Sam W. Brown Jr. was born July 27, 1943, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs where he was, in his own words, "the outstanding ROTC cadet." In his childhood, he wrote, "it never occurred to me that America could be wrong." Brown attended the University of Redlands in California, where he was first the president of the young Republicans and then the student body president. In 1967 Brown was the chairman of the National Student Association's national supervisory board. In 1967 Brown ran for president of the National Student Association and lost. Brown received a B.A. from the University of Redlands in 1965, an M.A. from Rutgers University in 1966, pursued graduate studies at Harvard University Divinity School from 1966–1968, and was a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics, Harvard University, in 1969.
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