington University in Washington in 1962. That same year she married David L. Aaron, who was just beginning his career in the Foreign Service. He would become a deputy national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and, in the 1990s, ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. After leaving her national PBS post in 1980, she was director of cultural and children’s programming at KQED in San Francisco, and in 1989 she became vice president for television at WNYC in New York. In addition to Ms. Wall, Ms. Aaron is survived by her husband and a son, Tim Aaron.