Robert R. Bowie, a Harvard foreign policy expert who served four postwar administrations as an adviser on the Cold War, national security and conflicts around the globe, died on Nov. 2 in Towson, Md. He was 104.

The cause was respiratory failure, his son William said.

In a career that took him from Princeton and Harvard to cities of Europe devastated by World War II, and from Washington’s halls of power to East-West summit meetings, Mr. Bowie was both a witness to history and a participant in shaping its course under Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

A member of what John Kenneth Galbraith called the Eastern foreign policy establishment, Mr. Bowie was deputy to John J. McCloy, high commissioner to Germany (1950-51); director of planning and assistant secretary of state under John Foster Dulles (1953-57); counselor to Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1966-68); and a deputy to Adm. Stansfield Turner, the director of central intelligence (1977-79)....