Elder Henry B. Eyring, the son of a reknowned chemist and a former head of the LDS Church's education system, was named as second counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today.
President Gordon B. Hinckley opened the 177th Semiannual General Conference of the church by noting the recent death of President James E. Faust, who had served as his second counselor since 1995. He lauded his former counselor as "an extremely able man ... of great faith and capacity who contributed much to our meetings. We greatly miss him and extend our condolences to his beloved companion, Ruth, and to their children."
President Faust died Aug. 10 at the age of 87 after serving as a general authority for 35 years.
President Hinckley then led the congregation of more than 20,000 in the Conference Center in sustaining church officers, naming Elder Eyring as second counselor and Elder Quentin L. Cook as a new member of the Quorum of the Twelve to fill Elder Eyring's position in that council.
Following the sustaining of officers, President Hinckley asked the men to take their new seats in positions on the dais that reflect their seniority. A tall and slender President Eyring, as members of the First Presidency are called, walked to the seat formerly occupied by President Faust. Before he sat down, President Hinckley tapped him on the head with his cane, as if to knight him, drawing laughter from the congregation. The two men sat and shook hands.
President Eyring was born May 31, 1933, to Henry and Mildred Bennion Eyring in Princeton, N.J., where he lived as a young boy. His father was a renowned research scientist at Princeton, whose knowledge of intricate chemistry was widely applied to a variety of scientific fields. The family moved to Salt Lake City in the 1940s so their children could grow up in an LDS environment, and Henry Eyring helped build the U. into a renowned research institution.
With characteristic concern that children feel, Elder Eyring told an audience at Brigham Young University several years ago how he remembers the move to Utah. "I can remember how my cousins helped me," telling him "the kids would stone me with my New Jersey accent. I got rid of it quickly, out of fear. I remember terror as I walked up to the junior high school on the first day.
"A few years later — I don't know how it happened — but after basketball season I left high school and went without my high school classmates to the University of Utah. I can remember those first days — the Physics Department and the Mathematics Department didn't seem very friendly to me. I remember my fear.
"I went from there to the United States Air Force and somehow decided that physics would not be my life's work. I thought I needed something else for education, so I tried a place I had heard of called the Harvard Graduate School of Business. I was so naive I didn't know it might be hard to be admitted. I know now that it was a miracle that I was accepted.
"I can remember parting from my father on a street corner in New York City. For some reason he was there for scientific meetings. I was on my way to the Harvard Business School in my Ivy League suit, or so I thought. That suit was later borrowed by my roommate, who had been a Harvard undergraduate. He wore it to a costume party as a gangster suit, which offended me some. He wore a black shirt and a white tie with it.
"When I parted from dad in my new suit, it was one of those great moments in life when I was going off to school. I looked back at him. Later he said to me that I looked forlorn, but I remember feeling sorry for him. To him I was a frightened student. I didn't know what a balance sheet was. I didn't know what a pro-forma cash flow looked like. I was a physics student about to be lost in the Harvard Business School."
After graduation with a doctorate from the prestigious university, he took a faculty position at Stanford University, where he married his wife, Kathleen Johnson. He recalled that "her first adventures in cooking for us were to find some morning menu that I could keep down on my nervous stomach as I went off to meet those apparently confident Stanford students. I wondered how I could teach them, until I found out that they were scared, too."
While at Stanford, he held teaching and administrative assignments in production management, operations and systems analysis, organizational behavior and management of the total enterprise. He also served as a visiting fellow for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was founder, director or officer of at least two companies in Sunnyvale, Calif.
A consultant to a wide range of private and public enterprises, President Eyring was called by the First Presidency to serve as president of Ricks College (now BYU-Idaho) in 1971, where he served for six years before becoming deputy Commissioner of Church Education. He was later named Commissioner, where he served until being sustained as first counselor in the Presiding Bishopric in 1985, then a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1992, and then as an apostle on April 1, 1995, at age 61.
Recent messages from President Eyring have focused on the need to live the gospel in the present, rather than procrastinating one's activity for the future.
Those who wait for "some day" to improve their spiritual lives flirt with significant danger, he said during the April 2007 General Conference. "We may discover that we have run out of time. The God who gives us each day as a treasure will require an accounting. This day is a precious gift of God. The thought that 'some day I will' can be a thief of the opportunities of time and blessings of eternity."
He repeated the theme during the priesthood session of that conference,
Living the gospel and avoiding the evils of today's society have been a recurrent theme for President Eyring. In a talk several years ago, he warned of the flood of evil that "soon will be a torrent. It will become a torrent of sounds, sights and sensations that invite temptation and offend the spirit of God. ... Swimming back upstream to purity against tides of the world was never easy. It is getting harder and may soon be frighteningly difficult. We must raise our sights."
In recent months, President Eyring represented the church in interfaces on highly public issues that involved some controversy. Recently, in Cedar City, he was the church spokesman in issuing an apology to descendants of those murdered 150 years ago in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Some 120 non-Mormon immigrants traveling toward California were killed on the order of local church leaders who commanded an LDS militia.
During a memorial service at the gravesite of some of the victims, President Eyring read a prepared statement by the First Presidency acknowledging that local leaders led and carried out the murder of unarmed civilians. The statement expressed "profound regret" for the massacre, which has long been a source of historical dispute and embarrassment to the church.
Then-Elder Eyring, along with Elder Russell M. Nelson, his fellow on the Quorum of Twelve, also were assigned last summer to visit with The Rev. Al Sharpton, who made a public political comment aimed at presidential candidate Mitt Romney, suggesting Latter-day Saints do not believe in God.
In a telephone conversation with the two apostles, Sharpton apologized. The two church leaders accepted the apology and said the matter was closed.
Contributing: Twila Van Leer and Nicole Warburton
