HENRY CLAY

April 12, 1777–June 29, 1852

WASHINGTON—How the concerns of life and death intermingle! Amid the hot contention of political strife, a slow, dull sound, filling every ear, brings the long expected annunciation that Henry Clay is no more. The greatest of American Senators has passed to the silent land, and each one who hears has a grief or a hope of his own. Last night bonfires illumined every street; shouts of anticipated victory and hoarse murmurs of defiance went up together; we seemed on the eve of a time, when

The midnight brought the signal sound of strife;

The morn, the marshaling in arms; the day,

Battle’s magnificently stern array!

But the morn brought only “the death in life,” its solemn silence and its awful gloom. The curtains were gathered around the dying couch of Henry Clay, and at 11 o’clock darkness had set its seal upon his eyes forever. This does but deepen the sadness of my heart, and consecrates my humble sorrow; for while moving with all this stirring life, and talking coldly of politics and its chances, a little thing that had twined among the tendrils of my inmost nature and nestled there was torn rudely from me. I see now its tiny hand and wavy hair, beckoning and leading the way to that unknown shore where the great and humble must together lie. But pardon this outburst.

The eulogies upon Mr. Clay will not be biographies; for none need be told where he was born, or what he has done. The facts of his life are engraven on the public memory. During the long months of his final illness the Nation’s heart has been to him a “Storied urn, an animated bust,” on which his “fame and elegy” are written. A niche is reserved for him in the temple consecrated to American statesmanship, eloquence and genius, opposite to Jefferson, Franklin, the elder and younger Adams, and Patrick Henry.

Mr. Clay was surrounded, in dying, by all that could inspire hope and alleviate sorrow. His son, several affectionate friends and physicians, and his spiritual consoler, Dr. Butler, of the Episcopal Church, were present. His last words were these, addressed to Dr. Butler: “Don’t leave me; I am dying, I am gone.” Instantly after speaking these words, he sank back and expired.

It is well known that Henry Clay received his early education in a log schoolhouse. At the age of 14 he went into a store, from which he soon after entered a law office as copyist, where at first his awkward manners, unhandsome face, and pepper-and-salt dress brought upon him jeers and jokes from his fellow clerks, who soon found it, however, their interest, as well as their pleasure, to treat him with respect.

The following toast, given in 1843, at a Fourth of July dinner in Virginia, by Mr. R. Hughes, illustrates some traits in his character and history:

“He walked barefooted, and so did I—he went to mill and so did I—he was good to his mamma and so was I. I know him like a book, and love him like a brother.”

Mrs. Watkins, the mother, died in 1827. Mr. Clay was always a man of deep feelings, and sustained heavy afflictions during life in the loss of his children. Two of his daughters, born in 1800 and 1816, died in infancy. Two other daughters, born in 1809 and 1813, died at the age of 14. The first of these died at Ashland; the other, in 1825, while on her way to Washington. On hearing of this fresh bereavement, Mr. Clay fainted, and did not leave his room for many days.

Mr. Clay always showed himself prompt to sympathize with persons in distress, and ever ready to aid the helpless. He often volunteered his legal services to rescue persons from slavery whom he believed to be unjustly held in bondage, and he never allowed any person to go undefended on account of poverty. He once found a poor Irishman named Russell, who had been lynched and beaten by a gang of persons calling themselves Regulators, and who had compelled him to abandon his house and property. Mr. Clay promptly interfered on his behalf, volunteered his services at great personal risk, and broke up the gang. Many other instances are recorded, of his having undertaken the defense of persons in distress—widows and orphans, who had not the means to employ other counsel.

Mr. Clay was as magnanimous as he was brave. He was quite as ready to acknowledge a fault as to resent an insult. In 1816, while he and Mr. [John] Pope were opposing candidates for Congress, Mr. Clay took offense at something which had been said by some of Mr. Pope’s friends and attacked him in the streets of Lexington. The next morning, satisfied he was wrong, he made an apology to the gentleman, and at a public gathering made the same acknowledgment. The magnanimity of the act, and the grace with which it was done, commended him anew to public favor.

Mr. Clay’s voice was one of remarkable compass, melody and power. It has often been remarked by spectators in the galleries of the Senate chamber that his ordinary tones in conversing at his desk could be heard more distinctly than the voices of other Senators who might be speaking at the time. He used this wonderful organ with powerful effect. His manner in speaking was marvelously graceful, full of action and energy, yet never for an instant failing in dignity, and admirably adapted to the special topic or mood of the moment.

Many persons are still living in Kentucky who heard his earliest popular harangues in that State, when he was merely a stripling—and according to their testimony, these efforts were marked by the same features which distinguished his maturer exertions. His arguments and appeals before juries in criminal cases, were long remembered as wonderful specimens of forensic eloquence.

No man, probably, ever had more of that quick penetration of intellect which enabled him instantly to seize the strong points of a case than Mr. Clay. His power over a jury was even more remarkable, and instances were frequent where he secured the acquittal of persons charged with murder, against the clearest evidence, simply through his resistless appeals to the sympathies of the jury. It is stated that no person put in peril of his life through the criminal code was ever defended by Mr. Clay without being saved.

In one case, a man named Willis, accused of a peculiarly atrocious murder, Mr. Clay succeeded in dividing the jury. Upon the second trial, Mr. Clay startled the audience by claiming a verdict on the sole ground that no man could be put in peril of his life twice for the same offense. The Court forbade the use of that argument, whereupon Mr. Clay took his papers and left the room, declaring he could not go on under such ruling. Finding the whole responsibility thus thrown upon him, the judge sent for him and invited his return. Mr. Clay came back, pressed that point, and secured an immediate acquittal on that ground alone.

Mr. Clay, as prosecuting attorney, once secured the conviction of a slave for murder, in a case where if he had been free, it would have been only manslaughter. He was so affected by the result that he resigned his commission in disgust.

We could fill column after column with such anecdotes. They all tend to illustrate the traits in the character of Mr. Clay, which were conspicuous throughout his life.

DANIEL WEBSTER

January 18, 1782–October 24, 1852

Daniel Webster, Secretary of State in the Government of the United States, died yesterday morning at 3 o’clock at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

Thus has closed the most illustrious career which has yet graced the civil history of this Republic.

Daniel Webster was born in the town of Salisbury, New Hampshire, on the 18th of January, 1782. His age, at his death, was seventy years.

Ebenezer Webster, the father of the Great Statesman, was born in Kingston, New Hampshire, and served in the French War of 1763. He later commenced a settlement on a branch of the Merrimack River, eventually called Salisbury, and served in the state legislature and as a judge. His second wife, Abigail Eastman, was the mother of Daniel.

While still young, Daniel Webster was daily sent two miles and a half to school, in the middle of Winter, and on foot. In his 14th year, he was placed in Phillips’ Academy at Exeter, N.H.

In 1797, Daniel entered Dartmouth College. Upon graduation, he returned home, determined to adopt the profession of the law.

He was married in June, 1808, to Grace Fletcher. They had four children, of whom one survives.

Soon after the Declaration of War against England, Mr. Webster entered public life.

Mr. Webster took his seat in Congress in May, 1813, and was placed by Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, upon the Committee of Foreign Affairs. He delivered his maiden speech on 10th June, 1813, and in it a young man previously unknown in political circles made an indelible impression.

Great Britain then insisting upon her right of search in vessels belonging to the United States, and the mother country and her daughter were again embroiled in war.

Of the speeches of Mr. Webster on the Embargo, the politician Edward Everett said: “His speeches on these questions raised him to the front rank of debaters. He manifested upon his entrance into public life that variety of knowledge, familiarity with the history and traditions of the Government and self possession on the floor, which in most cases are acquired by time and long experience.”

Mr. Webster was reelected to the House of Representatives in August, 1814. In the Fall of 1822, he again took his seat in the House, this time representing the City of Boston.

Early in the session, the subject of the Revolution in Greece came before the House. Mr. Webster presented the following resolution: “That provision ought to be made by law, for defraying the expense incident to the appointment of an Agent or Commissioner to Greece.”

In his famous speech in support of this resolution, Mr. Webster showed himself a discriminating judge of the laws that govern the relations of nations. In sympathy for the struggling Greeks, he was not surpassed by any men of his time. He uttered a trumpet-toned remonstrance against the tyranny which sought their degradation. The “Greek Speech” will be remembered as long as American oratory has a place among the records of history.

In November, 1826, Mr. Webster was again solicited to represent his district in the House, but a vacancy occurred in the Senate, and Mr. Webster was chosen to fill that post.

Toward the close of 1827, a domestic affliction was visited upon Mr. Webster, in the loss of his wife, which prevented him from taking his seat until January, 1828.

Gen. [Andrew] Jackson was elected to the Presidency in the fall of 1828, and Mr. Calhoun, as Vice-President, occupied the Chair of the Senate.

In the Senatorial career of Mr. Webster, it is difficult to embrace all the great movements in which he took part.

One event in which Mr. Webster won laurels for himself was the part he took in the great controversy between the North and South—between the national views of the Constitution which he had often vindicated, and the doctrines of state rights, which had been enforced by Mr. Calhoun.

The first session of the 21st Congress opened in December, 1829. Attention was directed to the topic of the public lands. Both the North and the South sought to secure the political alliance of the Western states. Mr. Foote of Connecticut introduced a resolution proposing to limit the sale of public lands.

It has been alleged that this resolution was the starting point of a crusade against New England, and especially Mr. Webster.

The incidents that followed are so vividly presented in one of the chapters of Mr. March’s Reminiscences that we transfer it to our columns.

“It was on Tuesday, January the 26th, 1830, that the Senate resumed the consideration of Foote’s Resolution. As early as 9 o’clock of this morning crowds poured into the Capitol, in hot haste; at 12 o’clock, the hour of meeting, the Senate Chamber was filled to its utmost capacity. The very stairways were dark with men, who hung on to one another, like bees in a swarm.

“Mr. Webster was never more self possessed. The calmness of superior strength was visible everywhere; in countenance, voice and bearing. A deep-seated conviction of the extraordinary character of the emergency, and his ability to control it, seemed to possess him.”

Who can ever forget the tremendous burst of eloquence with which the orator spoke of the Old Bay State or his tones of pathos:

“Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts. There she is—behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history: the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill—and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State, from New England to Georgia, and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit.”

No one ever looked the orator as he did. His swarthy countenance lighted up with excitement, he appeared amid the smoke, the fire, the thunder of his eloquence, like Vulcan in his armory forging thoughts for the Gods!

His voice penetrated every corner of the Senate as he pronounced these words:

“When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent! on a land rent with civil feud, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased nor polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, ‘What is all this worth?’ Nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first, and Union afterwards;’ but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart, Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

Mr. Webster’s “great speech,” as it is universally known, produced a sensation. The debate continued for weeks, but the argument had been exhausted.

Mr. Webster continued to take an active part in the debates of the Senate throughout the administration of General Jackson and his successor.

The 22nd Congress was faced with an issue of pressing importance. In South Carolina discontent under the Tariff [acts] had greatly increased. Large manufacturing interest had grown up in the Northern and Central States, while the South had not experienced similar benefits.

The South turned against the principle of protection, and its constitutionality had been denied. Mr. Calhoun had asserted the right of any State to nullify laws which she might consider unconstitutional. Mr. Webster had always maintained the supremacy of the Constitution and the Supreme Court of the United States as the final interpreter of its provisions.

Gen. Jackson was reelected President in the Fall of 1832; and the people of South Carolina were roused into the most intense excitement against the North and the protective policy. The Legislature declared the Tariff acts unconstitutional, and advised all citizens to put themselves in military array.

A bill was proposed that gave the President power to put down any armed resistance to the revenue laws of the United States. Upon this bill, and resolutions which he introduced, embodying his views on the right of a State to annul laws of Congress, Mr. Calhoun made the ablest argument ever advanced in support of his position.

Mr. Webster immediately entered upon a reply. In it he laid down the following propositions:

I. That the Constitution of the United States is not a compact between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacities, but a Government creating direct relations between itself and individuals.

II. That no State authority has power to dissolve those relations.

III. That there is a supreme law, consisting of the Constitution of the United States, acts of Congress, and treaties.

IV. That an attempt by a State to nullify an Act of Congress is a usurpation on the powers of the General Government and a violation of the Constitution.

The inauguration of Gen. [Benjamin] Harrison, in 1841, was the inauguration of a new era in the life of Mr. Webster, the one in which he became Secretary of State.

At the opening of the Congress of 1845, Mr. Webster resumed his seat in the Senate. He found under discussion some of the gravest questions that ever agitated the country.

The settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute was effected during the first year of Mr. Polk’s administration, by a division of the territory to which both England and the United States laid claim. A bill passed the House of Representatives to organize a Government for the territory thus acquired. When it reached the Senate, it was amended, by making the Missouri Compromise a part of it—excluding Slavery above, and admitting it below, the parallel of 36° 30’ north latitude.

On the 12th of August, 1848, Mr. Webster insisted upon the right of Congress to exclude slavery from this territory, and against any further extension of slave territory.

“The Southern States have peculiar laws, and by those laws there is property in slaves,” he said. “The real meaning, then, of Southern gentlemen, in making this complaint, is, that they cannot go into the territories of the United States carrying with them their own peculiar local law—a law which creates property in persons. This demand I, for one, shall resist.”

The bill passed with a clause forever excluding slavery from the territory.

Mr. Webster has achieved high distinction in three walks of life. Surpassed by few in the eloquence of his appeals to the jury, as a lawyer he stands unrivaled. As a statesman, no American except Alexander Hamilton can maintain a comparison with him. He loved his country, and he reverenced the Constitution. But Mr. Webster has achieved the highest rank as a literary man. All the products of his pen and the utterances of his tongue will be studied and admired by future ages.

And great as Mr. Webster was in all these spheres of intellectual activity, he was equally great in the department of conversation. We cannot imagine a richer contribution to the literature of America and the world than would be a record of Mr. Webster’s conversations upon topics of public concern.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865

WASHINGTON—Abraham Lincoln died this morning at 22 minutes after 7 o’clock.

Official notice of the death of the late President Abraham Lincoln was given by the heads of departments this morning to Andrew Johnson, Vice-President. Mr. Johnson appeared before the Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the United States, and took the oath of office, as President of the United States.

All business in the departments was suspended during the day.

It is now ascertained with reasonable certainty that two assassins were engaged in the horrible crime, Wilkes Booth being the one that shot the President, who was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre, and the other, a companion of his, whose name is not known.

It appears from a letter found in Booth’s trunk that the murder was planned before the 4th of March, but fell through then because the accomplice backed out until “Richmond could be heard from.” Booth and his accomplice were at the livery stable at 6 o’clock last evening, and left there with their horses about 10 o’clock.

It would seem that they had for several days been seeking their chance, but it was not carried into effect until last night.

The murderers have not yet been apprehended. One of them has evidently made his way to Baltimore. The other has not yet been traced.

Two gentlemen, who went to the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, to apprize him of the attack on Mr. Lincoln, met at the residence of the former a man muffled in a cloak, who, when accosted by them, hastened away.

It had been the intention of Mr. Stanton to accompany Mr. Lincoln to the theatre, and occupy the same box, but the press of business prevented.

It seems evident that the aim of the plotters was to paralyze the country by at once striking down the head, the heart and the arm of the country.

As soon as the dreadful events were announced in the streets, Superintendent Richards and his assistants were at work to discover the assassin. Every road leading out of Washington was picketed, and every possible avenue of escape was guarded. Steamboats about to depart down the Potomac were stopped.

The Daily Chronicle says:

“As it is suspected that this conspiracy originated in Maryland, the telegraph flashed the mournful news to Baltimore, and all the cavalry was immediately put upon active duty. Every precaution was taken to prevent the escape of the assassin. Several persons were called to testify, and the evidence as elicited before an informal tribunal, and not under oath, was conclusive to this point:

“The murderer of President Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth. His hat was found in the private box, and identified by several persons who had seen him within the last two days, and the spur which he dropped by accident, after he jumped to the stage, was identified as one of those which he had obtained from the stable where he hired his horse.

Booth has played more than once at Ford’s Theatre, and is acquainted with its exits and entrances.”

Secretary of State Seward was also shot that evening, at his home, and the person who shot him left behind him a slouched hat and a rusty navy revolver.

Maunsell B. Field, assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury Department, gave this account of events:

“On Friday evening, April 14, 1865, I was reading the evening paper in Willard’s Hotel, at about 10½ o’clock, when I was startled by the report that an attempt had been made a few minutes before to assassinate the President at Ford’s Theatre.

“Immediately I proceeded to the scene of the alleged assassination. I found considerable crowds on the streets leading to the theatre, and a very large one in front of the theatre and the house directly opposite, where the President had been carried after the attempt upon his life.

“I obtained ingress to the house. I was informed that the President was dying; but I was desired not to communicate his condition to Mrs. Lincoln, who was in the front parlor. She appeared hysterical, and exclaimed over and over: “Oh, why didn’t he kill me?”

“I returned to Willard’s, it now being 2 o’clock in the morning, and remained there until between 3 and 4 o’clock, when I again went to the house where the President was. I proceeded at once to the bedroom on the parlor floor in which the President was lying.

“The bed was a double one, and the President lay diagonally across it. The pillows were saturated with blood. There was a patchwork coverlet thrown over the President, which was only so far removed as to enable the physicians in attendance to feel the arteries of the neck or the heart. The President was breathing regularly, and did not seem to be suffering.

“Among the persons present in the room were the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, the Postmaster-General, the Attorney-General, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of the Interior, the Assistant-Secretary of the Interior, Capt. Robert Lincoln, the President’s son, and Maj. John Hay.

“For several hours the breathing continued regularly. But about 7 o’clock a change occurred, and the breathing was interrupted at intervals, which became longer and more frequent. But not till 22 minutes past 7 o’clock in the morning did the flame flicker out.

“The President’s eyes after death were not entirely closed. I closed them myself with my fingers, and one of the surgeons brought pennies and placed them on the eyes, and subsequently substituted for them silver half-dollars.

“In fifteen minutes there came over the mouth a smile that seemed almost an effort of life. I had never seen upon the President’s face an expression more genial.

“About fifteen minutes before the decease, Mrs. Lincoln came into the room, and threw herself upon her dying husband’s body. She was allowed to remain there only a few minutes, when she was removed in a sobbing condition.

“Presently her carriage came up, and she was removed to it. She was in a state of tolerable composure until she reached the door, when, glancing at the theatre opposite, she repeated several times: ‘That dreadful house! That dreadful house!’”

The corpse of the late President has been laid out in the northwest wing of the White House. It is dressed in the suit of black clothes worn by him at his late Inauguration. A placid smile rests upon his features. White flowers have been placed over the breast.

The corpse of the President will be laid out in state in the east room on Tuesday, to give the public an opportunity to see once more the features of him they loved so well.

The catafalque upon which the body will rest will be placed there. The catafalque will be lined with fluted white satin, and the outside will be covered with black velvet. Steps will be placed at the side to enable the public to get a perfect view of the face.

The funeral ceremonies of the late President will take place on Wednesday next. The procession will form at 11 o’clock, and the religious service will commence at noon. The procession will move at 2 P.M.

The remains will be taken to Mr. Lincoln’s home at Springfield, Illinois.

The funeral car is to be a magnificent affair. The body of the car will be covered with black cloth from which will hang festoons of cloth fastened by rosettes of white and black satin over bows of white and black velvet. The bed of the car, on which the coffin will rest, will be eight feet from the ground, and over this will rise a canopy draped with black velvet.

A silver plate upon the coffin over the breast bears the following inscription:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. SIXTEENTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, Born July 12, 1809. Died April 15, 1865.

A few locks of hair were removed from the President’s head for the family previous to the remains being placed in the coffin.

The Extra Star has the following:

“Developments have been made within the past twenty-four hours, showing the existence of a deep laid plot of a gang of conspirators to murder President Lincoln and his Cabinet. We have reason to believe that Secretary Seward received an intimation from Europe that something of a very desperate character was to transpire at Washington; and it is more than probable that the intimation had reference to the plot of assassination.

“The pickets encircling this city on Friday night to prevent the escape of the parties who murdered President Lincoln were fired upon at several points by concealed foes.

“It was ascertained some weeks ago that the late President had received several private letters warning him that an attempt would probably be made upon his life. But to this he did not seem to attach much, if any, importance.”

Abraham Lincoln was a great man, great intellectually. This was not universally admitted, but a brief glance at his career was sufficient to establish it. He was born in the humblest walks of life, had no advantages of education, had not been aided by any of those adventitious circumstances which assist so many others, and yet had gradually risen until he had reached the highest position in the State.

He had been a leading lawyer, a member of the Legislature of his own State, a member of Congress, the leader of his party in a memorable struggle for the Senatorship, and finally a successful candidate for the Presidency of the party that monopolizes the intelligence of the country. In his speeches delivered in his contest with Frederick Douglass are passages as noble and sublime as ever fell from the lips of any statesman in the country.

His lecture delivered in New York City, in the Cooper Union, in the midst of the learning and refinement of the metropolis, was universally admitted to be the ablest of the campaign. He was the first statesman to enunciate the great truth that the country could not exist partly slave and partly free.

In the discharge of his office, he bore himself with such a burden as no other President had ever borne, deciding questions the most difficult, giving gracious audience to the highest and the lowest, holding firmly the helm of affairs amid the stormiest seas, and conducting all to a successful issue.

The course of Mr. Lincoln for the past four years proves the possession of high intellectual endowments. Few men had ever had such opportunities to benefit their race. No other man since Washington had enjoyed such an opportunity of performing great services for his country.

The emancipating of the slaves was the golden attribute on which his future fame would rest. The Emancipation Proclamation will carry down his fame to the last syllable of recorded time. This had secured him the blessing of those who were ready to perish, and ensured for him such a preeminence among the great and good that he can never be forgotten.

The assassination has embalmed him in the grateful and lasting remembrance of mankind. He was above all a good man, an honest man. The country may well be thankful that one so scrupulous and conscientious was at the helm in these stormy times. He loved his fellow men. With the poor negro he was a demi-god. The bitterest tears shed over his grave will be by the race from whose manacled limbs he struck the fetters, and for whom he did so much.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

October 27, 1858–January 6, 1919

OYSTER BAY, L.I.,—Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States, died this morning at his home on Sagamore Hill.

His physicians said that the cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.

A contributing cause was the fever he contracted during his explorations in Brazil, when he discovered the River of Doubt in 1914. This fever left a poison in the blood.

Colonel Roosevelt, who was 60, was working hard as late as Saturday, dictating articles and letters. He spent Sunday quietly, but looked and felt well, until shortly before 11 o’clock.

Colonel Roosevelt had no idea that he was seriously ill, and was full of plans for the future. When asked about his health by visitors, his reply was a vigorous “Bully!”

The village of Oyster Bay was stunned by the news. Colonel Roosevelt was appreciated by the village as a world figure, but he also was as much of a fellow townsman as the village blacksmith.

When Colonel Roosevelt returned from his South American journey, he gave the first account of his discoveries in an address at the local church, months ahead of the announcement of the discovery of the mysterious Brazilian River, now the Rio Teodoro, in a magazine. He was a village institution in the role of Santa Claus at the Cove Neck School, near Sagamore Hill.

Five airplanes from Quentin Roosevelt Field flew in “V” formation over Sagamore Hill in the afternoon and dropped wreaths of laurel about the house.

Only members of Colonel Roosevelt’s family and his intimate friends knew how deeply he suffered because of the death of Quentin, his youngest son, who was killed in combat in France on July 14. This is believed to have been a contributing cause of his death.

When the news was confirmed, Colonel Roosevelt, who had always declared that families should accept cheerfully the sacrifice of their sons in the war, issued a statement in which he said that he and Mrs. Roosevelt took pride in his death.

At his death Colonel Roosevelt carried in his body the bullet which was fired by Schrank, at Milwaukee, during the Presidential campaign of 1912, which nearly resulted in Colonel Roosevelt’s death because he went on and delivered his speech immediately after the attack.

Of all the accidents which Colonel Roosevelt went through, that which left the worst effects happened in South America. He tore his leg when he was thrown from a boat while descending the River of Doubt and the wound became badly infected. While ill from this he suffered an attack of fever.

Colonel Roosevelt was also partially blind and partially deaf. The sight of his left eye was destroyed while he was in the White House in a boxing match. The hearing of one ear was destroyed by an abscess. He was ordered by his physicians to give up violent exercise, but this advice he would not follow.

Mr. Roosevelt came from one of the oldest Dutch-American families. The founder of the family, Claes Martenzoon van Rosevelt, as the name was then spelled, came to this country in 1649.

His mother, Martha Bulloch, was a Southerner. His father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was a philanthropist and the works he accomplished for the poor were legion.

The second Theodore Roosevelt was born in this city Oct. 27, 1858. He was graduated from Harvard in 1880, and was an officeholder almost continuously from 1882 until he retired from the Presidency in 1909.

As a boy he was puny and sickly; but with that indomitable determination which characterized his every act, he transformed his feeble body not merely into a strong one, but into one of the strongest. This physical feebleness bred in him nervousness and self-distrust, and in the same indomitable way he set himself to make himself a man of self-confidence and courage.

“When a boy,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I read a passage in one of Marryat’s books which always impressed me. In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.

“This was the theory upon which I went. There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”

After graduation he took up the study of law, but did not stay at it long. He entered politics, and at the age of 23 was elected to the Legislature. Within a year he was the Republican leader in the lower house. With a little band of men like himself, he fought for reform legislation, which at that time was generally regarded as a silk stocking freak. His biggest achievement was forcing an investigation of the crooked machine government of New York City, in which he acted as Chairman of the Investigating Committee, making a recalcitrant Legislature pass bills reforming some of the more flagrant abuses uncovered by the committee.

He served three terms in the Legislature, and in his third year came the great fight that split the Republican Party over the nomination of [James] Blaine for President. Roosevelt fought Blaine to the last ditch and, young as he was, was elected one of the four delegates-at-large to the National Convention, where he fought for the nomination of George F. Edmunds.

When Blaine was nominated, Mr. Roosevelt went off to become a rancher on the Little Missouri. At first the ranchers were disposed to laugh at the “four-eyed dude,” but they changed their opinion when they found that no work was too hard for him, no hardship too severe.

Mr. Roosevelt next attracted notice as a hunter of big game. Small game had no attraction for him, and it is doubtful whether he ever shot a rabbit. Only when the beast had some chance against the hunter did sport appeal to him, and the game that seemed most to his taste was the grizzly bear of the Rockies.

In 1880 President Harrison appointed him Civil Service Commissioner. For six years his constant warfare with the spoilsmen kept up as unending commotion among the politicians. He thought nothing of antagonizing even the greatest leaders in the Senate.

When he became President of the Commission, 14,000 Government offices were under civil service rules; when he left in 1895 to run the New York police, 40,000 offices were under civil service rules.

The election of Mayor [William Lafayette] Strong was caused by the Lexow exposures of police corruption in New York, and the new Mayor realized that the problem of police management would be the crucial one of his administration. He urged Mr. Roosevelt to become President of the New York Police Board.

Mr. Roosevelt was warned that the force was so honeycombed with favoritism and blackmail that the board could never ascertain the truth about what the men were doing. Roosevelt smiled and said: “Well, we will see about that,” and he personally sought the patrolmen on their beats at unexpected hours of the night, and whenever one was found derelict he was reprimanded or dismissed.

In April, 1897, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He became convinced that war with Spain was inevitable and proceeded to make provision for it. For command of the Asiatic Fleet, Mr. Roosevelt determined to get the appointment for Commodore [George] Dewey and secured the appointment which resulted in so much glory for the American Navy.

When the Spanish War broke out, Mr. Roosevelt resigned from the Navy Department to organize the famous Rough Riders. He did not feel justified in taking command of men, so he became Lieutenant Colonel. Before the campaign was over he felt warranted in taking the Colonelcy. The story of his prowess at Santiago is too well remembered to need rehearsing here.

When the war was over the soldiers were left in Cuba because of the slow arrangements of the War Department for transporting them home. The danger of pestilence among the Americans was great, and it was then that Col. Roosevelt demanded that the soldiers be taken home at once.

When they arrived at Montauk Point someone asked the Colonel about the state of his health. “I’m feeling as fit as a bull moose,” he replied. The simile would furnish a name to a political party.

He returned to the United States to find himself a popular idol, with a universal demand for his nomination for Governor of New York. He was elected by a majority of 18,000.

As Governor he consulted with [Thomas] Boss Platt, but the results of these consultations were what Roosevelt wanted and not what Platt wanted. Platt led an unhappy life while Roosevelt was Governor, and determined not to stand for another two years of it. He resorted to the expedient of kicking him upstairs into the Vice Presidency—little dreaming that he was paving the way to an elevation to the Presidency that would make Roosevelt even more of a thorn in Platt’s flesh.

Roosevelt was elected Vice President in 1900, but before the regular session of the Senate could meet, McKinley had been shot and Roosevelt was President. He was inaugurated at Buffalo Sept. 14, 1901.

The new President at once pledged himself to carry out President McKinley’s policies, and began by inviting the McKinley Cabinet to remain. Then three weeks after his inauguration, he invited Booker T. Washington, who was visiting the White House, to remain to luncheon. The South was up in arms in a moment, and the specter of social equality began to stalk, and it was long before Mr. Roosevelt could live down the impression that he was unfriendly to the South.

Economic questions at once engaged the President’s attention. In 1902 he settled the great anthracite coal strike by the unprecedented step of summoning the contending leaders to Washington and using the power of his personality and his office to influence them to a settlement and then by appointing the Coal Strike Commission.

In his message to Congress in 1902, he urged legislation for the control of trusts. About this time action was begun in the Federal courts against violations of the Sherman law, and Attorney General [Henry] Knox was pressing a suit to dissolve the Northern Securities Company.

Roosevelt jammed through Congress the so-called Elkins bill, which really was a Roosevelt bill and was designed to end the system of giving rebates to favored corporations who had to ship over this or that railroad. In addition, Roosevelt forced the creation of the Bureau of Corporations and invested it with authority to investigate all the corporate concerns in the country.

It was during his first administration that the Panama Canal was made possible. A treaty was eventually negotiated with the new Republic of Panama, and in May, 1904, the Canal Commission secured full control of the Panama Canal Zone and began operations.

He was nominated for President unanimously by the Republican Convention in 1904. Toward the close of the campaign he employed his famous “square deal” term, saying: “All I ask is a square deal. Give every man a fair chance.”

In the election that year he received the largest popular and Electoral vote ever given to a President up to that time.

In his first year he performed one of the greatest public acts of his career—the settlement of the Russo-Japanese war. For this the President received the Nobel Peace Prize. But he himself has always said that his greatest contribution to the cause of peace was sending the American fleet to the Pacific in 1907, an act he believed averted war between Japan and the United States.

In 1905 he began fighting for the regulation of railroad rates. In 1900 he had forced the Hepburn bill through Congress in the face of such bitter opposition from his own party that he was obliged to form an alliance with the Democrats. The latter charged bitterly that he threw them aside like a squeezed lemon when they had served his purpose. But he had no hesitation in breaking with the leaders of his own party, and had the satisfaction of putting his bill through.

His popularity now was at its greatest height, and by merely saying the word he could have had a third term. But on the night of his election in 1904 he had announced that he would under no circumstances accept another nomination.

He undertook to secure the nomination of his friend, William H. Taft, the Secretary of War.

Taft was nominated, and the President virtually took charge of his campaign. He planned, as soon as Taft was inaugurated, to leave the country and bury himself in Africa. But between the election and the inauguration a coolness had already sprung up between them.

Roosevelt perceived that Taft intended to change the Roosevelt policies and remove Roosevelt’s friends from office. The accounts that reached him as he emerged from the African jungle put the matter beyond a doubt, and when he reached the United States in June 1910, he was already an enemy of Taft.

The insurgent or progressive element in the Republican Party planned early in 1911 to defeat the renomination of President Taft, and it was decided to put forward Robert M. La Follette as the candidate. But a large element among the progressives wanted the nomination of Roosevelt.

At last, early in 1912, seven progressive Governors united in a demand that Roosevelt become a candidate. His answer was, “My hat is in the ring.”

President Taft went on the stump to defeat Roosevelt, but his own State [Ohio] went against him. When the Republican Convention met in Chicago, the bitterness between the factions was so great that predictions of rioting in the convention were made. [Taft ultimately received the nomination.]

The night the convention adjourned, Roosevelt’s followers proceeded to Orchestra Hall, where he was informally placed in nomination as a bolting candidate. But a real convention was held later, in August, at which the Progressive Party was formally created and Roosevelt was nominated for President.

The Colonel immediately began a stumping tour that took him through nearly every State in the Union. When Election Day arrived it was found that his achievement was something stupendous. Though his party was not born until two months after the regular party conventions, he had put the old Republican Party out of the running. Taft carried only the two small States of Utah and Vermont, while the Progressive Party had carried the great States of California, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. Roosevelt had over 4,000,000 votes.

[The Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, won the election with a plurality of votes, defeating Roosevelt, Taft and the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs.]

While the campaign was going on Col. Roosevelt was shot by a crank named John Schrank just as he was going to deliver a speech in Milwaukee. With astonishing courage, the Colonel insisted on going on with his speech. Then he was rushed to a hospital.

About this time Col. Roosevelt was invited to go to Argentina and deliver some lectures on economic problems. He accepted the invitation, and then decided that he would go into the hinterland and do some exploring and hunting.

He sailed on Oct. 4, 1913, and returned May 19, 1914, much weakened by jungle fever and after having had a narrow escape from death. It was while he was on his voyage of exploration up the Duvida River, which he discovered. He was so weakened by the fever that he could not go on. The party was almost without rations, reduced to five crackers each per day.

“This looks like the last for me, Doctor,” said the ex-President to Dr. Cajaziera. “If I’m to go, it’s all right. You see that the others don’t stop for me.” But he pulled through.

The Progressive Party was visibly going to the dogs in 1914. The pitiful figure they cut in the election of 1914 made it evident that as a party they had no future.

Then came our entrance into the war. “I and my four sons will go,” announced the Colonel. His four sons went, one of them to death, but he could not. The Administration was hostile to his proposal that he raise a division of volunteers, of which he would be brigadier general. This was the bitterest disappointment of his life.

Mr. Roosevelt was twice married. His first wife was Alice Hathaway Lee, who died in 1884. The only child of this marriage was Alice, the clever and attractive girl who became the wife of Congressman Nicholas Longworth.

In 1886 he married Edith Kermit Carow, and they had five children, Ethel, Theodore Jr., Kermit, Archibald and Quentin. The family life of the Roosevelts was ideal.

As an author Mr. Roosevelt has been prolific. His books include “The Winning of the West,” “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,” “History of the Naval War of 1812,” “Life of Thomas Hart Benton,” “History of New York,” “The Wilderness Hunter,” “American Ideals,” “The Rough Riders,” and “The Strenuous Life.”

WOODROW WILSON

December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924

WASHINGTON—Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, a commanding world figure and chief advocate of the League of Nations, is dead. He died at 11:15 o’clock this morning, after being unconscious for nearly twelve hours.

Mrs. Wilson, Miss Margaret Wilson, Joseph Wilson, a brother, and Admiral Grayson, his physician, were at the bedside.

Mr. Wilson’s last word was “Edith,” his wife’s name. In a faint voice he called for her yesterday afternoon when she had left his bedside for a moment. His last sentence was spoken on Friday, when he said: “I am a broken piece of machinery. When the machinery is broken—“I am ready.”

Mrs. Wilson held his right hand as his life slowly ebbed away.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (he dropped the first name early in life) was born on Dec. 28, 1856, at Staunton. Va., where his father, the Rev. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Not long after his birth the family moved to Augusta, Ga. Those who knew Woodrow Wilson well thought that he got his first stimulus to political thinking under the impressions of the reconstruction period.

He attended Princeton and entered the Law School of the University of Virginia and in 1882 he began to practice in Atlanta, but for law as a trade he appeared to have no aptitude. So he pursued a career in academia, eventually serving Princeton twelve years as professor and for eight more as President.

In his years as professor he wrote both books and magazine articles, and came into demand as a public speaker. He expressed a tenacious adherence to the idea that the place of the executive in the American Government was as the representative of the whole people, responsible for the advocacy before Congress of the greater policies, which could not be entrusted to a body whose members were concerned with local interests, nor to standing committees, impregnable to criticism and managed largely by log-rolling.

In the years leading up to 1912, the country at large was interested in him as a new and forceful representative of the popular political ideas, who was not handicapped by any accumulation of political enemies.

The public had seen him fight at Princeton with the “aristocracy” of the clubs, and with moneyed men on the Board of Trustees, and regarded the battles as a dramatization of the struggle against “special privilege,” which was then agitating the country.

In a sense, his entry into New Jersey politics was a sort of minor-league “try-out” which might fit him for fast company. Wilson, a Democrat, won the Governorship by 49,000 votes in a State which had usually been Republican in recent years.

Before the end of 1911 the Wilson-for-President movement was well under way all over the United States.

He won the nomination at Baltimore the next June. With the Republicans divided, the election went as was generally expected; Wilson was a minority President, to be sure, but he had a plurality of more than 2,000,000 over Roosevelt and nearly 3,000,000 over Taft, and he swept the electoral college with 435 votes to Roosevelt’s 88 and Taft’s 8. The election also gave the Democrats a heavy majority in Congress.

On March 4, 1913, he was inaugurated as President. He soon triumphed on the issues of tariff and currency reform, changes in anti-trust laws and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission.

The outbreak of the European war in August, 1914, seems to have surprised our Government. At the moment it seemed to call only for the formalities of a neutrality proclamation and a general tender of good offices for mediation toward peace.

While the President was criticized by those who were beginning to think that the war was our business, there was spreading among others the conviction that, whether it was our business or not, it might yet spread so far that we would become involved in it. And America was visibly unready for any war more formidable than an excursion into Mexico. The preparedness movement was countered by organized pacifist activities, with which almost from the first the pro-German faction allied itself.

The President treated the preparedness movement with disdain. He styled some of its advocates “nervous and excitable.”

There was now a growing prospect that even neutrality might not keep America from uncomfortable entanglements with the warring powers. This danger did not become acute, however, until the Germans on Feb. 4, 1915, declared British waters a war zone and announced the first submarine campaign. The American Government warned that if American vessels were sunk or American citizens killed, it would hold the German Government to “strict accountability.”

“Strict accountability,” however, had no terrors for the Germans. The submarines began to kill American citizens. With each new episode more Americans turned against the Germans, and the counter-activities of the pacifists and German agents increased.

Complaints against the failure to make the Germans check the submarines were increasing, chiefly in Republican papers, when the Lusitania was sunk on May 7, with the loss of more than 1,200 lives, including upward of a hundred Americans.

There was now a general feeling that something would be done. However, in a speech, the President invented another of the phrases which his opponents have constantly recalled.

“There is such a thing,” he said, “as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”

Still, he sent a note to the German Government warning that the Administration would not “omit any word or act” necessary to defend the rights of Americans.

The country drew a long breath and prepared for whatever might happen. There was violent protest from the professional leaders of Irish and German racial groups and from the pacifists, but the mass of the articulate part of the population seemed ready for war if that must be.

The German answer was a series of evasions and exculpations. Meanwhile more American lives had been lost by the torpedoing of passenger ships, and the pressure of the American Government obtained from Germany on Sept. 1 a promise to torpedo no more passenger liners without warning. And for a time there were no more.

The partisan bitterness shown by pro-German elements in 1915 had been a revelation of unsuspected national disunity. In the weeks when war seemed an overnight possibility the President had contemplated the condition of the national defenses, and had seen that they were not adequate. He soon undertook a tour to stir up public interest in an improvement of military and naval defenses.

By 1916 Wilson was renominated at St. Louis by acclamation, and the platform gave his record full endorsement.

A significant episode in the convention was the keynote speech of Martin H. Glynn, built upon the theme. “He kept us out of war.”

Wilson went on to defeat Charles E. Hughes, with 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254, and a popular plurality of nearly 600,000.

The Democrats still held a majority of 12 in the Senate; in the lower house they had only 212 Representatives to 213 Republicans, with a corporal’s guard of scattering members holding the possibly decisive votes. But the President-Premier, leader of the party, had received a vote of confidence.

The President had been thinking about the proper terms for ending the war, and arrangements that might be made to remove the possibility of a similar catastrophe hereafter. The world was already talking of a League of Nations.

During all of 1916 the chief aim of the President’s foreign policy seemed to be to keep America in the position to play the leading part in a peace conference after the peace, and, if need be, take the initiative in bringing the belligerents to the peace table. The difficulty with the belligerents was that something was constantly happening to give one or the other side the hope of victory in a few months more. Moreover, the section of American opinion which favored the Allies was convinced that they must win in the end, and talk of mediation was suspected as being advantageous to Germany.

But the issue of peace or war had already been decided. On Jan. 9 the Germans resumed its policy of unlimited submarine warfare.

On Feb. 3, the President announced that he had broken diplomatic relations with Germany.

A note from Germany to Mexico, endeavoring to enlist Mexican and Japanese aid in the case of war with America, was intercepted by secret agents and published semi-officially. It convinced many who had hitherto been hard to persuade that war was near.

American merchantmen were attacked by submarines. After dissent in the Senate, the President armed the ships by executive order.

The country was waking up. Former pacifists and pro-Germans now stood firmly in support of the President’s policy. On April 2 the President appeared before Congress and asked for a declaration that the acts of the German Government constituted war against the United States. Neutrality was no longer possible, he declared.

“We have no quarrel with the German people,” he said, but their Government had shown itself to be “the natural foe of liberty.” So America would fight for the freedom of all peoples, the German people included; “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

It was the most famous of all his famous phrases. The logical dilemma had been solved; the President had found a new and transcendent issue.

Both houses passed the declaration of war by overwhelming majorities. A conscription bill went through Congress by a considerable majority.

The year ended with the allied cause in a rather bad way. The collapse of the Russian armies and the Bolshevist revolution had removed the eastern front. It was evident that the opening of 1918 would see bloodshed more copious than any previous year.

It was during this time, on Jan. 8, 1918, that Wilson gave an address to a joint session of Congress, embodying his Fourteen Points, which detailed his vision of a just peace, one that would allow the League of Nations to settle future conflicts peaceably.

In the Spring American soldiers began to go to France by the tens and hundreds of thousands, and by July 4 a million were on their way. By the end of Summer their intervention had turned the tide. German leaders now began to think of mediation by President Wilson.

In New York on Sept. 27, the President declared in a speech that the League of Nations must be a part of the peace settlement, “in a sense the most essential part.”

A new German Chancellor, Max of Baden, on Oct. 4 appealed to the President to call a conference at once. Step by step the Germans, their armies drawing nearer the old frontier every day, were driven to more concessions. On Oct. 12 they promised that the Fourteen Points would be accepted flatly. Two days later the President informed them that there must be an armistice whose terms would “assure the present supremacy” of the allied armies in the field.

On Nov. 5 the Allies informed the President that they accepted the Fourteen Points, with reservations. On Nov. 11 hostilities ceased.

President Wilson thus played the principal part in bringing the war to an end. It left him exalted in the opinion of Europe to a position such as no American ever before enjoyed. But he was not so generally exalted at home.

In the election of 1918, the country went Republican. Opponents of the Administration won a majority of 39 in the lower House, and a majority of two in the Senate, which would have to ratify the President’s treaty of peace.

A few days after the armistice was signed, when talk of the Peace Conference had begun, it was intimated in Washington that Lloyd George and Clemenceau wanted the President to come to the meeting. The sentiment of the American public, so far as could be judged from newspaper expression, was strongly against this. Nevertheless, the President decided to go.

He was leaving home after an election in which he had issued an unprecedented challenge and had been defeated. But he enjoyed a triumphal progress through Western Europe. Everywhere the masses of the people received him as the man who had given voice to their aspirations and led them out of the wilderness of war.

There was reason in this. The Fourteen Points and the other Wilson principles which had been accepted as a basis of peace were not so precise as to be incapable of varying interpretations.

Every nation in Europe believed that its program was founded on the principles of Wilson, and that Wilson had come to the peace conference to fight for precisely that.

The Peace Conference opened on the 18th of January. The history of its conflicts is too well known to need repetition. The European powers pressed their own ideas as to what the terms of surrender meant. Some American liberals, when the peace terms were eventually published, denounced the President for his “surrender to European imperialism.”

The Wilson who had been the world’s idol in December was now only the head of one of many States in conference. Every decision of Mr. Wilson in favor of any particular measure set a body of opinion against him.

Republican leaders at home blamed the President for the collapse of allied unity. Their opposition to the League of Nations, as President Wilson presented, also was growing. As early as Jan. 4, two weeks before the Conference met, Senator Lodge had said that the peace treaty ought to be first and the League discussion taken up later.

On the 14th of February the President read the text of the League covenant to the conference, which adopted it. A few days later the President started for home.

On the night of March 3 Senator Lodge announced that 37 Republican Senators were opposed to the acceptance of the League covenant in the form in which it stood.

Twenty-four hours later, at a meeting in New York, the President declared that the League was inextricably interwoven with the treaty and that he did not intend to bring the corpse of a treaty back from Paris. On the next day he sailed back to the Peace Conference.

The League covenant was somewhat modified to meet Republican suggestions and on June 28 the treaty was signed.

But he could not overcome opposition at home and the treaty was not ratified.

In the 1920 election, the Democratic nominee, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, fought valiantly for the League, but was plainly willing to compromise on reservations that did not destroy the principles. Woodrow Wilson did not shift his position. But his health had suffered so much that he could not have taken part in the fight if he had wanted to.

The old scenes had changed. The Democratic Party of 1920 was not the party of 1912. Those who had fought in the front ranks in 1912 were most of them out of sight, and the final appeal to the country of the President-Premier for the ratification of a policy to which he had given four years of constant struggle was in the hands of an outsider, the Republican Warren G. Harding.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

March 8, 1841–March 6, 1935

WASHINGTON—Oliver Wendell Holmes, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served for 29 years, died this morning at his Washington home of bronchial pneumonia.

Death came at 2:15 o’clock to the great liberal of the Supreme Court and soldier of the Union, who would have been 94 years old Friday.

Since he retired on Jan. 12, 1932, Justice Holmes had spent nearly all of his days in his unostentatious little red brick house on I Street. There, in a mellow study running nearly from front to back of the dwelling, its walls lined with books, he read, dictated letters and received intimate friends.

He had waited for the end, his friends said, without fear or melancholy. When he left the bench he told his associates that “for such little time as may be left” he would treasure their friendship as “adding gold to the sunset.”

While he delved now and then into his law books, he loved a detective story or a tale with a humorous turn. He chuckled over the absurdities of P. G. Wodehouse’s starchy Englishmen. But he would turn now and then to a classic, with whose pages he was familiar years ago.

Although the culture that he gained from classic literature was always with him, he resorted often to quaint words and sentences, products, perhaps, of his New England upbringing. Most of his distinguished legal friends, one 65 years old, were known to him as just “young fellers.”

This was a symbol of the inherent democracy that led him to sit for hours and talk with a country flagman in the little railway station at Beverly Farms [in Massachusetts], where the justice spent many of his Summers. The flagman, incidentally, told a friend that the justice was the most unaffected man he ever knew.

He was such a stickler for the forms and ceremonies, for the dignity of the Supreme Court, that it was hard for those who did not know him to realize the great justice’s fresh, simple and amusing mental outlook. Despite all the reminiscences of his liberal findings in the court, his war exploits, his dignity, his personal charm, it is his sense of humor that seems to come first to the mind.

One authentic story concerns the play, “Of Thee I Sing,” with its flippancy toward the Supreme Court. It seems that in the scene where the court announces that the First Lady has borne a son, one character was to chant: “Brandeis and Holmes dissent.”

Eventually the line was deleted for fear of offending the aged justice, but when he heard of this he laughed heartily and said he wished that the sentence had been retained.

Mr. Holmes lived longer than any of the other 75 men who have sat upon the Supreme Court bench. He was the oldest man ever to have sat on the Supreme Court. Only eight justices served longer terms than his 29 years, among them John Marshall and Stephen J. Field, each of whom served 34 years.

As Justice Holmes grew old he became a figure for legend. Eager young students of history and the law made pilgrimages to Washington merely that they might remember at least the sight of him on the bench. Others so fortunate as to be invited to his home were apt to consider themselves thereafter as men set apart.

A group of leading jurists and liberals filled a volume of essays in praise of him, and on the occasion of its presentation Chief Justice [Charles] Hughes said: “The most beautiful and the rarest thing in the world is a complete human life, unmarred, unified by intelligent purpose and uninterrupted accomplishment, blessed by great talent employed in the worthiest activities, with a deserving fame never dimmed and always growing. Such a rarely beautiful life is that of Mr. Justice Holmes.”

He was born on March 8, 1841, in Boston. His father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, was of New England’s ruling caste, and the atmosphere of his home was at once Brahminical, scientific and literary. The boy started each day at the breakfast table where a bright saying won a child a second helping of marmalade.

The boy was prepared for Harvard by E. S. Dixwell of Cambridge. Well-tutored, he made an excellent record in college. His intimacy with Mr. Dixwell’s household was very close. His tutor’s daughter, Fanny Dixwell, and he fell in love and later they were married. (She died in 1929.)

After Fort Sumter was fired on, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. Holmes, 20 years old and shortly to be graduated from Harvard with the class of ’61, walked down Beacon Hill with an open Hobbes’s “Leviathan” in his hand and learned that he was commissioned in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers.

The regiment was ordered South and into action at Ball’s Bluff in Virginia. There were grave tactical errors, and the Union troops were driven down the cliff on the Virginia shore and into the Potomac. Men trying to swim to safety were killed and wounded men drowned.

Lieutenant Holmes, with a bullet through his breast, was placed in a boat with dying men and ferried through saving darkness to the Maryland shore. For convalescence he was returned to Boston. On his recovery he returned to the front.

At Antietam a bullet pierced his neck and again his condition was critical. Dr. Holmes, on learning the news, set out to search for his son. He found him already convalescent and brought him back to Boston.

Back at the front, the young officer was again wounded. A bullet cut through tendons and lodged in his heel. This wound was long in healing and Holmes was retired to Boston with the brevet ranks of Colonel and Major.

The emergency of war over, his life was his own again. He finally turned to law, although it was long before he was sure that he had taken the best course.

“It cost me some years of doubt and unhappiness,” he said later, “before I could say to myself: ‘The law is part of the universe—if the universe can be thought about, one part must reveal it as much as another to one who can see that part. It is only a question if you have the eyes.’”

Philosophy and William James helped him find his legal eyes while he studied in Harvard Law School and James, a year younger, was studying medicine. But while James went on, continuing in Germany his search for the meanings of the universe, Holmes decided that “maybe the universe is too great a swell to have a meaning,” that his task was to “make his own universe livable.”

He took his LL.B. in 1866 and went to Europe to climb some mountains. Early in 1867 he was admitted to the bar. In 1870 he was made editor of the American Law Review.

Two years later, on June 17, 1872, he married Fanny Bowditch Dixwell and in March of the next year became a member of the law firm of Shattuck, Homes & Munroe. In that same year, 1873, his important edition of Kent’s Commentaries appeared.

His papers, particularly one on English equity, which bristled with citations in Latin and German, showed that he was a master scholar. It was into these early papers that he put the fundamentals of an exposition of the law that he was later to deliver in lectures at Harvard and to publish under the title, “The Common Law.” In this book, to quote Benjamin N. Cardozo, he “packed a whole philosophy of legal method into a fragment of a paragraph.”

The part to which Judge Cardozo referred reads: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy avowed or unconscious, even with the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men, have had a great deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”

Holmes was only 39 years old when Harvard called him back to teach in her Law School, and 41 when he became an Associate Justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court bench. He was Chief Justice on the Commonwealth bench when, in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt noted that Holmes’s “labor decisions” were criticized by “some of the big railroad men and other members of large corporations.”

For Roosevelt, that was “a strong point in Judge Holmes’s favor.” In 1902, President Roosevelt appointed Judge Holmes to the Supreme Court of the United States, an appointment that was confirmed by the Senate immediately and unanimously.

A great struggle between the forces of Roosevelt and the elder J. P. Morgan began on March 10, 1902, when the government filed suit in Federal Court charging that the Great Northern Securities Company was “a virtual consolidation of two competing transcontinental lines,” whereby not only would “monopoly of the interstate and foreign commerce, formerly carried on by them as competitors, be created,” but, through use of the same machinery, “the entire railway systems of the country may be absorbed, merged, and consolidated.”

In April, 1903, the lower court decided for the government and the case went to the Supreme Court. On March 14, 1904, the High Court found for the government, with Justice Holmes writing in dissent.

He held that the Sherman act did not prescribe the rule of “free competition among those engaged in interstate commerce,” as the majority held. It merely forbade “restraint of trade or commerce.” He asserted that the phrases “restraint of competition” and “restraint of trade” did not have the same meaning; that “restraint of trade,” which had “a definite and well-established significance in the common law, means and had always been understood to mean, a combination made by men engaged in a certain business for the purpose of keeping other men out of that business.”

The objection to trusts was not the union of former competitors, but the sinister power exercised by the combination in keeping rivals out of the business, he said. It was the ferocious extreme of competition with others, not the cessation of competition among the partners, which was the evil feared.

“Much trouble,” he continued, “is made by substituting other phrases, assumed to be equivalent, which are then argued from as if they were in the act.”

From the opinions and other writings of Justice Holmes the following lines are some that stand out: “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.… That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

Soon after he resigned on Jan. 12, 1932, he sent a message to the Federal Bar Association: “I cannot say farewell to life and you in formal words. Life seems to me like a Japanese picture which our imagination does not allow to end with the margin. We aim at the infinite, and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames.”

LOUIS BRANDEIS

November 13, 1856–October 5, 1941

WASHINGTON—Louis Dembitz Brandeis, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and one of the greatest liberals in the history of that tribunal, died at his residence here at 7:15 o’clock this evening.

Justice Brandeis, whose name was often linked in dissents with that of the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, would have been 85 years old on Nov. 13. He had a heart attack on Wednesday and had been in a coma before the end. At his bedside were Mrs. Brandeis and their two daughters. Mrs. Brandeis received from President Roosevelt a message of condolence.

In frail health during the last two years, he devoted himself largely to consideration of the problems of Jews, whose plight during the European war and under the Nazi persecutions affected him intensely.

More than 82 years old at the time of his retirement, Justice Brandeis was nevertheless marked for his logic, surprising intellectual energy, and extraordinary ability to obtain the basic facts in legal controversies. But his physical strength was decreasing, and after a siege of grippe in January, 1939, he decided to leave the bench where he had sat so long.

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes died, in 1935, the mantle of judicial liberalism long since had been wrapped about the lean shoulders of Louis Dembitz Brandeis, like his mentor an outstanding apostle of dissent. He already had spent a long lifetime in pursuit of justice, both real and in the abstract, before he was appointed to the highest court of the land by Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Throughout the years that followed he continued to pursue it, handing down decision after decision that sparkled with the integrity of his mind, the breadth of his learning and great human qualities which the exactitudes of legalism were never able to dull.

He had been appointed against the wishes of a united front which used every weapon at its command to keep him from donning the black silken robes of an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But when, ten years after he had passed man’s allotted span, his aquiline face still peered down from the august bench, men and women in every walk of life, including some of his most bitter former enemies, joined in paying him tribute as one of America’s best-loved citizens.

In one of his best-known dissenting opinions, Justice Brandeis expressed those qualities which endeared him even to those who, spurred on by President Roosevelt in 1937, felt that an age limit of 70 years should be imposed upon the members of the Court. He read this decision in a quiet, almost colorless voice on March 21, 1932, while Herbert Hoover was still President and the New Deal had not been broached.

“Some say that our present plight is due, in large measure, to the discouragement to which social and economic invention has been subjected,” he said. “I cannot believe that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, or the States which ratified it, intended to leave us helpless to correct the evils of technological unemployment and excess productive capacity which the march of invention and discovery have entailed. There must be power in the States and the nation to remold through experimentation our economic practices to meet changing social and economic needs.

“To stay experimentation within the law in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to such experimentation may be fraught with serious consequences to the nation. It is one of the happy incidences of the Federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. This court has the power to stay such experimentation. We may strike down the statute embodying it on the ground that, in our opinion, it is arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable; for the due-process clause has been held applicable to substantive law as well as to matters of procedure. But in the exercise of this power we should be ever on guard, lest we erect our prejudices into legal principles.

“If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.”

Behind these words lay three-quarters of a century in which Justice Louis Brandeis had steadfastly endeavored to guide by the light of reason and in which he had been characterized by the boldness of his mind.

Justice Brandeis arbitrated the 1910 garment strike in New York, which affected 70,000 workers and $180,000,000 worth of business; he drove Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger from office in the Indian “land-grab” scandals of the Taft administration, and he fought zealously the battle of the small entrepreneur, summarizing his economic philosophy in the famous phrase, “the curse of bigness.”

It was said of the Justice that he matured early and never had a chance to change his mind about the fundamentals. In 1905 he said: “Democracy is only possible—industrial democracy—among people who think… and that thinking is not a heaven-born thing. It is a gift men make and women make for themselves. It is earned, and it is earned by effort.”

Outside the legal sphere, this son of German exiles who fled their native land after the failure of the Revolution of 1848 achieved the respect of men of all faiths by his stern adherence to his own religious beliefs. Often called America’s outstanding Jew, he became a leader of the Zionist movement, devoting time, energy and money to this cause.

His wide learning, revealed in more than one decision where his footnotes refer not only to scores of law texts, dozens of newspaper and magazine articles ranging from The Nation to The Nation’s Business, but to a wide array of books both ancient and modern and, in one instance to a book still in manuscript, set him apart from his brethren on the bench.

Justice Brandeis was born in Louisville, Ky., on Nov. 13, 1856. The spirit of Jackson and the frontier still hovered over the Kentucky in which this German-Jewish lad grew up in comfort derived from his father’s grain business. His maternal grandfather had been a leader in a Polish revolution in 1830; his father was an outspoken Union sympathizer in a hostile land, and his mother had risked her life to bring succor to Northern soldiers.

When his parents took up residence abroad, he entered the Annen Realschule at Dresden, where he studied for three years. He returned to America and received his Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard in 1877.

His social consciousness was developing all the time, and, while his law practice was lucrative, he found time for matters that satisfied his conscience more than his pocketbook. He was “people’s counsel” in behalf of the Oregon and Illinois women’s ten-hour law, the California eight-hour law and the Oregon State minimum wage law between 1900 and 1907, all models of social legislation by the State. He fought the Oregon law through half a dozen courts with dogged persistence before he was successful.

Another case which brought Mr. Brandeis to the attention of the country was his defense of Louis R. Glavis, who had been dismissed as investigator for the Department of the Interior in 1910. Mr. Glavis had revealed a “land-grab,” and the scandal reflected upon the integrity of his chief, Secretary Ballinger. Mr. Brandeis’s vehement cross-examination not only caused the resignation of Mr. Ballinger but caught President Taft in some uncomfortable positions because of his attempt to shield the Secretary of the Interior.

A storm broke out when, in 1913, Woodrow Wilson selected Mr. Brandeis as his Attorney General, an appointment that was withdrawn when the cry of “radical” was raised. This storm, however, was nothing to that which broke when, in 1916, Mr. Wilson named him to the Supreme Court.

Leaders of the bar raged. Mr. Taft, recalling the Ballinger episode, fought the appointment. Businessmen and public utilities representatives came to Washington to argue against the former “people’s crusader,” the man who knew the “curse of bigness.” Arrayed against him were men of the school of social and economic thought later characterized by Franklin D. Roosevelt as the “economic royalists.” Every former president of the American Bar Association stood against him.

The fight raged from January until June, but Mr. Brandeis was confirmed finally by the Senate.

As a justice he did not revise his economic doctrines but, in the words of Max Lerner, he stood by his guns that “wherever monopoly has taken the place of former competitive units, he wishes to restore and maintain competition; where, in a competitive situation, unfair practices threaten the competitive equilibrium, he wishes to curb them and so maintain the plane of competition; where competition is impossible or undesirable, due to the nature of the industry, he wishes to pattern the system of control as closely as possible upon… putative competition.”

In October, 1938, Justice Brandeis was stirred out of his judicial seclusion. Forgetting the robes of office, he turned his attention and thereby the attention of many other Americans to the plight of the Jews of the world.

Making one of his rare public appearances, the venerable Brandeis, white of hair but still steady of gait and unflinching of mind, went to the White House.

There for more than two hours he was closeted with President Roosevelt. Neither announced what was discussed; none doubted that the question of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was the topic. Some commentators went as far as to suggest that Mr. Roosevelt’s stand against Hitler after the Munich pact stemmed from this talk.

Justice Brandeis’s first public utterance on Zionism was in the form of an interview in The Jewish Advocate, a Boston daily newspaper. He began by stating that there was no room anywhere for “hyphenated Americans,” and spoke of the obligations of Jews to American institutions. Under a complete democracy, he said, there should be an elimination of class distinction.

Always Mr. Brandeis sought to approach the Jewish problem without abandoning the essential Americanism of his methods. When the Zionist leadership failed to agree with his methods, he broke with Zionism until 1938.

In his private life Mr. Brandeis was simple, even austere. His Washington home was a model of unostentation and long the gathering place of leaders in many realms of endeavor. Hosts of social workers, lawyers, and executives turned to him for advice.

Justice Brandeis had a musty office above his living quarters, crowded with books, where his secretary worked. He worked downstairs, in a small, almost bare room. There he wrote, in pencil, his decisions. During 1936, when 80, he wrote sixteen decisions.

Mr. Brandeis married the former Alice Goldmark of New York on March 23, 1891. They had two daughters, Susan (Mrs. Jacob H. Gilbert) and Elizabeth (Mrs. Stephen Raushenbush).

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

January 30, 1882–April 12, 1945

WASHINGTON—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, War President of the United States and the only Chief Executive in history who was chosen for more than two terms, died at 4:35 P.M. today at Warm Springs, Ga. He was 63.

The President, stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage, died on the eighty-third day of his fourth term and in an hour of high triumph. The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander in Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands as Mr. Roosevelt died, and the cause he led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.

Less than two hours after the official announcement, Harry S. Truman of Missouri, the Vice President, took the oath as the 32nd President.

No President of the United States has died in circumstances so triumphant and yet so grave. World War II, which the United States entered in Mr. Roosevelt’s third term, still was being waged at his death, and in the Far East the enemy’s resistance was still formidable.

Mr. Roosevelt was regarded by millions as indispensable to winning the war and making a lasting peace, and for this reason he was elected to a fourth term in 1944.

Upon the announcement of his death, crowds gathered across from the executive mansion, and the tears that were shed were not to be seen only on the cheeks of women.

The spoken tributes paid by members of Congress also testified to the extraordinary impression Mr. Roosevelt made on his times. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, a constant adversary on policy, called him “the greatest figure of our time.”

The internal crisis which existed at the time of his first inauguration, on March 4, 1933, when the nation’s economic system was faltering and its financial organism paralyzed by fear, was followed in his third term by the global war during which he and Winston Churchill emerged as leaders of the English-speaking world.

The years between were packed with swift and drastic social and economic changes that made Mr. Roosevelt the most controversial figure in American history. Beloved by millions, hated by others, he did more to mold the future of the nation he headed, and the world he lived in, than anyone else.

—Arthur Krock

The early life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was typical of a member of a family of wealth and social position. His birthplace was a mansion on the Roosevelt estate, overlooking the Hudson River near Hyde Park.

He was born on Jan. 30, 1882, the only child of James and Sara Delano Roosevelt. His father’s family was of Dutch descent and made its first appearance in America in 1654. The Delanos, his mother’s family, were of Flemish origin and had emigrated to Massachusetts even earlier.

James Roosevelt, a distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt and a former railroad president, retired early to lead the life of a country gentleman. Like Franklin D., his father and grandfather before him had been Democrats.

At 14, Franklin Roosevelt entered Groton to prepare for Harvard, where he was editor and president of The Harvard Crimson. After graduation from the Columbia Law School he worked as a law clerk, later establishing his own law partnership. While still a law student, he married his sixth cousin, Miss Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the favorite niece of President [Theodore] Roosevelt. The couple had five children.

The year 1910 was a turning point in politics in this State, when after a generation of Republican rule at the Capitol the Democrats took over control of the executive and legislative branch. Roosevelt, then only 28, successfully ran for State Senator from his home district, and was re-elected two years later.

He quickly attracted nationwide attention by assuming the leadership of a group of insurgents in the Legislature which revolted against Tammany Hall.

Tammany Hall opposed the nomination of Woodrow Wilson for President. Anti-Tammany Democrats favored Mr. Wilson. At the 1912 Democratic National Convention, Mr. Roosevelt was active in behalf of Mr. Wilson, who was elected in that year. His reward was appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The World War broke out in 1914, fifteen months after that appointment.

In the Presidential contest of 1920, the Democrats nominated Gov. James M. Cox of Ohio. Mr. Roosevelt drew second place, but the ticket was defeated.

In August, 1921, came Mr. Roosevelt’s tragic illness of infantile paralysis, which at first threatened to end his career and possibly his life, but later came to be regarded as the turning point from which he began his upward climb to the White House. He was swimming near his summer home at Campobello, New Brunswick, when he was stricken. The next day he felt a stiffness. On the second morning his leg muscles were paralyzed.

For months his life was despaired of. After an epic fight for health he began to recover. The optimism which was a cardinal trait in his makeup, along with his courage, were powerful allies in the battle. He was paralyzed from the waist down. It was almost a year before he could move about with the aid of crutches.

It was at this time that he “discovered” Warm Springs, Ga., and the health-giving qualities of its waters. Gradually he regained in part the use of his legs and could move about with the aid of canes and steel braces. The process of recovery, however, took years, and he never fully recovered the use of his lower limbs.

The foundations of Mr. Roosevelt’s political career were laid while he convalesced. In the three years he was absent from the public scene, from 1921 to 1924, he maintained close contact with the key figures in the Democratic party.

In September of 1928 Mr. Roosevelt was persuaded to seek the Democratic nomination for Governor of New York. He was nominated, and upon his election quickly demonstrated his huge capacity for work and his consummate skill as a politician.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1932, when the nation, then under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, was in the throes of the Great Depression, Mr. Roosevelt was nominated for President. At the close of the Presidential contest Mr. Roosevelt carried 42 States.

About three weeks before his inauguration, on Feb. 15, 1933, Mr. Roosevelt had a narrow escape from death at the hand of an assassin in Miami, Fla. Mr. Roosevelt was delivering an open-air address when an anarchist named Giuseppe Zangara fired several shots into the multitude, with the design to kill the President-elect. Zangara was convicted and executed.

Between Jan. 1, 1930, and March 3, 1933, the day before Mr. Roosevelt became President, 5,504 banks, with a total of deposits of $3,432,000,000, had closed their doors. The country was in the grip of fear bordering on panic.

In his first inaugural address, directed to a nation ravaged by the greatest depression in history, President Roosevelt demonstrated that he had a considered plan for the nation’s recovery. His outstanding declaration was that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That memorable address set the pattern for most of the accomplishments of his first term and for many of the events in his later administrations.

He attacked the selfish interests, “the unscrupulous money changers,” to whom he attributed the economic depression. He asserted that these interests having “fled from their high seats in the temple of our administration,” there was no recourse other than to have the Government assume the task of putting men to work, by direct recruiting if necessary.

He then called the Congress into extraordinary session on March 9. Within the next one hundred days the Congress, at his urging, enacted more legislation than in any like period in American history.

This legislation included:

Ratification by Congress of all the steps taken by the President in proclamations dealing with the banking crisis, including the ending of gold as a medium of exchange, and later steps taking the country off the gold standard.

Legalization of 3.2 percent beer before the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

The first Federal farm-subsidy measure under which the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was set up, giving the Government the right to pay subsidies to farmers for not producing, plus a law to refinance farm mortgages with Federal aid.

The Civilian Conservation Corps law, in which the younger generation of the unemployed were employed in forestry and conservation work.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, under which the vast potential of water power in the Tennessee Valley was developed as a governmental enterprise.

The first Securities and Exchange Commission law, under which the issuance of securities by corporations became subject to governmental regulation.

The Home Owners Loan Corporation Act, under which hundreds of thousands of private homes were saved for their owners by the Government taking over and refinancing the mortgages at a low rate of interest.

The National Recovery Administration, designed to permit industries to govern themselves and prevent ruinous competition so higher wages could be paid.

During the winter of 1933 President Roosevelt started his first national work relief program, headed by Harry L. Hopkins, Federal Emergency Relief Administrator, to transfer 4,000,000 unemployed from direct relief to work relief. This was known as the Civil Works Administration to distinguish it from the Public Works Administration, under Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, which made relief secondary to the construction of large-scale public works.

The “hundred days” of Congress vested in a President for the first time in a period of peace powers virtually dictatorial in essence and broad in scope, which wrought changes of a fundamental and revolutionary character in the American plan of government.

The first measures proposed to Congress were passed by practically unanimous vote, and Mr. Roosevelt’s policies won widespread approval throughout the country. His willingness to assume responsibility and his exhibition of unprecedented courage at a time of grave crisis compelled universal admiration and were reflected in a revival of hope and confidence while also producing a rise in the price of securities on the exchanges.

President Roosevelt was inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20, 1937.

Emergency relief continued to be one of the most pressing problems confronting the President. Business was improving, but employment indices were not keeping up with this improvement, and labor-management strife and riots bordering on open warfare shook the nation.

Addressing a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 1938, President Roosevelt voiced his dissatisfaction with the attitude of the United States Supreme Court in declaring unconstitutional certain New Deal measures, and he resolved to curb the Court’s power. The nation was not, however, prepared for the drastic program of Federal judiciary reform announced by the President on Feb. 5, which precipitated a crisis such as the government had not known since the Civil War.

The battle raged for five months. Conservative Democrats and Republicans were ranged against Presidential prestige and power. In the midst of the strife, Justice Willis Van Devanter, one of the oldest justices and most often under attack as a “reactionary,” retired. The Court reversed itself, turning to a “more liberal interpretation of the Constitution.” It upheld the Wagner Labor Relations Act and social security legislation. On July 22, by a vote of 70 to 20, the judicial reform bill was killed in the Senate. Mr. Roosevelt had lost the battle, but he had won the war. Death, retirement and resignation permitted him to appoint more justices than had any other President.

In his frequent press conferences, which continued throughout his 12 years in office, President Roosevelt, more than any other Executive in the nation’s history, achieved a direct contact with the press and public. His quick wit and complete control of the situation, as he sat with his inevitable cigarette cocked in a holder, made these verbal sparring matches the best show in Washington.

He also had a gift for vivid phrases that crystallized his policies for the multitude. In accepting his first nomination for the Presidency, he pledged himself to “a new deal for the American people.”

He coined an almost equally well-known phrase when in his first inaugural he declared he would dedicate the nation to the policy of “the good neighbor.” Eight years later, when he grimly resolved that this nation should furnish arms to Britain, he turned again to the simile of the good neighbor lending a garden hose to fight a fire.

His efforts on behalf of legislation designed to improve the social and economic lot of the less fortunate sections of the country were waged to the declaration that “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

The President also possessed unusual personal charm, which held to him many associates who questioned the wisdom of some of his policies. His distinguished bearing, made familiar to millions of people by countless newsreel and newspaper pictures, was an asset. So was his richly timbred speaking voice, carried by radio into millions of American homes in countless fireside chats and formal addresses.

As delegates to the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago in July of 1940, the President’s silence on his third-term aspirations remained unbroken. Nonetheless, he was nominated on the first ballot. While the convention was still in session, Mr. Roosevelt, in a dramatic radio address from the White House, announced his decision to run again, citing the national crisis of the war abroad. Another whirlwind tide of Roosevelt votes came on election day, Nov. 5.

As the overshadowing world crisis developed, President Roosevelt increasingly turned his attention to international affairs. As the war clouds grew blacker over Europe he did what he could to dispel them.

He chose a policy of defiance against the dictators and aggressor nations, denunciation of efforts at appeasement and the extension of all-out material and moral support to the embattled democracies, which were locked in a death-grapple with the Axis powers that would lead to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

When the long-dreaded war broke out in Europe, Mr. Roosevelt promised that all his efforts would be devoted to keeping this nation at peace.

His first step was to call a special session of Congress for amendment of the Neutrality Act. He successfully argued that by repealing the arms embargo and substituting a “cash and carry” provision for the sale of American arms to nations defending themselves, this country could keep the war far from its shores.

When the war leaped into sudden flame in April, 1940, with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, Mr. Roosevelt denounced the Nazis. The following month, when the German armies overran the Low Countries and France, he called upon the United States to embark upon a defense program of unprecedented magnitude.

Meanwhile he sought to extend to the faltering French nation, and then to the imperiled British, every assistance within his power. He rushed to the British vast quantities of arms and munitions. He arranged a trade of 50 over-age American destroyers to Britain in return for the right to lease air and naval bases on British possessions from Newfoundland to British Guinea.

He also asked Congress for authority and funds to aid the victims of aggression, saying that the most useful role for the United States was to be an “arsenal” for the democracies.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt faced the task of providing the leadership for conversion of a peace economy into an efficient war economy capable of delivering the necessary war materials. This required total mobilization of American resources, out of which rose the most powerful war economy of the time.

The President extended the draft to the group between 20 and 44, and ordered seemingly impossible production goals. The program involved a vast dislocation of the civilian economy, a labor shortage that led to a food shortage, and a vast series of governmental organizations, directives, and decrees.

Yet the first 18 months of the war saw production reach miraculous heights. It also saw the armed forces head toward the goal of 11,000,000 men; it saw fathers drafted, and the age limits lowered to take in 18- and 19-year-olds.

By the spring of 1944, many Democratic State organizations were calling for Mr. Roosevelt’s renomination for a fourth term.

As the Republicans were preparing to nominate Governor Dewey for President in Chicago, the nation was stirred in early June of 1944 by the landing of American forces in Normandy, France.

Governor Dewey was nominated on June 28. On July 11 President Roosevelt announced that he would accept a nomination for a fourth term.

Democrats argued that Roosevelt was needed to win the peace, that Dewey lacked experience in foreign affairs, and that the rejection of the President would give aid and comfort to the enemy. When the votes were counted, Mr. Roosevelt became the first four-term President in American history, winning 36 States.

JOSEPH MCCARTHY

November 14, 1908–May 2, 1957

By W. H. Lawrence

WASHINGTON—Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who built a global reputation on anti-Communist investigations, died tonight of a liver ailment at the age of 47.

The Wisconsin Republican’s death at 6:02 P.M. ended one of the most controversial careers in modern United States politics.

At its peak, from about 1950 to 1954, he wielded more power than any other Senator, and his activities gave a new word, “McCarthyism,” to the English language. He charged that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had not done all they could to root Communists from Government and that their Administrations marked more than 20 years of “treason.”

Later he amended his charge to “21 years,” thus bringing in the Eisenhower Administration.

But after the Senate voted in December, 1954, to condemn his tactics his political power waned. He seldom was in his Senate seat and his advice, seldom offered, was little heeded.

Washington was shocked by the Senator’s sudden death. Friend and foes joined in expressions of regret.

One of the first came from the White House, where President and Mrs. Eisenhower sent to Mrs. McCarthy an expression of their “profound sympathies… on the grievous personal loss she has sustained.”

Vice President Richard M. Nixon issued a statement in which he said:

“Years will pass before the results of his work can be objectively evaluated, but his friends and many of his critics will not question his devotion to what he considered to be the best interests of his country.”

Senator McCarthy, who began his political career as a Democrat but shifted to the Republican party, was a little-known Senator until February, 1950, when he jumped into the limelight on the anti-Communist issue.

His contention, in a speech at Wheeling, W. Va., was that he held in his hand a list of card-carrying Communists on the payroll of the State Department. Challenged to prove it, he maintained before a special Senate committee that the Truman Administration had withheld the proof he needed.

When the Democratic committee majority ruled against him, he charged “whitewash” and helped in the campaign that defeated Senator Tydings for re-election later that year.

He parlayed one charge after another into great political power. “McCarthyism” meant one thing to his friends and another to his foes. His friends prized the new word as meaning a determined effort to root Communists from government and industry. His enemies thought the same word meant “character assassination” on charges that were more frequently false than true.

Senator McCarthy would have been up for re-election in 1958, and this would have confronted President Eisenhower with a difficult political situation. He was one of three Republicans—the others were Senators William E. Jenner of Indiana and George W. Malone of Nevada—who the President publicly had said could not be counted on for help in advancing the Administration’s legislative program.

However, tonight a close acquaintance of Mr. McCarthy said that the Senator had wondered whether he would be able to run again, apparently because of his poor health and his lessened political power.

When the Senator was running for his second term in 1952, General Eisenhower was a candidate for the Presidency for the fire time. One of the most celebrated incidents of that campaign was General Eisenhower’s deletion from a Milwaukee speech of a paragraph of praise for his old Army friend, General of the Army George C. Marshall. General Marshall had been a target of Senator McCarthy.

In recent months Senator McCarthy seldom was on the Senate floor, and his once powerful voice had virtually no influence on his colleagues. He cast the only negative vote against confirmation of President Eisenhower’s nomination of William J. Brennan of New Jersey to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

One of his foes involved in the Army-McCarthy case was Brig. Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker, recently confirmed by an overwhelming vote for a second star as a major general despite Senator McCarthy’s active opposition.

Senator McCarthy’s last appearance as an investigator was as a member of the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, which conducted the inquiry into the leadership of the Teamsters Union.

The ineffectual role that the Senator played in the Senate caucus room where he once had held the spotlight emphasized how he had lost his standing both with the public and the Senate.

His questioning had lost its former sharpness. On several days he wandered in, took off on questions apart from the main issue, and after 15 or 20 minutes of repetitive questioning—during which his colleagues scarcely concealed their annoyance—he would give up, and then leave the hearing room.

On many days he never showed up. Several times his appearances provoked a buzz of comment on his condition. He had a ghastly color. He was plainly ill. On one occasion he sat for a while, gazing vacantly, and seemed to arouse himself by breaking into the questioning.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

October 11, 1884–November 7, 1962

Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt died last night.

The former First Lady, famous as the wife and widow of the 32rd President of the United States and an international figure in her own right, died at 6:15 P.M. in her home at 55 East 74th Street. She was 78 years old.

The woman who was a noted humanitarian, author and columnist, delegate to the United Nations and active force in the Democratic party was mourned by people over the world.

President Kennedy called her “one of the great ladies in the history of this country.” Mayor Wagner ordered flags on city buildings flown at half-staff.

Mrs. Roosevelt succumbed four weeks after her birthday, which was Oct. 11, and six weeks after she entered a hospital with anemia and a lung infection.

She will be buried next to her husband, who died on April 12, 1945, in the rose garden of the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Shortly after the first signs of illness, she went to the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, on Sept. 26. She marked her 78th birthday in the hospital and went home to convalesce on Oct. 18.

Three of Mrs. Roosevelt’s children were at the apartment last night: her daughter, Mrs. Anna Roosevelt Halsted, and her sons Franklin Jr. and John. Her son Elliott was flying here from Miami. Her son James arrived early today from California, where he won re-election to the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s elections.

During her illness, Mrs. Roosevelt had only one visitor who was not a member of the family—Adlai E. Stevenson, the United States representative at the United Nations. Mrs. Roosevelt had worked closely with Mr. Stevenson in the United Nations for many years, and she had asked him to talk with her about the Cuban crisis.

Besides her five children, Mrs. Roosevelt is survived by 19 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt was more involved in the minds and hearts and aspirations of people than any other First Lady in history. By the end of her life she was one of the most esteemed women in the world.

During her 12 years in the White House she was sometimes laughed at and sometimes bitterly resented. But during her last years she became the object of almost universal respect.

Again and again, she was voted “the world’s most admired woman” in international polls. When she entered the halls of the United Nations, representatives from all countries rose to honor her. She had become not only the wife and widow of a towering President but a noble personality in herself.

She was as indigenous to America as palms to a Florida coastline, and as the nation’s most peripatetic woman, she brought her warmth, sincerity, zeal and patience to every corner of the land and to much of the world.

After a career as mistress of the White House that shattered precedents with a regularity never approached by Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison, and after her husband’s death, President Harry S. Truman appointed Mrs. Roosevelt in 1945 a delegate to the General Assembly.

The esteem in which Mrs. Roosevelt was held in this country was immense, despite intense criticism that some observers believed stemmed from persons who differed politically and ideologically with her husband. She was accused of stimulating racial prejudices, of meddling in politics, talking too much, traveling too much, being too informal and espousing causes critics felt a mistress of the White House should have left alone.

On the other hand, she was hailed by countless numbers as their personal champion in a world first depression-ridden, then war-torn and finally maladjusted in the postwar years. She was a symbol of the new role women were to play in the world.

The more important chroniclers of Mr. Roosevelt’s days in the White House have noted few instances in which it could be established that her counsels were of first importance in changing the tide of affairs. Nor did President Roosevelt always confide in his wife where matters of state were concerned.

There were, however, many known incidents in which Mrs. Roosevelt was able to direct the President’s attention to such matters as injustices done to racial or religious minorities in the armed services or elsewhere in the Government.

With characteristic feminine candor, Mrs. Roosevelt always insisted that she had to do what she felt was right.

She got along well with the State Department until the Palestine issue arose. In February and March of 1948 she publicly opposed American policy that maintained an arms embargo on shipment of arms to Israelis. She also came out in favor of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

While often critical of Soviet tactics, Mrs. Roosevelt consistently urged the United States to continue efforts to end the cold war by negotiation. She also advocated the abandonment of nuclear weapons tests and called for United States recognition of Red China.

Mrs. Roosevelt never lost interest in the Democratic party. She addressed its national convention in 1952 and 1956, and both years campaigned for Mr. Stevenson. At the 1960 convention in Los Angeles, she pressed unsuccessfully for a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket and seconded Mr. Stevenson’s nomination.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born to Elliott and Anna Hall Roosevelt in New York on Oct. 11, 1884. Theodore Roosevelt, the 25th President, was her uncle. The families of both her parents were prominent socially, the Roosevelts a wealthy family of Dutch descent and the Halls of the same family as Philip Livingston, the English-descended signer of the Declaration of Independence.

When Eleanor was eight her mother died, and the young girl went to live with her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Valentine G. Hall. Her father died a year and a half later.

She was taught at home by tutors for the most part, and she recalled later in her autobiography, “This Is My Story,” that her real education did not begin until she went abroad at the age of 15.

She remained abroad for three years, studying languages, literature and history, perfecting her French and Italian, and spending her vacations traveling on the Continent and absorbing European culture.

At the age of 18 she was brought back to New York for her debut. “It was simply awful,” she said in a public discussion once. “It was a beautiful party, of course, but I was so unhappy, because a girl who comes out is so utterly miserable if she does not know all the young people.”

She was relieved of her misery within two years by meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had graduated from Harvard in 1904 and had come to New York to attend the Columbia Law School. He found Miss Roosevelt good company.

The two Roosevelts were distant cousins; they had met first when he was four years old and she two; and they got along easily together. Their relatives approved so highly that the marriage followed naturally. President [Theodore] Roosevelt came from the White House to New York on March 17, 1905, to give the bride in marriage.

Mrs. Roosevelt had her first brush with politics and government in 1911 after Mr. Roosevelt had been elected a State Senator and the family moved to Albany. In 1920 she saw more of the political scene when her husband was a candidate for the Vice Presidency on the democratic ticket with James M. Cox, who ran for President against Warren G. Harding.

The next year poliomyelitis struck her husband, and Mrs. Roosevelt attended him and encouraged him for three years until it was evident that any further recovery would come slowly through the remainder of his life.

It was at this point that Mrs. Roosevelt emerged seriously in search of a career. She took part in political discussion with other women after several years of suffrage, and pointed out in those early years, prophetically perhaps, that “women were not utilizing their opportunity to elevate politics.”

She became a director of the Foreign Policy Association and of the City Housing Corporation. In addition, she became a syndicated newspaper columnist, edited a magazine and judged contests.

On March 4, 1933, her husband was inaugurated as the 32nd President, and Eleanor Roosevelt began her 12 years as the First Lady. At the White House she established a weekly conference with the press, the first of its kind ever held by a First Lady, and attended only by women journalists.

Except for the formal occasions and official events, the White House under Mrs. Roosevelt’s influence had a gay informality about it, with grandchildren and an odd assortment of dogs scampering through its halls. Visitors were frequent and, she once laughingly remarked, “We call it a hotel.”

In 1939 the nation noted a change in Mrs. Roosevelt’s newspaper writings. Until then she had devoted the bulk of her space to women. Her columns began discussing the Works Progress Administration, United States neutrality and other current topics, with the result that political observers noted that what she had to say either anticipated or supplemented the President’s statements. Concomitantly, she found herself more and more in the field of controversy.

The same year Mrs. Roosevelt announced in her column her resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution because the society had refused the use of Constitution Hall in Washington for a concert by Marian Anderson, the Negro contralto.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s work with the United Nations kept her name before the public for a number of years after the death of her husband. She brought a rare combination of toughness and idealism to its halls. The fact that her lofty objectives were viewed by “realists” as being impossible to attain did not deter her from fighting for them.

Mrs. Roosevelt played an important part in drafting the Covenant on Human Rights, designed to establish basic civil rights of peoples throughout the world.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

May 29, 1917–November 22, 1963

DALLAS—President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.

He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet that was fired at him as he was riding through downtown Dallas in a motorcade.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was riding in the third car behind Mr. Kennedy’s, was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States 99 minutes after Mr. Kennedy’s death.

Mr. Johnson is 55 years old; Mr. Kennedy was 46.

Shortly after the assassination, Lee H. Oswald, 24, who once defected to the Soviet Union and who has been active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, was arrested. Tonight he was accused of the killing.

Gov. John B. Connally Jr. of Texas, who with his wife was riding in the same car with Mr. Kennedy, was severely wounded.

The killer fired the rifle from a building just off the motorcade route. A Dallas television reporter reported that as the shots rang out he saw a rifle extended from a window of the Texas Public School Book Depository.

Mr. Kennedy apparently was hit by the first of what witnesses believed were three shots. He was driven at high speed to Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where he died without regaining consciousness.

President Kennedy was shot at 12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time. He was pronounced dead at 1 P.M. and Mr. Johnson was sworn in at 2:39 P.M.

Mr. Johnson, who was uninjured in the shooting, took his oath in the Presidential jet plane as it stood on the runway at Love Field. The body of Mr. Kennedy was aboard.

Standing beside Mr. Johnson was Mrs. Kennedy. She had been sitting next to her husband in the motorcade, and her stockings were spattered with her husband’s blood.

Mr. Johnson was sworn in by Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes of the Northern District of Texas in the private Presidential cabin in the rear of the plane.

As Judge Hughes read the oath of office, her eyes were red from weeping. Mr. Johnson’s hands rested on a leather-bound Bible as Judge Hughes read and he repeated: “I do solemnly swear that I will perform the duties of the President of the United States to the best of my ability and defend, protect and preserve the Constitution of the United States.”

Those 34 words made Lyndon Baines Johnson, one-time farm boy and schoolteacher of Johnson City, the President.

At 2:46 P.M., seven minutes after Mr. Johnson had become President and 106 minutes after Mr. Kennedy had become the fourth American President to succumb to an assassin’s wounds, the jet took off for Washington.

—Tom Wicker

John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave few signs in his youth that he might some day head for the Presidency.

He was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, a Boston suburb. By 1926 the business interests of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., were concentrated in New York, and the family moved to Bronxville.

John attended Choate, an exclusive boys’ school in Wallingford, Conn., graduating in 1935, when he was 18. He was tall, thin, good-looking and energetic. He had decided to break with family tradition and go to Princeton rather than Harvard, where his father had studied and where his older brother, Joseph Jr., was already carving out an important career. However, John had a recurrence of jaundice in December and left Princeton. In the autumn of 1936 he entered Harvard.

His first two years at Harvard were undistinguished. He got slightly better than a C average. He also suffered a back injury that would plague him later on. Toward the end of 1937 his father was named Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s by President Roosevelt.

Ambassador Kennedy took the side of the supporters of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, backed the Munich agreement, in which Chamberlain allowed Hitler to annex the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in exchange for promises of peace, and expressed views regarded by his critics as those of isolationism and appeasement.

John Kennedy’s final year at Harvard was the best of his educational career. He was determined to be graduated with honors. His grades improved to a B average. But his principal achievement was the writing of a thesis, “Appeasement at Munich.” His basic point was that the Munich Pact should not be the object of criticism. Rather, he wrote that underlying factors, such as the state of British opinion and the condition of Britain’s armaments, had made “surrender” inevitable.

In June, 1940, John Kennedy was graduated cum laude in political science.

The precise moment when John Kennedy determined to run for the Presidency of the United States may never be determined.

Some historians believe that a campaign for the Presidency was implicit in his decision in late 1945 to embark upon a political career. They point out that he took over, in effect, the projected ambitions of his late older brother, Joseph Jr., who had been killed on a bombing mission in the war. John went on to represent his Massachusetts district in Congress from 1947 to 1953 and serve in the Senate from 1953 to 1960.

To some, the Kennedy ambition for the Presidency stemmed from a frustrated drive originally possessed by his father and transmitted first to his son Joe and then to his son Jack.

In any case, it seems certain that John Kennedy’s decision to seek the nation’s highest office stemmed from his own year of deep crisis, 1954 to 1955.

He spent most of that period in and out of hospital beds. He underwent surgery several times at grave risk of his life to correct his chronic and painful back injury. During his months of illness and recuperation, he turned his mind to a task that intimately linked his personal and political interests. This was the writing of the book “Profiles in Courage,” published in 1956.

Before he picked up the political mantle of his older brother, John Kennedy had been headed for a career as a writer. On the eve of World War II he had turned his college political science thesis into a book called “Why England Slept,” an analysis of what led England into World War II.

With “Profiles in Courage” he fused his literary and political aspirations. The book described notable examples of political courage in America. John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston and Robert A. Taft were some of the men portrayed.

The book became a best-seller and won a Pulitzer Prize in biography, an honor that helped place the author in a leading position among Presidential possibilities. There was one discordant note. Rumors circulated that the book had been ghost-written by his close friend and political aide, Theodore C. Sorenson.

By early 1956 Mr. Kennedy had become a national figure. In view of his age and the political situation—the renomination of Adlai E. Stevenson as the Democratic Presidential nominee was virtually certain—Senator Kennedy set his sights on the Vice-Presidential nomination. He took the spotlight at the convention, placing Mr. Stevenson in nomination. But on the third ballot he was swamped for the Vice-Presidency by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

Mr. Kennedy then turned full-time attention to Presidential politics. In 1957 he began to build a national legislative record in the Senate. He backed aid for Poland and India. He called for the independence of Algeria. He published incisive critiques of United States foreign policy in the quarterly “Foreign Affairs.”

And he demonstrated his political appeal in 1958 when he ran for a second term in what proved to be a rough campaign. Mr. Kennedy won with a winning margin of 874,608 votes, the biggest in Massachusetts history.

From that time forward Presidential politics seemed almost completely to preoccupy Senator Kennedy. Behind him was a well organized and seasoned political staff built around the Kennedy family. His brother Robert was campaign manager. His principal aides were the group of close friends and associates he had gathered over the years.

The first task was to obtain the nomination. Senator Kennedy faced Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota in two key primaries, first in Wisconsin and then in West Virginia. In Wisconsin, Mr. Kennedy won the state but Mr. Humphrey put up a good showing. In the Wisconsin primary Mr. Kennedy had wanted to demonstrate two things—his ability to run well in the agricultural Middle West and his ability to overcome the “Catholic issue.”

When Mr. Kennedy began his quest for the Presidency, the issue of his religion loomed larger than ever. Overhanging the prospects of a Roman Catholic candidate was the memory of the candidacy of Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic Democrat who ran a disastrous race against Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Senators Kennedy and Humphrey were rematched in the West Virginia primary. Here Mr. Kennedy encountered voters who were hard-bitten in their opposition to any candidate of the Catholic faith. But he won a big victory that drove Mr. Humphrey out of the race and was hailed by Kennedy supporters as conclusive evidence that the Al Smith defeat no longer overhung his campaign chances.

By the time the Democratic National Convention opened in Los Angeles in July, political observers were certain that Mr. Kennedy had put together a winning combination, even though Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas was still in the field against him and Mr. Stevenson hoped for a third nomination.

Mr. Kennedy won easily on the first ballot, then asked for and got Mr. Johnson’s acceptance as his running mate.

The major innovation of the campaign, which pitted Mr. Kennedy against Vice President Richard M. Nixon, were four national television debates between the two candidates. The first, on Sept. 26 in Chicago, proved the most important. Many observers later felt that this encounter had been the turning point of the campaign.

Kennedy partisans credited this debate with clearing away a major issue that had been raised against their candidate, that of youth, inexperience and immaturity. But after the first and subsequent debates, the Republicans conceded that the issue lost most of its bite because Senator Kennedy had presented himself as an assured, mature figure with a wealth of information about government and policy at his fingertips.

Moreover, Mr. Nixon appeared thin, tired and nervous. In contrast. Mr. Kennedy was ebullient and self-confident and radiated health and energy.

But the religious issue refused to be laid to rest—until Mr. Kennedy appeared before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston. The group was apparently convinced that a Catholic, with allegiance to the pope, could not act with independence in the White House.

Mr. Kennedy confronted his accusers in a dramatic hour-long session, which was televised nationally. The high point was his declaration that he would resign the Presidency if he ever thought that his religious beliefs would not permit him to make a decision in the national interest.

On Election Day, Nov. 8, Mr. Kennedy awaited the election results at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., where the Kennedy clan had gathered and where his wife was awaiting the birth of their second child (the youngster, John F. Kennedy Jr., was born Nov. 25). Twenty-four hours later, on the morning of Nov. 9, Mr. Nixon conceded the election to Mr. Kennedy after one of the closest votes in national history.

The Administration of John F. Kennedy was marked by a breathless series of major events—the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin Wall, riots at the University of Mississippi and other places in the battle for civil rights, and the Cuban showdown. But from the moment Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev announced the dismantling of the missile bases and withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba in October, 1962, a period of comparative relaxation in cold war tensions began, a generally tranquil time internationally.

For 13 months the nation has been living without fear of imminent war. In this period the President was able to turn his main attention to domestic issues such as civil rights and the lagging economy.

His inaugural address was only 1,355 words long—one of the shorter introductory messages of recent American Presidents.

“Now the trumpet summons us again,” he declared, “not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”

And in what became his most celebrated passage, he implored: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what America will do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

His legislative program had an exceptionally difficult time in Congress, and the lack of results on major items reduced his popular support. At his last White House news conference, a week ago, the President publicly accepted what had become a foregone conclusion: the legislative achievements of this session of Congress would be among the most meager ever.

Congress had not yet taken up the civil rights bill. Other items on the President’s program that were still languishing were education and health insurance for the aged under Social Security. The Administration’s tax bill, promising lower taxes to stimulate economic recovery, was stalled in the Senate Finance Committee.

President Kennedy had promised to reinvigorate the domestic economy, to “get the country moving again.” In April he appointed an Appalachian Regional Commission, which is now drawing up a massive program of Federal aid for a ten-state swath of chronic poverty running from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania to northern Alabama.

The President’s relations with the business community had improved considerably since the spring of 1962, when he raised hackles by forcing the steel companies to hold the price line. At that time he made a withering attack on United States Steel and other leading corporations, which had increased steel prices $6 a ton.

The President called the price rise “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” Privately, he called the industry leaders “sons of bitches.” Big Steel backed down.

The civil rights front became suddenly grimmer in late 1962. In October, a Negro named James Meredith, grandson of a slave and a nine-year veteran of the Air Force, sought to register at the University of Mississippi.

The university town of Oxford was torn by rioting. A mob attacked United States marshals who were guarding Mr. Meredith.

Gov. Ross Barnett pleaded with the President by telephone: “Get Meredith off the campus… I can’t protect him.”

“Listen, Governor,” the President shouted, “we’re not moving anybody anywhere until order is restored.… You are not discharging your responsibility, Governor.… There is no sense in talking any more until you do your duty.… There are lives in jeopardy.… I’m not in a position to do anything, to make any deals, to discuss anything until law and order is restored and the lives of the people are protected. Good-by.”

President Kennedy slammed down the phone, and ordered Federal troops into Oxford.

There was also disorders [sic] in Birmingham where on Sunday morning, Sept. 15, 1963, a dynamite explosion shook the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham’s downtown Negro section. Rescuers found the bodies of four girls beneath a pile of debris.

President Kennedy called the affair a consequence of the “public disparagement of law and order.” He appeared to mean Alabama’s Governor, George C. Wallace, a segregationist who had tried to block integration at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

The President had promised a broad civil rights program. He was forced to appeal for a softening of a bill drafted by a bipartisan group of Northern liberals in the House. But the watered-down bill was still considered the broadest civil rights program ever recommended to Congress.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY

November 20, 1925–June 6, 1968

LOS ANGELES—Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of a murdered President, died at 1:44 A.M. today of an assassin’s shots.

The New York Senator, who was 42, had been wounded more than 20 hours earlier.

Among those at his side when he died were his wife, Ethel, and his sister-in-law, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, whose husband was assassinated 4 1/2 years ago in Dallas.

The man accused of shooting Mr. Kennedy early yesterday in a pantry of the Ambassador Hotel was identified as Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, 24, who was born in Palestinian Jerusalem of Arab parentage and lived in the Los Angeles area.

Eight bullets from a .22-caliber revolver were fired into a throng of Democratic rally celebrants in the hotel. The shots came moments after Senator Kennedy had made a speech celebrating his victory in yesterday’s Democratic Presidential primary in California.

—Gladwin Hill

By Alden Whitman

In his brief but extraordinary political career, the Massachusetts-born Robert Francis Kennedy was Attorney General of the United States under two Presidents and Senator from New York. In those offices he exerted an enormous influence on the nation’s domestic and foreign affairs, first as the closest confidant of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 as the immediate heir to his New Frontier policies.

The Kennedy name, which John had made magical, devolved on Robert, enabling him to win a Senate seat from a state with which he had minimal association. The Kennedy aura also permitted him to campaign this year for the Democratic Presidential nomination and gain important victories in the primaries. Wherever he went he drew crowds by evoking, through his Boston accent, his gestures and his appearance, a remarkable likeness to his elder brother.

Mr. Kennedy called forth sharply opposed evaluations of himself. Some found him charming, brilliant and sincerely devoted to the welfare of his country. Others saw him as calculating, overly ambitious and ruthless.

Those who praised him regarded his candidacy for his party’s Presidential nomination as proof of his selflessness. They quoted his announcement on March 16, in which he said:

“I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course.”

Those who questioned his motives noted that his candidacy was posed only four days after the New Hampshire primary, in which Senator Eugene J. McCarthy had demonstrated the political vulnerability of President Johnson.

Mr. Kennedy’s partisans tended to ignore or discount his inconsistencies. Even many voters who expressed reservations about him were certain that, in public office, he would do “the right thing.” This belief was underlined, especially among Negroes and the poor, because of the earnestness with which he pleaded their cause.

Describing the reaction of one ghetto throng in California, Tom Wicker wrote in The New York Times of June 2:

“The crowds surge in alarmingly; children leap and shriek and grown men risk the wheels of Kennedy’s car just to pound his arm or grasp his hand. Moving through the sleazy back streets of Oakland, he repeatedly stopped traffic; for six blocks along East 14th Street, his car could barely creep along.”

Contrasting with such frenzied warmth was what Fortune magazine called “the implacable hostility toward him in the business community.”

Mr. Kennedy was an indefatigable campaigner, able to put in a 16-hour day of stress and tension and then sleep briefly before going through another strenuous day. And he played with as much concentration as he worked. He was a vigorous touch football participant, a hardy skier, a pacesetting mountain climber and a swimmer who would plunge into the cold Pacific surf on an Oregon beach.

Mr. Kennedy often conceded that he was aggressive, explaining semi-humorously: “I was the seventh of nine children. And when you come from that far down, you have to struggle to survive.”

Robert Kennedy was born Nov. 20, 1925, in Brookline, Mass., a suburb of Boston, the son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. His father was already amassing a fortune in the stock market and other enterprises. His mother was the daughter of John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, who served in the House of Representatives and was Mayor of Boston.

When Robert was born, his brother Joseph Jr. was 10 and John was 8. (Edward was born in 1932.) Thus Robert passed his early years as the little brother, with two older brothers and five sisters. “He was the smallest and thinnest, and we feared he might grow up puny and girlish,” his mother recalled. “We soon realized there was no fear of that.”

Although Robert as a youth was overshadowed by his older brothers, he displayed grim determination to succeed. After graduation from Harvard, he went to law school at the University of Virginia, graduating in 1951. That same year he joined the criminal division of the Department of Justice in Washington.

He resigned in 1952 to manage the campaign of his brother John for United States Senator from Massachusetts, a campaign notable for the Kennedy organization’s painstaking attention to detail and the vast amount of money spent. Mr. Kennedy’s first venture into the public limelight occurred in 1953, when he was named an assistant counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

His immediate superior was Roy M. Cohn, the group’s chief counsel. Above them both was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, whose name was soon attached to the committee. It rapidly acquired a malodorous reputation among liberals, intellectuals and civil libertarians for its chivvying of witnesses in its investigations of asserted Communist conspiracies and plots in the Government.

By February, 1954, Mr. Kennedy was counsel to the Democratic minority. The following year he succeeded Mr. Cohn as chief counsel and staff director when Senator John L. McClellan, Democrat of Arkansas, became committee chairman.

Senator McClellan then chose Mr. Kennedy as chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field when it was organized in January, 1957. Mr. Kennedy began a headline-making inquiry into the affairs of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, then under the presidency of Dave Beck. Beck was later imprisoned for filing false income tax returns.

Mr. Kennedy’s sharp questioning of Beck before the Senate Rackets Committee, as the McClellan group was known, brought the accusation that he was antilabor. This charge was compounded when he investigated James R. Hoffa, Beck’s successor, in 1958.

Hoffa, who was convicted and jailed for jury tampering and misuse of union funds, disliked Mr. Kennedy, calling him “a ruthless monster.” Later, when he was Attorney General, Mr. Kennedy continued his investigation of the 1,700,000-member teamsters union, causing Hoffa to charge that he was engaged in a vendetta. Mr. Kennedy left the rackets committee in 1959 to manage his brother’s campaign for the Presidency.

In this role, Robert Kennedy never bothered to hide his political muscle. Answering one politician’s complaint, he said:

“I’m not running a popularity contest. It doesn’t matter if they [the politicians] like me or not. Jack can be nice to them. I don’t try to antagonize people, but somebody has to be able to say no. If people are not getting off their behinds and working enough, how do you say that nicely? Every time you make a decision in this business you make somebody mad.”

In the election campaign that followed, against Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate, Mr. Kennedy proved as drivingly perfectionist as he had been during the primary.

Mr. Kennedy also advised his brother on tactics, and according to his biographer, Lawrence J. Quirk, he was responsible for John Kennedy’s intervention in the Martin Luther King case. As Mr. Quirk related it, this is what happened:

“The Rev. Martin Luther King was arrested for staging a sit-in at a department store in Atlanta, and was forthwith sentenced to four months of hard labor in a Georgia penitentiary. This event occurred a scant week before the election.

“Bobby saw to it that J.F.K. called Mrs. King to offer comfort. Then Bobby called the judge who had sentenced Dr. King. Shortly afterward, the Negro leader was freed on bail, and a member of the King family declared, ‘I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.’”

After John Kennedy defeated Mr. Nixon in 1960, he appointed his brother Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was reluctant at first, sensitive to the likely charge of nepotism.

John Kennedy, however, wanted his brother in the Cabinet as an absolutely loyal and dependable confidant. In public, when criticism of the appointment mounted, the President explained his choice almost flippantly. “I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law,” he said.

Mr. Kennedy’s term as Attorney General touched many sensitive areas of the nation’s life—civil rights, immigration, crime, labor legislation, defense of the poor, juvenile delinquency and the Federal judiciary.

In the opinion of his staff—and he recruited a brilliant group that included Byron R. White, now a Supreme Court justice, and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, now Deputy Secretary of State—Mr. Kennedy was imaginative and inspiring. His relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was reportedly more formal than cordial.

Conspicuously active in civil rights, Mr. Kennedy, among other achievements, exerted the Federal force that permitted James H. Meredith, a black student, to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962.

In foreign affairs, he was an especially close adviser to the President. He investigated the Central Intelligence Agency after the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. In the Cuban missile crisis the next year he opposed a pre-emptive air strike on Cuba and advocated the policy of restrained toughness that allowed the Soviet Union to retreat gracefully.

Mr. Kennedy was lunching at his home in McLean, Va., on Nov. 22, 1963, when he was informed of his brother’s assassination in Dallas. He was at the airport when the Presidential plane landed in Washington with the President’s body, his widow, Jacqueline, and the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The assassination plunged Mr. Kennedy into a deep grief that amounted virtually to melancholy. His face was a mask; sadness enveloped his eyes; he seemed to have shrunk physically, and he often walked alone, his hands dug into his jacket pockets. For the remainder of his life, thoughts of his dead brother were never far from the surface of his mind. When his lassitude lifted, he set out to replan his political life.

For a time in 1964 there was speculation that he might be President Johnson’s running mate that fall. Whatever hopes he had were dispelled when Mr. Johnson ruled out all Cabinet members as Vice-Presidential material. Displeased, Mr. Kennedy resigned to run for the Senate from New York and won the nomination without difficulty. His opponent was Senator Kenneth B. Keating, the incumbent Republican, whom Mr. Kennedy defeated by 800,000 votes.

In the Senate he forged a position slightly to the left of Mr. Johnson on the problems of the poor and the cities. He also sought to develop moderately “dovish” views on the war in Vietnam, but his opposition to Mr. Johnson on this issue remained cautious. He held back from contesting the Presidential nomination of 1968 until after the New Hampshire primary on March 12 showed the extent of voter disaffection with the war.

Thereafter, however, he fought keenly for the nomination, winning major primaries in Indiana, Nebraska and California. Campaigning with him was his wife, the former Miss Ethel Skakel, who is expecting their 11th child.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

October 14, 1890–March 28, 1969

WASHINGTON—Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, died peacefully at 12:25 P.M. today at Walter Reed General Hospital after a long fight against coronary heart disease. He was 78 years old.

Death came to the five-star General of the Army and hero of World War II as members of his immediate family stood at his bedside.

The former President’s doctors gave no immediate cause of death, presumably because they considered this unnecessary. His damaged heart—scarred by seven attacks and weakened by recent episodes of congestive heart failure—finally gave out.

In all corners of the earth where the name Eisenhower was associated with victory in war and a tireless crusade for peace, great men and small were moved by the passing of the man whose rise from a farm boy in Kansas to supreme Allied commander and conqueror of the Axis powers and President of the United States was a story of devotion to duty.

Trained to command, he welded together the greatest military coalition in history by the tactic of conciliation. After he became President in 1952 he ended the war in Korea, and he refused to give fighter planes to the French forces in Vietnam because he was fearful the United States might become directly involved as a result.

As President he governed effectively through the sheer force of his popularity among average Americans of both major parties, and it was the average American who was the real source of his power.

His critics at home accused him of playing too much golf and of garbling syntax at his news conferences. But the voters loved him and twice elected him President by the largest pluralities ever recorded at the time.

In his infectious grin and his highly expressive face, most Americans thought they saw in “Ike” a dim reflection of themselves.

President Nixon, who had been notified of the death of his former chief moments after the event, left the White House at 12:50 P.M. and was sped to the hospital behind a motorcycle escort. He was accompanied by Mrs. Nixon and their eldest daughter, Tricia.

General Eisenhower’s brother Milton S. of Baltimore, former president of John Hopkins University, arrived at the hospital just ahead of the Presidential party. The other surviving brother, Edgar N., lives in Tacoma, Wash.

The Eisenhower family was in a third-floor suite adjoining that of General Eisenhower. Among them were David Eisenhower, the general’s grandson, and his wife, the former Julie Nixon, daughter of the President. They had remained in an anteroom while the former President’s wife, Mamie, his son, John, and the latter’s wife, Barbara, remained at his bedside until the end.

—Felix Belair Jr.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in Denison, Tex., on Oct. 14, 1890. He was of German descent. His ancestors belonged to evangelical groups from which evolved the Mennonite sect.

The future President’s father, David Eisenhower, failed in grocery and banking ventures in Kansas. He then moved his family to Texas, where he got a job as a mechanic in Denison. In 1892, when Dwight was two years old, the family returned to Abilene.

His father could not afford to send Dwight to college. The youth, however, took an examination for the United States Military Academy and entered West Point on July 1, 1911.

At West Point, Cadet Eisenhower won his Army “A” in baseball and football. Neither his scholastic record nor deportment was of the best. A steady shower of demerits had rained down on him. He graduated with a standing of 61st in a class of 164.

He did not fight overseas in World War I but he rose steadily over the decades in the peacetime Army and was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general on Sept. 29, 1941.

On Dec. 14, 1941, seven days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Gen. George C. Marshall, then the Army’s Chief of Staff, called Eisenhower to Washington.

Although he had never commanded troops in battle, he was recognized as a specialist in operations planning and organization. He also had made a reputation as a tactician in the large-scale Louisiana maneuvers of 1941.

Soon he became Chief of Operations for the Army. In June 1942, he was designated Commanding General, European Theater of Operations.

He flew to London and began planning the invasion of French North Africa. One objective was to encourage harmony among British, French and United States officers at headquarters. Relations with the British and French had to be handled delicately.

He directed the troop landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers on Nov. 7. The following day he was named Allied Commander in Chief, North Africa.

The fighting at first went badly. United States troops were green and their commanders untried.

After the Allied defeat at Kasserine Pass, Eisenhower relieved Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredenall, ranking United States commander in the field.

The tide turned. In May, 1943, the mass surrender of German and Italian forces in Tunisia brought Eisenhower’s first military campaign to a successful end. North Africa was liberated.

He also directed the invasions of Sicily and Italy and the combined operations leading to the conquest of Sicily and reducing Italy to a state of military impotence.

In December, 1943, President Roosevelt announced Eisenhower’s selection as Supreme Allied Commander for the invasion of Western Europe.

On June 6, 1944, he directed the landings on the Normandy beaches in France. One vital decision that Eisenhower alone had to make was whether to postpone the invasion because of bad weather. It already had been postponed once.

The weather prediction looked bad for June 6. But Eisenhower had studied meteorology and decided to go ahead. The silent travail he underwent in making this decision has been described by Lieut. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, then his chief of staff. Writing after the war, General Smith related:

“The silence lasted for five full minutes while General Eisenhower sat on a sofa before a bookcase that filled the end of the room. I never realized before the loneliness and isolation of a commander at a time when a momentous decision has to be taken, with full knowledge that the failure or success rests on his judgment alone. He sat there quietly, not getting up to pace with quick strides as he often does. He was tense, weighing every consideration.… Finally he looked up and tension was gone from his face. He said briskly, ‘Well, we’ll go.’”

Weather conditions still were far from favorable. Heavy swells on the Channel beset the troops with seasickness. Yet they were able to complete the landings.

By September the Allied invasion from the west had reached German soil and was battering against the strongly fortified Siegfried Line.

Eisenhower was elevated by President Roosevelt to the temporary rank of General of the Army on Dec. 20, 1944.

About this time the Allied campaign met a serious but temporary reverse. Just before Christmas, 1944, Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt opened a surprise counteroffensive into Belgium and Luxembourg. In their last desperate drive, the German troops broke through a weak point in the United States lines and plunged deep into the Ardennes Forest. This became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

But the Nazis then were gradually beaten back and the Bulge was wiped out.

The end followed quickly. In the spring of 1945 American troops took 317,000 prisoners and broke the back of German resistance in the Ruhr.

On April 23, United States troops met the Russians in the Torgau area on the Elbe River. The Allies smashing from the west and the Russians from the east had crushed Hitler’s once mighty legions. The unconditional surrender of Germany was accepted by Eisenhower on May 7, 1945, at Allied headquarters in a schoolhouse at Rheims, France.

In Paris more than 1 million persons thronged the streets through which he rode in a triumphal procession. At Washington more than 1 million persons turned out in the streets for him. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade.

On June 7, 1948, he became president of Columbia University. While there, however, he was called back into uniform on several occasions.

Eisenhower’s final leave of absence from Columbia came in 1950. By that time the threat of aggression from the Soviet Union had become so obvious that nations of the North Atlantic area had formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to prepare defense armaments. These nations asked President Truman to let Eisenhower command its military forces. The President consented.

Military leadership of the victorious Allied forces invested Dwight David Eisenhower with an immense popularity, almost amounting to devotion, that twice elected him President of the United States. His enormous political success was largely personal, for he was not basically a politician dealing in partisan issues and party maneuvers. What he possessed was a superb talent for gaining the respect and affection of the voters as the man suited to guide the nation through cold war confrontations with Soviet power and to lead the country to prosperity.

Eisenhower’s entrance into politics was reluctant. But in 1952, he entered the fray for the Republican Presidential nomination and defeated Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the “Mr. Republican” of the party’s conservative wing.

As a Vice-Presidential candidate the convention chose Senator Richard M. Nixon of California, a man known then for his conservative views.

Eisenhower’s concepts of loyalty and integrity were tested in the general election against Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. One episode involved Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. The general was persuaded to delete from a campaign speech a defense of General of the Army George C. Marshall, his Army mentor, whom Senator McCarthy had impugned as a traitor. Political advisers had told Eisenhower that he needed McCarthy’s support to win the election.

Eisenhower defeated Stevenson soundly, polling 33,936,252 popular votes and 442 votes in the Electoral College; his opponent received 27,314,992 popular votes and 89 electoral votes.

Eisenhower began his first term as a symbol of international goodwill as well as of national high purpose. He had traveled to Korea, where a truce was soon effected. At home the government climate was benign and the press was friendly, even protective, as a seeming new era opened.

Oddly, Old Guard Republicans, long entrenched in Congress, were among the most vocal critics, because the first Republican Administration in 20 years did not make a clean break with the New and Fair Deals.

Under Eisenhower, the nation maintained its international leadership even if, at times, its course seemed uncertain and erratic. The Administration had high hopes that, with the Korean truce, psychological warfare would give the West an ascendancy in the battle of ideologies. But when Stalin died in 1953, and again when revolt flared three years later in Hungary and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain, there was no master plan ready to capitalize on developments.

To many Americans, however, events abroad seemed remote. Anxieties centered rather on the President, who suffered two major illnesses.

The first, on Sept. 24, 1955, was diagnosed as a coronary thrombosis, a clot in the artery of the heart. It sent the President to the hospital for seven weeks. The second occurred eight and a half months later and was diagnosed as ileitis, an inflammation of the lower part of the small intestine. Eisenhower underwent a successful operation the next day.

Despite his health troubles, Eisenhower decided to run for re-election in 1956. At the peak of his popularity, he conducted a restricted campaign. He made few radio and television speeches and undertook only two campaign swings.

Stevenson, again the Democratic choice, hammered away at the “break-down of leadership.” Eisenhower insisted that his Administration had brought “sense and order” to Washington.

The election results gave him 35,582,236 votes, a record up to that time, and 457 electoral votes. Stevenson’s popular vote was 26,031,322, his electoral total 73.

Difficult and fateful problems confronted Eisenhower in his second term.

There was mob violence over school integration in the South, and in September, 1957, the President was obliged to send troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce court-ordered school desegregation.

Business slumped sharply in the winter of 1957–58. In July, 1959, a steel strike dealt the economy another blow. The national debt climbed higher than ever.

The Soviet Union achieved a stunning scientific success, with strong military implications, when it orbited the first man-made earth satellite in October, 1957.

The perilous stalemate between the Soviet Union and the West over Berlin continued.

Tensions in the Far East reached a peak when the President was forced to cancel a visit to Japan because of anti-American rioting there.

The widening rift between Cuba and the United States brought a threat of Soviet intervention that led Eisenhower to declare that he would never “permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international Communism in the Western Hemisphere.”

The demands of the times would have taxed the energy of the healthiest of men, and they were especially heavy for Eisenhower. His health was further compromised in 1957, when he suffered an occlusion of a small branch of the middle cerebral artery on the left side. He was left with a mild aphasia (difficulty in speaking) and he was not pronounced recovered until March 1, 1958.

The President’s popularity began a perceptible decline soon after he took his second oath of office.

Some observers attributed the decline to his being the first President whose tenure was limited to two terms by the 22nd Amendment. Others felt that the President was delegating too many functions to subordinates.

This view appeared to be reinforced in 1958 when Sherman Adams, the stern Assistant to the President who presided over the White House offices, came under investigation for alleged intervention with Federal agencies in behalf of his friends. He resigned.

In the elections that November, the Republicans lost 47 House seats and 13 of 21 contested Senate seats. The Democrats controlled Congress by the widest margins since the Roosevelt landslide of 1936.

Few realized it until well afterward, but the elections were the nadir of Eisenhower’s political fortunes. By the spring of 1959 some observers were talking about “the new Ike,” while others insisted that it was only the re-emergence of the old Ike who had so fired the country’s imagination in 1952.

One sign of change was in the field of personal diplomacy and involved a visit to the United States by Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union in September, 1959. Informal talks resulted in what was termed “the spirit of Camp David,” a thaw in the cold war in which peaceful coexistence was to replace bellicosity.

The Camp David spirit persisted until May 1960, when a summit meeting in Paris was blasted by the disclosure that the United States was using a U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union.

Ten days before the meeting on May 5, Khrushchev announced that an American plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union. He withheld details. The State Department unequivocally denied any “deliberate attempt to violate Soviet air space.”

This denial had scarcely been made when the Russians produced Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot, and the confession that he had been on a spying mission across Russian territory.

Moscow’s revelations forced Washington to admit that it had engaged in U-2 espionage for the last four years. For this Eisenhower took full responsibility.

Khrushchev demanded that the United States end its U-2 project, ban future flights and punish those “directly guilty.” Eisenhower made only one concession, saying the espionage flights had been suspended and “are not to be resumed.”

It was clear that the last chance had gone for the President, in the final months of his term, to strengthen hopes for peace.

On Jan. 17, Eisenhower delivered a televised farewell address that contained a warning that has echoed down through the years.

Noting that a vast military establishment and a huge arms industry had developed in the United States, Eisenhower said:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

J. EDGAR HOOVER

January 1, 1895–May 2, 1972

WASHINGTON—J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years and built it into a dominant and controversial force in American law enforcement, died during the night from the effects of high blood pressure.

Mr. Hoover, who at 77 still held the F.B.I. firmly within his control, had worked a full day yesterday. He was found by his housekeeper this morning, slumped on the floor of his bedroom in his home in northwest Washington.

The strong-willed and demanding bachelor ruled the bureau from the day—May 14, 1924—when he took over a small, politics-ridden agency, through the eras of its most famous exploits. Yet toward the end, he became the target of critics who thought he rode roughshod over civil liberties and slighted the old F.B.I. role of spy-catching.

The mandatory retirement age for F.B.I. directors is 70, but President Johnson waived it, as did President Nixon, who this morning praised Mr. Hoover’s “unparalleled devotion and ability and dedication.” Major figures across the political spectrum joined in the admiration.

But Dr. Benjamin Spock, the antiwar activist, called Mr. Hoover’s death “a great relief, especially if his replacement is a man who better understands democratic institutions and the American process.”

—Fred P. Graham

By Christopher Lydon

When J. Edgar Hoover ambled through the Mayflower Hotel after one of his ritual fruit salad–and–coffee lunches late last year, he passed almost unnoticed. The once ruddy face was puffy and pale. The brushed-back, gray-brown hair was straight and thin—not the wiry dark curls of a few years ago. Behind his glasses, his dark brown eyes looked fixed, and he seemed to be daydreaming.

In one of his rare reflections on mortality a few years ago, Mr. Hoover told a reporter, “The greatest enemy is time.” Time’s advances against this seemingly indestructible official had become obvious. But then, Mr. Hoover was always more human than he or the myth admitted.

Mr. Hoover’s power was a compound of performance and politics, publicity and personality. The centralized fingerprint file and the crime laboratory are landmarks in the application of science to police work. The National Police Academy has trained the leadership elite of local forces throughout the country. Mr. Hoover’s recruitment of lawyers and accountants set a world standard of professionalism.

His bureau rounded up the gangsters in the nineteen-thirties. It made the once epidemic crime of kidnapping a rarity. It arrested German saboteurs within days after their submarines landed them on the Atlantic Coast.

Not a New Dealer at heart, he had nonetheless dazzled President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his celebrated success against kidnappers. Roosevelt’s assignment of counterespionage duties to the F.B.I. as war loomed in 1936 expanded the bureau’s size and heightened Mr. Hoover’s prestige.

But when the Republicans won the White House again in 1952, Mr. Hoover’s loyalty swung to the new team. Mr. Hoover always understood the subtle currents of power among officials in Washington better than almost anyone. The more awesome his power grew, the more plainly Mr. Hoover would state that there was nothing “political” about it, that the F.B.I was simply a “fact-finding agency” that “never makes recommendations or draws conclusions.”

Mr. Hoover’s reappointment was virtually the first decision John F. Kennedy announced on the day after his election in 1960. The Hoover-Kennedy relationship started out cordially, based apparently on Mr. Hoover’s long acquaintance with the President’s father, the late Joseph P. Kennedy. Robert Kennedy had urged the President-elect to retain Mr. Hoover; and when John Kennedy weighed assignments for his brother, Mr. Hoover urged him to follow his instinct and make Robert the Attorney General.

Later, Robert Kennedy and Mr. Hoover fought over the assignment of agents to civil rights and organized crime cases. Mr. Hoover was not used to having a boss who could block his access to the White House.

Robert Kennedy never forgave Mr. Hoover for the cold telephone call that brought the first word of his brother’s assassination. Mr. Hoover’s voice, Robert Kennedy told William Manchester, the author, was “not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”

Until Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the House majority leader, criticized Mr. Hoover in the House last spring as a “feudal baron” and a wiretapper, the F.B.I. director had been sacrosanct in Congress.

Mr. Hoover insisted that he did not tap the phones or “bug” the offices of Congressmen, and Mr. Boggs failed notably to prove the contrary. But Mr. Hoover always had other ways to keep critics in line.

The late Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, a Tennessee Democrat and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, harassed Mr. Hoover from time to time in the nineteen-thirties, and in the spring of 1936 drew the blushing testimony that the director of the F.B.I. had never made an arrest.

Less than a month later, as if by magic, Mr. Hoover led a raid in New Orleans that captured Alvin (Kreepy) Karpis, a star of the Ma Barker mob. By his own account, Mr. Hoover rushed up to the unsuspecting Karpis as he sat in a car, threatened him with a gun, then snapped out the order to “put the cuffs on him, boys.” (In his recently published memoirs, Karpis contends that Mr. Hoover “hid until I was safely covered by many guns.”)

When Senator McKellar tried to cut $225,000 out of the F.B.I. budget that year, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan denounced him as “a miser whose parsimony would cause the threat of kidnapping to hang once more over every cradle in America.” Mr. Hoover’s full budget request was then passed by a resounding voice vote. Since then, the Senate has never questioned the F.B.I. budget, which has also sailed through the House.

While Mr. Hoover’s primary genius might well have been publicity, the director never held a news conference. Instead, he relied on Walter Winchell, the Broadway gossip columnist, who traveled with an F.B.I. escort and carried an item about “G-man Hoover” almost every day.

Mr. Hoover promoted “junior G-man” clubs for boys, and sold two and a half million copies of “Masters of Deceit,” a book on Communism. His “ten most wanted” list made seedy drifters into headline material. In the age of television, he shrewdly reserved the right to select the actor (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) who would represent the F.B.I. in millions of living rooms.

Even after political potshots at the director became fashionable in recent years, a Gallup Poll for Newsweek magazine last spring showed that 80 percent of those who had any opinion about Mr. Hoover rated his performance “good” or “excellent.”

Mr. Hoover’s personality, as well as his office, always inspired fear. Francis Biddle, President Roosevelt’s Attorney General in the early nineteen-forties, sensed that behind Mr. Hoover’s “absolute self-control” was “a temper that might show great violence if he did not hold it on leash, subject to the domination of a will that is the master of his temperament.”

When the Warren commission was investigating President Kennedy’s assassination and said that the F.B.I. had not shared its intelligence fully with the Secret Service, Mr. Hoover lashed out at what he called “a classic example of Monday morning quarterbacking.”

And when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that Southern blacks could not turn to their local F.B.I. offices with any assurance of sympathy or zeal for civil rights, Mr. Hoover called Dr. King “the most notorious liar in the country.”

Later, Mr. Hoover had his staff invite newsmen to hear the taped record of F.B.I. bugs in Dr. King’s hotel rooms as evidence that “moral degenerates” were leading the civil rights movement. (Mr. Hoover’s lifelong practice was to entertain Attorneys General and Presidents with spicy details about the secret lives of famous people.)

John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington on New Year’s Day in 1895, the youngest of three children of Dickerson N. Hoover, an easygoing Federal official, and the former Annie M. Scheitlin. Mrs. Hoover instilled in her son an intense discipline and stern sensitivity to moral issues.

As a boy, he was known as “Speed,” a reference, apparently, to his agile mind, rattling speech and efficiency as a grocery delivery boy. Unable to make the high school football team, he concentrated on the military drill team, of which he became captain, and public speaking.

He was class valedictorian, and the University of Virginia offered him a liberal arts scholarship. But Mr. Hoover feared that his living expenses would be a burden on his father. He took a $30-a-month clerk’s job at the Library of Congress and enrolled at George Washington University, where he was able to win his law degree in three years. With a master’s degree in 1917, Mr. Hoover passed the bar and moved into a $1,200-a-year job at the Department of Justice.

His first assignment in “counter-radical activities” came at the end of President Wilson’s second term, the era of the “Red raids” under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Years later, Mr. Hoover said he “deplored” the hysterical dragnet arrests of thousands of innocent aliens in 1919 and 1920, but the record is clear that, as the head of the new General Intelligence Division at the Justice Department, he was responsible for planning the raids, if not their execution.

Under President Harding, the Bureau of Investigation had become “a private secret service for corrupt forces within the Government,” according to Alpheus T. Mason, the historian. When Harlan Fiske Stone became Attorney General under President Coolidge in 1924, he determined to rebuild the bureau after the image of Scotland Yard. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, an untainted holdover from the Harding Administration, recommended J. Edgar (no relation) as director.

Attorney General Stone offered him the job. With confidence and cunning that were very much in character, Mr. Hoover, then only 29, said he would accept the assignment only if appointments to the bureau were divorced from outside politics and if he would have sole control over merit promotions.

Thus the modern bureau—renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935—was born.

From the start, Mr. Hoover’s personal grip was the organizing principle. Women were not allowed to smoke on the job. No one got a coffee break. The unofficial uniform for an agent came to include a white shirt and dark suit.

Agents quaked at the thought of the director’s disapproval, expressed typically in the bright blue ink of Mr. Hoover’s stub pen in the margins of their memorandums. Once, it was said, when an assistant’s memorandum so filled the page that Mr. Hoover barely had room for a comment, he wrote. “Watch the borders,” and his puzzled but obedient aides dispatched agents to patrol the Canadian and Mexican borders for a week.

The few changes in Mr. Hoover’s daily routine were forced on him. His friend Clyde Tolson, the F.B.I.’s associate director, was not well enough to walk the last few blocks to the office in recent days, so their morning strolls along Constitution Avenue were abandoned. The old Harvey’s Restaurant was razed, so Mr. Hoover and Mr. Tolson had lunch instead at the Mayflower Hotel.

Yet there were continuities in his life: the Jack Daniel’s whiskey before dinner, the Miami vacation in December, the July break in California, the passion for horse racing. Above all, there was the friendship with Mr. Tolson, a fellow bachelor with whom Mr. Hoover had lunch and dinner six days a week.

Perhaps the most widely asked question was why Mr. Hoover stayed on. The men around him pointed to his egotism and to the lack of family and other interests. “For him the bureau is everything,” one said.

HARRY S. TRUMAN

May 8, 1884–December 26, 1972

KANSAS CITY—Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, died this morning. He was 88 years old.

Mr. Truman, an outspoken and decisive Missouri Democrat who served in the White House from 1945 to 1953, succumbed at 7:50 A.M., Central Standard Time, in Kansas City’s Research Hospital and Medical Center.

He had been a patient there for the last 22 days, struggling against lung congestion, heart irregularity, kidney blockages, failure of the digestive system and the afflictions of old age.

In the more than seven years he was President, from the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death suddenly elevated him from the Vice-Presidency until he himself was succeeded by Dwight David Eisenhower, Mr. Truman left a major mark as a world leader.

He brought mankind face to face with the age of holocaust by ordering atomic bombs dropped on Japan, sent American troops into Korea to halt Communist aggression in Asia, helped contain Communism in Europe by forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and speeded the postwar recovery of Europe through the Marshall Plan.

His domestic record was somewhat less dramatic, for his proposals and ideas were often premature. He ended up on the losing side of fights other Presidents later won—Federal health care, equal rights legislation, low-income housing.

His other legacies were perhaps less tangible but no less remembered—the morning walk, the “give ’em hell” campaign that nipped Thomas E. Dewey at the wire, the desk plaque that proclaimed “The buck stops here!” and the word to the timid and indecisive: “If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen.”

At the time of his death, Mr. Truman’s wife, Bess, 87, was at their home in Independence, having spent most of yesterday at the hospital. Mr. Truman’s only child, Mrs. Clifton Daniel of New York, also was at the home. She flew to Kansas City last night for a brief visit with her father.

The room in which the former President died is on the sixth floor of Research Hospital, a 500-bed facility he helped dedicate in 1963. The room cost $59.50 a day. In Mr. Truman’s case it was paid for by private medical insurance and Medicare.

Long an advocate of Federal health plans, Mr. Truman held Medicare Card No. 1. He had not been able to push such a plan through during his own Presidency, but Lyndon B. Johnson was more successful and came to Independence in 1965 to sign the Medicare act in the Truman Library, enrolling the former President as the first member.

It was a final political victory for Harry S. Truman.

—By B. Drummond Ayres Jr.

By Alden Whitman

At 7:09 P.M. on April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman, the Vice President of the United States, was elevated by the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Presidency of the United States. He lacked a month of being 61 years old, and he had been Vice President for only 83 days.

For Truman, a hitherto minor national figure with a pedestrian background as a Senator from Missouri, the awesome moment came without his having intimate knowledge of the nation’s tremendously intricate war and foreign policies. These he had to become acquainted with and to deal with instantly, for on him alone, a former haberdasher and politician of unspectacular scale, devolved the Executive power of one of the world’s mightiest nations.

The drama and significance of his accomplishments—ending one war, helping to rebuild a ravaged Europe, and waging war in Korea while maintaining a stable economy—were, of course, not readily predictable when Truman took office, but there was an element of theatricality in the way he was notified that the burden had fallen on him.

He had entered the office of Speaker Sam Rayburn for a chat. Writing to his mother and sister a few days later, he said: “… as soon as I came into the room Sam told me that Steve Early, the President’s confidential press secretary, wanted to talk with me. I called the White House, and Steve told me to come to the White House ‘as quickly and as quietly’ as I could.”

He arrived there at 5:25 P.M. and was taken by elevator to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s study on the second floor.

“Harry,” she said quietly, “the President is dead.”

Fighting off tears, he asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

With her characteristic empathy, Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”

The person on whom the Executive power of the United States was so abruptly thrust was, in appearance, not distinctive. He stood 5 feet 8 inches tall. He had broad, square shoulders, an erect carriage, a round, apple-cheeked face, a long, sharp nose, deep blue eyes that peered through steel-rimmed glasses, and thin gray-white hair that was neatly parted and carefully brushed.

Apart from the plain eyeglasses, the most catching feature of Truman’s face were his thin lips, which could be clamped in grimness or parted, over even teeth, in an engaging smile. He seemed a typical small-city businessman, pleasant and substantial, more at home on Main Street than on Pennsylvania Avenue.

His formal education had ended with high school, and he had been in business from time to time, but mostly he had been in politics. He was a county official from 1922 until his election to the Senate in 1934.

In creating and carrying out his policies, Truman built a reputation for decisiveness and courage, echoed by the sign on his desk: “The buck stops here.”

With the war in Europe near its end, Truman had immediately to deal with Soviet intentions to impose Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and possibly to exploit the economic breakdown in Western Europe. Simultaneously he had to seek military and political solutions in the war against Japan. Both situations involved Soviet-American relations, and both gave initial shape to decades of strife between the world’s two major powers.

In the foreground of Truman’s dealings with Josef Stalin, at Potsdam and afterward, was the atomic-bomb project. Started in the deepest secrecy in the early days of World War II, it was on the verge of producing its first explosive when Truman became President.

Truman was unaware and unprepared when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson explained the atomic project to him on April 25, 1945, 13 days after he had become President, and told him of the then presumed fantastic power of an atomic bomb. Apart from its staggering military potential, what impressed the President were its implications for American diplomacy and world peace.

At the same time, it was assumed by Truman and Stimson and virtually everyone connected with the project that the bomb would be employed as a matter of course to shorten the Japanese war.

“I did not like the weapon,” he said, “but I had no qualms, if in the long run millions of lives could be saved.”

Against his critics—and there were many in [later] years—he took the responsibility for the atomic havoc inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs, he maintained, did shorten the war and did save millions of American and Japanese battlefield casualties.

Japan surrendered Aug. 14, 1945, after the atomic-bomb toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exceeded a total of 100,000 lives and after the Russians had stormed into Manchuria.

The global war was ended and a new and different era was emerging. The Truman domestic program, given to Congress on Sept. 6, 1945, called for full employment, increased minimum wages, private and public housing programs, a national health program, aid to education, Negro job rights, higher farm prices and continuation of key wartime economic controls.

Truman’s foreign program was to combat Communist expansion and to strengthen what he called the free world.

There was outstanding success in Europe, thanks to the Truman Doctrine, inaugurated in 1947. In that year Britain, for lack of money, had to halt her subventions to Greece and Turkey, nations under heavy Communist pressure. With great dispatch, Truman convinced Congress it should extend cash help. This historic action, he said later, was “the turning point” in damming Soviet expansion in Europe, because it “put the world on notice that it would be our policy to support the cause of freedom wherever it was threatened.”

The Truman Doctrine was the logical base for the Marshall Plan, enunciated by Secretary of State Marshall in the summer of 1947. Under it, the United States invited all European nations to cooperate in their economic recovery with billions of dollars in American backing.

Truman was born at 4 P.M. May 8, 1884, in a small frame house at Lamar, Mo. He was the firstborn of John Anderson Truman and Mary Ellen Young Truman. The initial “S” was a compromise between Shippe and Solomon, both kinsman’s names.

When Harry was six, the family moved to Independence. It was there that Harry, whose mother had taught him his letters by five, went to school. He made friends, one in particular. “She had golden curls… and the most beautiful blue eyes,” he said of Bess Wallace, the childhood sweetheart who was to become his wife.

Truman entered into politics in 1922, when he was elected a judge of the Jackson County Court. He proved conscientious, vigorous and industrious, both as a campaigner and as an administrator.

In 1934, running on a pro-Roosevelt program, he won a Senate seat. The time Truman spent in the Senate he recalled as “the happiest 10 years of my life.” He spoke seldom on the floor, and then briefly, without ostentation; his voting record was New Deal.

When Roosevelt sought his fourth term, Truman had no serious thought of himself as Vice-Presidential material. But Roosevelt decided to drop Vice President Henry A. Wallace and chose Truman.

“A gone goose” was how Clare Boothe Luce described Harry S. Truman in 1948. There was a generalized voter discontent over inflation and high taxes, but he won the nomination. Republicans, emphasizing “it is time for a change,” had chosen Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York as their candidate.

Truman’s campaign, during which he repeatedly denounced “that no good, do nothing 80th Congress,” covered 31,700 miles, and it included 256 speeches—16 in one day once. More than 12 million people turned out to see him.

“I simply told the people in my own language,” he said later, “that they had better wake up to the fact that it was their fight.”

Election eve, Truman was in Missouri. He awoke twice during the night, to listen to Hans von Kaltenborn’s clipped, slightly Teutonic-voiced radio analyses of the returns. These showed Truman ahead in the popular vote, but he couldn’t possibly win, the commentator insisted. (For years afterward Truman delighted in imitating Kaltenborn’s remarks, just as he enjoyed poking fun at The Chicago Tribune, which “elected” Dewey in its early-edition headline.)

Internal security problems preoccupied legislators and the public for the remainder of Truman’s time in office, becoming acute when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, began to accuse the State Department of harboring Communists and to charge that the Administration was “soft” on party members and sympathizers.

Beset on the home front, Truman was soon fatefully involved again in the Far East, where Japan was obliged to give up her 40-year suzerainty over Korea. The peninsula was divided for occupation purposes between the United States and the Soviet Union, with American forces supervising the area south of the 38th Parallel.

On Saturday, June 24, 1950, the North Koreans invaded. Truman requested an immediate special meeting of the United Nations Security Council, seeking a declaration that the invasion was an act of aggression under the United Nations Charter.

With North Korean forces rapidly penetrating southward, the President ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur to use American air and naval forces to aid the South Koreans. Within the next few days, under nominal United Nations command, American ground troops entered the conflict.

Early in the conflict there were two developments that deeply affected the fighting and brought Truman into collision with MacArthur. The general was optimistic: the Chinese Communists would not enter Korea and the fighting would end by Thanksgiving, he predicted. But the Chinese did enter the conflict, sending thousands of “volunteers” into North Korea. The Communist forces eventually beat back the American and United Nations troops to the 38th Parallel, where a front was established that lasted until the truce of 1953.

Truman’s policy was to continue to confine the fighting to Korea, to avoid escalation. MacArthur, on the other hand, wanted to strike directly at the Chinese. In March, 1951, MacArthur wrote to Representative Joseph W. Martin Jr., the House Republican leader, criticizing the President’s policy. A month later Truman discharged MacArthur for insubordination.

In the midst of the Korean conflict there was a crude attempt to assassinate the President. On Nov. 1, 1950, when the Trumans were living in Blair House while the White House was under repair, two men got out of a taxicab, and one drew a pistol and fired at a guard. The other ran toward the front door of Blair House.

In a few minutes, Griselio Torresola, a Puerto Rican extremist, lay dead, and a guard was mortally wounded. The second would-be assassin, Oscar Collazo, was shot in the chest. He was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to die, but the President commuted the penalty in 1952 to life imprisonment.

Truman’s second term, like his first, was marked by greater harmony on foreign policy—especially economic and military aid to Europe—than on domestic affairs.

Truman strove to keep the economy stable, a determination that he dramatized by seizing the steel industry on April 8, 1952, to avert a strike and a price rise. Steel challenged the seizure and was upheld by the Supreme Court on the ground the President had exceeded his authority.

Truman’s intimates and advisers, who had watched him mature in office, praised him above all for his forthrightness. He himself, reviewing his actions, said:

“I have tried my best to give the nation everything I had in me. There are probably a million people who could have done the job better than I did, but I had the job, and I always quote an epitaph on a tombstone in a cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona: ‘Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damndest.’”

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

August 27, 1908–January 22, 1973

By Albin Krebs

SAN ANTONIO—Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States, died today of an apparent heart attack suffered at his ranch in Johnson City, Tex.

Although his vision of a Great Society dissolved in the morass of war in Vietnam, Mr. Johnson, 64, left a legacy of progress and innovation in civil rights, Social Security, education and housing.

The Texan who began his career in public life in 1937 with his election to Congress as an ardent New Dealer, a career that led him to the majority leadership of the Senate and the Vice-Presidency, was thrust into the Presidency on Nov. 22, 1963, when an assassin’s bullet took the life of President [John F.] Kennedy in Dallas.

He won election in 1964 to a full term as President with the greatest voting majority ever accorded a candidate, but was transformed by the Vietnam war into the leader of a divided nation.

Amid rising personal unpopularity, in the face of lingering war and racial strife at home, Mr. Johnson surprised the nation on March 31, 1968, with a television speech in which he announced, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Although the nation was frustrated and angry about the war in Vietnam and troubled by racial strife, most Americans had assumed that Mr. Johnson would run for re-election in 1968.

In his speech, Mr. Johnson announced that he had ordered a major reduction in the bombing of Communist North Vietnam and called for peace talks. Then he said he would not be a candidate for another term.

With those electrifying words, Mr. Johnson in effect admitted the shattering of a dream he had cherished, since Nov. 22, 1963, when an assassin’s bullet killed his predecessor and made him President, that he would restore peace to the American people.

He set forth those goals in a ringing speech before a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965.

“This is the richest and most powerful country which ever occupied this globe,” he said. “The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion.

“I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world.

“I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of tax-eaters.

“I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.

“I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races, all regions and all parties.

“I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.”

Less than two years after the day in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was shot, and less than a year after he had been chosen President in his own right, Mr. Johnson found himself trapped in a bloody and incredibly costly war that would seemingly never end.

The budgets of his Administration were mortgaged to that war, and its unpopularity drained his political strength. Moreover, the cities of America were ravaged by decay and racial dissension, and the white majority responded with anger, fear and vindictiveness. By the time he left office on Jan. 20, 1969, the name of Lyndon Johnson had become inextricably linked with war and its consequences.

Those who knew him would also remember that the essential Lyndon Johnson was a dynamo of a man who worked himself and those around him like Texas field hands. He was constantly on the telephone, ordering, threatening, wheeling and dealing.

He was often a cruel man, capable of great rages and monumental castigations of anyone who dared cross him.

By the time he had decided to leave the Presidency, the man who had been fond of saying, “Let us reason together,” had found fewer and fewer of his fellow Americans reasoning along his lines. Vast numbers of the people wanted someone else to be their President.

It had seemed unlikely that Lyndon Baines Johnson would even attain the Presidency. His career had been clouded by charges of vulgarism, by his disputed election to the Senate in 1948, by his ownership of lucrative Government-regulated television broadcasting rights, and by the tangled affairs of his protégé, Robert G. Baker. Moreover, he was a Texan, and no Southerner had occupied the White House since Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian, had left it in 1921. But the fact that he would go into politics seemed certain from the start.

Mr. Johnson’s father, his father’s father and his mother’s father all served in the Texas Legislature. It was said that on Aug. 27, 1908, Mr. Johnson’s rancher grandfather, Sam Johnson Sr., rode on horseback around Johnson City proclaiming that “a United States Senator was born this morning—my grandson.”

Lyndon Johnson was born in the three-room Johnson home at Hye, near the village of Johnson City, in the hills of southwest Texas. He was the eldest of five children of Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines. The Johnson family was extremely poor.

In February, 1927, he entered Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos and graduated in three years. His first full-time job was teaching at Sam Houston High School in Houston, where many of his students were Mexican-Americans.

While teaching in Houston, Mr. Johnson worked as a volunteer in the 1931 Congressional campaign of Richard M. Kleberg Sr., an owner of the mammoth King Ranch. When Mr. Kleberg won election to the House, the tall, gangling Mr. Johnson, then 22, went to Washington with him as his legislative assistant.

Lyndon Johnson hit Capitol Hill in those Depression days like a Texas tornado, seeking drought relief, unemployment relief, anything for the folks back home. Mr. Johnson had the help of Sam Rayburn, soon to become the powerful Speaker of the House.

In September, 1934, he met Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed Lady Bird. They were married on Nov. 17, 1934, and had two daughters, Lynda Bird, now Mrs. Charles S. Robb, and Luci Baines, now Mrs. Patrick J. Nugent. His wife and daughters survive him.

In 1935, Mr. Johnson was appointed Texas state director of the National Youth Administration. And his chance to run for office came in 1937 when the United States Representative from his district, James P. Buchanan, died.

When the ballots were counted, Lyndon Johnson had piled up twice as many votes as his nearest opponent. He had won the first of his six House terms handily.

He won re-election easily in 1938, and in 1940 he breezed through to a second full term without formal opposition.

Meanwhile, Mr. Johnson obtained more than his share of public works projects for his district. Among these was a flood-control and electricity-generating dam-and-spillway system for the Pedernales River, which runs through what is now the LBJ Ranch at Johnson City.

In 1941, after the death of Senator Morris Sheppard, he announced that he planned to run for the vacant Senate seat. Mr. Johnson lost the race by 1,311 votes to the colorful former Gov. W. Lee (Pappy) O’Daniel.

In 1942 a virtually bankrupt radio station in Austin came up for sale, and the Johnsons bought the station for $17,500. The assets of the station, KTBC, and later KTBC-TV, were by 1964 listed at $3.2 million.

By 1948, Mr. Johnson was ready for another try at the Senate. He faced a formidable opponent in former Gov. Coke Stevenson. In the runoff that became required after the Democratic primary, Mr. Johnson squeaked to victory by a margin of 87 votes of 988,295 cast.

There were accusations of ballot-box irregularities, But in the general election he defeated his Republican opponent by a 2-to-1 margin. For years, Mr. Johnson was derisively called “Landslide Lyndon” and there were persistent charges that the election had been “fixed.”

In the Senate, Mr. Johnson cultivated the veteran Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, and in 1951 Mr. Johnson was elected majority whip, a testament to his growing capacity to wield influence.

The Democrats lost majority control in the Senate in the 1952 election, which brought Dwight D. Eisenhower into the White House. Mr. Johnson became Democratic minority leader. At 44, he was the youngest man ever to hold that position.

The Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress in 1954 and Mr. Johnson became majority leader in the Senate. His achievements as majority leader became a legend in Washington. Mr. Johnson exhibited an uncanny ability to know precisely what chances a given bill had for passage.

He was proud of having piloted through the Senate, in 1957, the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, and in 1960 he helped beat back a filibuster aimed at blocking an expanded civil rights measure.

Mr. Johnson withheld the announcement of his decision to seek the Presidential nomination in 1960 until shortly before the opening of the convention in Los Angeles.

Senator John F. Kennedy was the nominee, and his selection of Mr. Johnson as his running mate came as a surprise. But Mr. Kennedy knew he could benefit from Mr. Johnson’s presence on the Democratic ticket, which ultimately triumphed over the Republican team of Richard M. Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge by the smallest vote margin in this century.

Mr. Johnson accompanied Mr. Kennedy to Texas on Nov. 21, 1963. The following day Mr. Johnson and his wife rode in a motorcade through Dallas behind an open limousine bearing John and Jacqueline Kennedy and Gov. John Connally of Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from a window of the Texas Book Depository, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

Thirteen minutes after the President was pronounced dead, Mr. Johnson was hustled into an unmarked police car and driven to Love Field, where Air Force One, the Presidential jet, was waiting. Mr. Johnson took the oath of office in the plane’s cramped executive suite. At his right stood his wife, Lady Bird, to his left the grief-stricken Jacqueline Kennedy.

At Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, when Air Force One rolled to a halt, Mr. Johnson stepped forward and read the nation a few words of reassurance from a white card, ending: “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”

Five days later the new Chief Executive stood before a joint session of Congress and said, “Let us continue.” He made it apparent that what he meant was passage of Mr. Kennedy’s entire legislative program, including civil rights laws and a tax reduction to stimulate the economy.

In his first 15 months in office Mr. Johnson best demonstrated the qualities for which he hoped to be remembered—by masterly managing the transition of power from the slain President to himself, by breaking legislative logjams of decades’ duration, and by persuading the world of the strength and continuity of American institutions.

Action on a tax-cut bill occurred only weeks after Mr. Johnson became President.

In July, 1964, Mr. Johnson signed into law the most sweeping civil rights bill since Reconstruction days. The measure, which had been submitted to Congress in June, 1963, by Mr. Kennedy, outlawed discrimination in places of public accommodation, publicly owned facilities, employment and Federally-aided programs.

To get the legislation he wanted, the President used what came to be known in Washington as “the Johnson treatment,” a combination of cajolery, flattery, concession, and arm-twisting threats.

Early in his Administration, the President declared what he called a “war on poverty.” He traveled to the distressed Appalachia area to dramatize the need for an antipoverty drive for which he asked Congress to appropriate $1 billion.

He first spoke of the Great Society, the phrase with which he sought to identify his Administration, in May of 1964.

“I ask you to march with me along the road to the future,” he said, “the road that leads to the Great Society, where no child will go unfed and no youngster will go unschooled… where every human being has dignity and every worker has a job; where education is blind to color and unemployment is unaware of race; where decency prevails and courage abounds.”

Mr. Johnson’s record in the months after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination left no doubt that he would be his party’s nominee in the 1964 election. He chose as his running mate Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.

Much campaign oratory was devoted to arguments as to whether Mr. Johnson’s Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, the conservative Senator from Arizona, might plunge the nation into atomic holocaust. The Democrats charged that a President Goldwater might escalate the United States participation in the fighting in Vietnam, while Mr. Johnson would seek peace in Southeast Asia.

On Election Day, 1964, it became quickly apparent that Mr. Johnson had received a record-breaking majority of 61 percent of the popular vote.

Mr. Johnson took the oath of office for his full term in the Presidency on Jan. 20, 1965. His 1,500-word inaugural address was one of the shortest in history.

The President believed that many of his dreams for a better America could become reality, for the voters had given him not only a landslide victory but also a Congress dominated by Democrats. That Congress soon began to enact far-reaching programs, among them Medicare for the elderly, a massive program of Federal aid to elementary and secondary schools, new safeguards for Negro voting rights, reform of the immigration laws, grants for the “model cities” development program, and increased funds for the antipoverty program. All these and tax cuts too were realized by the President, with the help of the 89th Congress.

The problems of South Vietnam had plagued both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Kennedy. They sent military advisers to help the South Vietnamese army combat the Communist rebels, the Vietcong, who were armed by Communist North Vietnam. But President Johnson committed American troops to a long and costly land war in South Vietnam.

The stage for his escalation of the war was set in August, 1964, after Communist PT boats had attacked United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Mr. Johnson obtained Congressional approval of a resolution granting him full support for “all necessary action to protect our armed forces.” In February, 1965, there were about 20,000 American servicemen in South Vietnam.

At that time, Mr. Johnson learned that the Saigon Government stood in danger of collapse and the Vietcong were on the march. He authorized what became daily air bombardment of North Vietnam. By November, 1965 there were 160,000 American troops in Vietnam.

Three years after the escalation had begun, the number of troops in Vietnam soared past a half million. By the end of January, 1969, two weeks after Mr. Johnson left office, more than 31,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam and nearly 435,000 had been wounded.

The financial cost of the war went from $103 million in 1965 to an estimated $28.8 billion for the 1969 fiscal year.

A large and vocal minority of Americans disagreed, sometimes violently, with Mr. Johnson’s pursuit of the war in Vietnam. Some came to hate him and the war passionately.

Everywhere he turned, at home and abroad, Lyndon Johnson ran headlong into the limitations set for him by the war, which sapped both money and governmental energy from addressing the decay of the cities and the revolt of the Negroes in the ghettos.

Only a week after Mr. Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, rioting engulfed the Watts Negro ghetto of Los Angeles. Newark, Detroit and other cities were in open rebellion for several days in 1967, and after the assassination in April, 1968, of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the nonviolent civil rights leader, rioting took place in dozens of cities.

Behind the riots lay the decay of the cores of the nation’s major cities and pervasive patterns of discrimination that kept poor Negroes imprisoned there. Behind the angry white response lay the deterioration of much of the quality of life in middle-class America, despite a booming economy.

As the nation sank deeper and deeper into the horror of Vietnam, the President’s popularity continued to wane. The intellectual community found him vulgar and untrustworthy. Much of the press treated him as crude and temperamental.

In his own party, opponents of the Vietnam war and critics of his domestic failures were getting growing attention. Two Democratic Senators, Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota and Robert F. Kennedy of New York (who was assassinated in June, 1968), had entered state primaries.

On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Johnson turned over the Presidency to Mr. Nixon, the Republican who defeated Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in the 1968 election.

EARL WARREN

March 19, 1891–July 9, 1974

By Anthony Lewis

WASHINGTON—Earl Warren, who as Chief Justice of the United States presided over extraordinary constitutional change, died tonight at Georgetown University Hospital. He was 83 years old.

He had entered the hospital a week ago with what was diagnosed as coronary insufficiency and congestive heart failure—his third hospitalization with heart problems this year.

Mrs. Warren, the former Nina Meyers, was with him. Other survivors are his sons James, Earl Jr. and Robert, and daughters Virginia (Mrs. John Charles Daly), Dorothy (Mrs. Harry Van Knight) and Nina (Mrs. Stuart Brien).

President Nixon said in a statement: “America has lost one of her finest public servants.”

Mr. Warren was Attorney General of California for four years, Governor for 12 and the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1948. But his long political career was entirely overshadowed by his nearly 16 years as Chief Justice, from 1953 to 1969.

The school segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, was the best-known symbol of those years. Decided on May 17, 1954, just eight months after Mr. Warren took his seat, the case held segregated schools unconstitutional, overruling the 60-year-old separate-but-equal doctrine. Later cases applied the new rule to all racial barriers imposed by law.

The Chief Justice’s role in the Brown case was hidden by the Supreme Court tradition of secrecy in deliberation. But many students of the period believe that he had a crucial role in achieving unanimity on the Court.

The Warren Court also interpreted the Constitution to provide many new rights for those suspected of accused of crime, including the landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona in 1966. The Court held that all arrested persons had a right to see a lawyer before being questioned by the police—a free lawyer if they could not pay for one—and had to be advised of that right.

Chief Justice Warren once said that he regarded the apportionment cases as more important than those dealing with either race or criminal defendants’ rights.

Precedents had barred Federal courts from even considering challenges to legislative districts that were gerrymandered or grossly unequal in population. Then, in 1962, the Court turned away from that history and said that Federal judges could consider apportionment cases.

Two years later, in a massive opinion by the Chief Justice, the Court held that every house of every state legislature had to be districted substantially on the basis of equal population. The result was the redistricting, in a short time, of almost all American state legislatures.

These cases made Earl Warren a highly controversial figure, very likely the most controversial judge of the century. Southern segregationists ran campaigns to “impeach Earl Warren.” Liberals honored him more than they did most Presidents.

From his seat on the bench Chief Justice Warren would often indicate a distaste for something that the Federal Government or a state had done to some individual. He would ask counsel, as if the latter were personally responsible, “Was that fair?”

By Alden Whitman

Presiding over the Supreme Court for 16 years, Earl Warren championed the Constitution as the vigorous protector of the individual rights and equality of all Americans.

Reflecting the dynamics of social change in the nation (and profoundly affecting them), Mr. Warren’s Court, amid much dispute, elaborated a doctrine of fairness in such areas as criminal justice, voting rights, legislative districting, employment, housing, transportation and education. In so doing, the Chief Justice contributed greatly to a reshaping of the country’s social and political institutions.

“I would like the Court to be remembered as the people’s court,” he remarked on his retirement. This was a quite different attitude from his earlier law-and-order views as a California prosecutor; but Mr. Warren had become more liberal with age and perspective. “On the Court I saw [things] in a different light,” he once explained.

The impact of the Warren Court was cumulative, and Mr. Warren’s stature grew perceptibly over 16 years. The parts that constituted the whole were embodied in a series of decisions that had the collective effect of reinforcing popular liberties. Among these were rulings that:

Outlawed school segregation.

Enunciated the one-man, one-vote doctrine.

Made most of the Bill of Rights binding on the states.

Curbed wiretapping.

Upheld the right to be secure against “unreasonable” searches and seizures.

Buttressed the right to counsel.

Underscored the right to a jury trial.

Barred racial discrimination in voting, in marriage laws, in the use of public parks, airports and bus terminals and in housing sales and rentals.

Extended the boundaries of free speech.

Many observers believed that the desegregation rulings, starting with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, were the Warren Court’s most important because they led to a readjustment of long-standing racial imbalances in the country.

Mr. Warren himself, however, regarded the redistricting cases as the most significant. The essence of Mr. Warren’s (and the Court’s) position on one man, one vote—a doctrine that transformed the political map of the nation—was set forth in Reynolds v. Sims.

At issue was whether factors other than equal representation of voters could be considered in electing state legislators. Assuming that members of one house would be elected from districts of equal populations, could members of the other house represent geographical areas of varying densities in order to assure a voice to sparsely settled localities and minority interests?

Because to do so would give some persons more influence than others, Mr. Warren replied with a firm “no.” “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres,” he wrote.

As a result of this and other rulings, states redrew their legislative districts, and many reviewed Congressional boundaries.

Ranking just below redistricting in Mr. Warren’s estimation came the school desegregation rulings that started with the Brown case. This historic decision was one of 45 in which the Warren Court overruled prior Supreme Court holdings and set in motion profound changes in the country’s racial relations.

Mr. Warren’s handling of the Brown case to achieve unanimity illustrated the qualities that made him, in the minds of many lawyers, an outstanding Chief Justice. Describing what happened, he said:

“Ordinarily, the Justices, at our Friday conferences stated their positions, offered debate and then voted. But in Brown we were all conscious of the case, so I held off a vote from conference to conference while we discussed it. If you’ll remember, Brown was argued in the fall of 1953, and I did not call for a vote until the middle of the following February, when I was certain we would be unanimous. We took one vote, and that was it.”

Speaking for the Court, Mr. Warren brushed aside the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson that had been in effect for 58 years. “We conclude,” he wrote, “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

From the Brown decision flowed a score or more of holdings by the Court and by inferior courts that collectively struck down racial inequalities in most areas of public life. As a result, parks, swimming pools, bus terminals and housing were desegregated.

Ranking third in Mr. Warren’s mind was a group of criminal cases that expanded protection for the rights of the accused. “Then we come to the Miranda case,” he said, “and the question arises: If he’s entitled to a lawyer when his lawyer is present, when is he first entitled to a lawyer?”

More than many Chief Justices, Mr. Warren removed himself from partisanship and political activity, but in one instance he felt obliged to take on, albeit reluctantly, an extra-judicial task. That was the chairmanship of the so-called Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy in November, 1963, and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had shot the President.

In taking the post, Mr. Warren yielded to the importunings of President Johnson. The 10 months of the commission’s work were “the unhappiest time of my life,” he said, adding that “to review the terrible happenings of that assassination every day [was] a traumatic experience.

Mr. Warren was born in Los Angeles on March 19, 1891, the son of Methias H. (Matt) Warren and Crystal Hernlund Warren. His mother was a native of Sweden and his father was born in Norway.

The family moved to Bakersfield, where, after a number of years Matt Warren slipped into the way of an eccentric who did not live with his family. He was bludgeoned to death in 1938, and the case was never solved.

Earl attended public schools in Bakersfield and went to the University of California, getting a Bachelor of Letters degree in 1912 and a doctorate in jurisprudence in 1914.

He practiced law for several years, served as an infantry first lieutenant in World War I, and began his public career as Deputy City Attorney for Oakland, Calif. Then he became a Deputy District Attorney for Alameda County. As the County’s District Attorney, from 1925 to 1938, he emerged as a racket-busting prosecutor.

Mr. Warren was Republican national committeeman when he ran successfully for California Attorney General in 1938. In four years in the post, he kept in the public eye with an occasional raid on gambling dens, but most of his work was administrative. Nonetheless, he appeared frequently around the state, usually with his wife, the former Mrs. Nina Palmquist Meyers, a widow, whom he had married in 1925.

In 1942 Mr. Warren ran for Governor and won by defeating the favored Democratic nominee, Governor Culbert L. Olson. He was re-elected twice. In 1948, he was selected to run for the Vice-Presidency with Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York. They lost to Harry S. Truman and Alben W. Barkley.

He was a big, fair-haired man, at 6 feet and 215 pounds, called Pinky in his youth, who loved spectator sports and outdoor life, and whose suits were always double-breasted blue serge. He could call hundreds of people by name, but he had few close friends, preferring to spend free time with his family.

In his early years, Mr. Warren was instinctively attracted to the kind of conservative thinking that made him a favorite of California’s regular Republicans.

Mr. Warren’s opportunity for a Court seat came in 1953 when Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a lackluster jurist, died, and President Eisenhower nominated the Californian. He was sworn in on Oct. 5.

In June, 1968, Mr. Warren was stunned by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He later told a friend of reading with astonishment that a few hours before the assassination, people stood two and three deep along the highway into Los Angeles from the airport. He had seen many politicians travel that route, and he knew that no such assemblage had ever greeted a candidate before. He took it as a sign that the nation was reaching out for younger leaders and new ideas.

On June 13, he wrote President Johnson and tendered his resignation “at your pleasure.” A few days later, in his first public news conference as Chief Justice, he explained that “at the age of 77, this was a good time to retire.”

It was Mr. Warren’s tendency to interpret the Constitution in terms of the result he found desirable that drew the most criticism. The result, critics said, was to transform the Supreme Court into a perpetual constitutional convention, updating the Constitution to square with the liberal majority’s concept of what the law ought to be.

Mr. Warren’s admirers answered that a half-century had passed since Charles Evans Hughes had conceded that the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and that the Supreme Court must, because it is supreme, “make” law.

At a time of great social upheaval, sensitive issues were being placed before the Court, and it was argued that the Justices’ duty was to decide those issues.

For Mr. Warren, the outcome almost always reflected idealism, fairness and equality—and the decisions made him a revered figure to many Americans and people around the world.

THURGOOD MARSHALL

July 2, 1908–January 24, 1993

By Linda Greenhouse

WASHINGTON—Thurgood Marshall, pillar of the civil rights revolution, architect of the legal strategy that ended the era of official segregation and the first black Justice of the Supreme Court, died today. He was 84 years old.

A Court’s spokeswoman said Justice Marshall died of heart failure at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland.

Thurgood Marshall was a figure of history well before he began his 24-year service on the Supreme Court on Oct. 2, 1967. During more than 20 years as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he was the principal architect of the strategy of using the courts to provide what the political system would not: a definition of equality that assured black Americans the full rights of citizenship.

His greatest legal victory came in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared an end to the “separate but equal” system of racial segregation then in effect in the public schools of 21 states.

Despite the years of turmoil that followed the unanimous decision, the Court left no doubt that it was bringing an end to the era of official segregation in public institutions. The Court continued to confront issues involving the legacy of segregation even after Justice Marshall retired.

As a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Marshall devised the legal strategy that brought the school desegregation issue before the Court, and he argued the case himself in the plain-spoken manner that was the hallmark of his courtroom style. Asked by Justice Felix Frankfurter what he meant by “equal,” Mr. Marshall replied, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.”

Mr. Marshall, who was born and reared in Baltimore, was excluded from the all-white law school at the University of Maryland. Later he brought successful lawsuits that integrated that school and other state university systems. He received his legal education at the law school of Howard University in Washington, D.C., the nation’s pre-eminent black university, where he graduated first in his class in 1933.

“To do what he did required a heroic imagination,” Paul Gewirtz, one of Justice Marshall’s former law clerks and a professor at Yale Law School, wrote in a tribute.

“He grew up in a ruthlessly discriminatory world,” Mr. Gewirtz continued, “a world in which segregation of the races was pervasive and taken for granted, where lynching was common, where the black man’s inherent inferiority was proclaimed widely and wantonly. Thurgood Marshall had the capacity to imagine a radically different world, the imaginative capacity to believe that such a world was possible, the strength to sustain that image in the mind’s eye and the heart’s longing, and the courage and ability to make that imagined world real.”

Yet Justice Marshall was not satisfied with what he had achieved, believing that the Constitution’s promise of equality remained unfulfilled.

For much of his Supreme Court career, as the Court’s majority increasingly drew back from affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination that he believed were still necessary to combat the nation’s legacy of racism, Justice Marshall used dissenting opinions to express his disappointment and anger.

In 1978, in the Bakke case, in which the Court found it unconstitutional for a state-run medical school to reserve places in the entering class for black and other minority students, Justice Marshall filed a separate opinion tracing the black experience in America.

“In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes,” he wrote, “bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. To fail to do so is to insure that America will forever remain a divided society.”

He dissented in City of Richmond v. Croson, a 1989 ruling in which the Court declared unconstitutional a municipal ordinance setting aside 30 percent of public contracting dollars for companies owned by blacks or other minorities. The Court majority called the program a form of state-sponsored racism that was as offensive as a policy officially favoring whites.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Marshall said that in reaching that conclusion “a majority of this Court signals that it regards racial discrimination as largely a phenomenon of the past, and that government bodies need no longer preoccupy themselves with rectifying racial injustice.”

He added: “I, however, do not believe this nation is anywhere close to eradicating racial discrimination or its vestiges.”

Justice Marshall’s most powerful voice was in dissent, and not only in the area of racial discrimination. Like his friend and closest ally, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., Justice Marshall believed that the death penalty was unconstitutional under all circumstances. He wrote more than 150 dissenting opinions in cases in which the Court had refused to hear death penalty appeals.

In an article published after his retirement, Kathleen M. Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor, called Justice Marshall “the great dissenter,” adding, “With his departure goes part of the conscience of the Court—a reminder of the human consequences of legal decisions.”

The phrase “first black Supreme Court Justice” scarcely encompassed the unusual range of legal experience that Justice Marshall brought to the Court.

By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson named him to succeed Justice Tom C. Clark, who had retired, Mr. Marshall had argued 32 cases before the Court and won 29 of them. He argued 18 of these cases as Solicitor General of the United States, the Federal Government’s chief advocate in the Supreme Court. President Johnson had named him to that position in 1965, two years before nominating him to the Supreme Court.

From 1961 to 1965, Thurgood Marshall was a Federal appeals court judge, named by President John F. Kennedy to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. He wrote 112 opinions on that court, none of which was overturned on appeal.

In the courtroom Justice Marshall’s face was an inscrutable mask. But those who knew him well said that behind the mask was a man with an earthy sense of humor, a spellbinding storyteller with an anecdote from his own long life for every occasion.

Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908. His mother, Norma, was a teacher. His father, William Marshall, had worked as a Pullman car waiter. A great-grandfather had been taken as a slave from the Congo to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where the slaveholder eventually freed him.

Mr. Marshall was named for his paternal grandfather, who had chosen the name “Thoroughgood” when he enlisted as a private in the Union Army during the Civil War. His grandson later explained that he adopted the spelling “Thurgood” in grade school because he “got tired of spelling all that out.”

In his high school years, he worked as a delivery boy after classes. He waited on tables to help pay the tuition at Lincoln University in Chester, Pa., where he became a star debater and graduated with honors in 1930.

His mother wanted him to become a dentist, a lucrative career for a black professional in those days, but he was determined to become a lawyer. Enrolling at Howard University Law School meant a long daily commute from Baltimore because he could not afford housing at the school. His mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to pay the entrance fees.

At Howard he met a man who would influence the course of his life, Charles Hamilton Houston, then the law school’s vice dean. Mr. Houston, a Harvard Law School graduate who later served as chief counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and became the first black lawyer to win a case before the Supreme Court, imbued his students with the goal of using the law to attack institutional racism.

After earning his law degree Mr. Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore. His courtroom victories, including his successful challenge to segregation at the University of Maryland Law School, began to be noticed, and in 1936 Mr. Houston, by then the chief counsel of the N.A.A.C.P., recruited him for a job on the organization’s legal staff in New York. Two years later, when Mr. Houston returned to Washington, Mr. Marshall succeeded to the chief counsel’s title.

Pursuing a long-range strategy to eradicate segregation, the two men concentrated first on graduate and professional schools. As successes mounted, they turned their attention to segregation in public elementary and high schools.

“Under Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.’s legal staff became the model for public interest law firms,” wrote Mark Tushnet, one of the Justice’s biographers. “His commitment to racial justice led him and his staff to develop ways of thinking about constitutional litigation that have been enormously influential far beyond the areas of segregation and discrimination.”

In its public school cases, the initial focus of the N.A.A.C.P., and later of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was to seek to equalize the resources available to the all-black schools in segregated systems. Mr. Marshall persuaded the organization’s board to abandon that approach and refuse any cases that did not challenge the fact of segregation itself.

By 1961, when President Kennedy named him to the Federal appeals court, Thurgood Marshall was the nation’s best-known black lawyer. Six years later, President Johnson said that placing Judge Marshall on the Supreme Court was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.”

Liberals still dominated the Court in the closing years of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tenure, and Justice Marshall fit in comfortably with such colleagues as Justices Brennan and William O. Douglas.

But the ideological landscape changed. By the time Justice Marshall announced his retirement, on June 27, 1991, he had served longer than all but one of the sitting Justices, Byron R. White, and was more liberal than any of them.

One of his best-known dissents was a 63-page opinion in a 1973 case, San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez. The majority in that case held that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection was not violated by the property tax system used by Texas and most other states to finance public education. Under the system, districts with generous tax bases can afford to provide better schools than less wealthy districts.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Marshall accused the majority of an “unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens.”

He argued that the right to an education should be regarded as a “fundamental” constitutional right, and that state policies that have the effect of discriminating on the basis of wealth should be subject to searching judicial scrutiny.

“In my judgment,” he wrote, “the right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record.”

Justice Marshall’s first wife, the former Vivien Burey, whom he married in 1929, died in February 1955. That December he married Cecilia Suyat, known as Cissy. They had two sons.

Justice Marshall, a few days shy of his 83rd birthday, gave health as the reason for his retirement at the end of the 1990–1991 term. At a news conference the next day he was asked, “What’s wrong with you, sir?”

“What’s wrong with me?” Justice Marshall replied. “I’m old. I’m getting old and coming apart.”

RICHARD NIXON

January 9, 1913–April 22, 1994

Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, who was the only President in more than two centuries of American history to resign from office, died last night of a stroke at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. He was 81 years old.

Mr. Nixon’s daughters, Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox, were at his bedside.

—R.W. Apple Jr.

By John Herbers

To millions of Americans, Richard Nixon was the most puzzling and fascinating politician of his time. He was a highly intelligent man whose talents, especially in international affairs, were deeply respected. Yet he was so motivated by hatreds and fears that he abused his powers and resorted to lies and cover-ups.

Almost constantly in the public eye from the time he entered politics in 1946, he propelled himself into a career that culminated a generation later when he became the first President to travel to Communist China and the first to resign from office. His career was a tumultuous roller-coaster ride of victory, crisis, defeat, revival, triumph, ruin and re-emergence as an elder statesman who traveled widely and wrote copiously. “No one,” he told an interviewer in 1990, “had ever been so high and fallen so low.”

Mr. Nixon never received the accolades he would have earned had he not resigned the Presidency in the face of certain impeachment for the cover-up of a political burglary of Democratic offices in the Watergate complex and other illegal acts of domestic espionage. Still, he never confessed to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of which he was accused in articles of impeachment, which were approved by the House Judiciary Committee and precipitated his resignation in 1974.

“When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” he told David Frost in a celebrated television interview three years after he was pardoned by his successor, Gerald R. Ford.

So strong was the stigma of the Watergate scandals that it tended to obscure Mr. Nixon’s accomplishments. In foreign affairs these included establishing relations with Communist China and initiating nuclear arms control treaties with the Soviet Union.

Yet his accomplishments were marred by his methods and motives. Carrying out the “peace with honor” agreement to end the long, divisive war in Southeast Asia took five years from the time he was elected to office on a peace pledge—years in which American society was scarred by riots against bombings and incursions into new territory.

By the end of 1968, 30,610 Americans had died in the war, and another 27,557 over the next five years.

Then came Watergate. Watergate in its broadest sense—not only the burglary of Democratic headquarters and subsequent efforts at a cover-up, but also the corruption of Federal agencies for illegal purposes—had such an impact on politics and government that it remains a promontory on the landscape of American history.

“Though he was a remote and private man, we had all been drawn into his life story,” Garry Wills, author of “Nixon Agonistes,” wrote after the resignation. “Decade by decade, crisis by crisis, we were unwilling intruders on his most intimate moments—we saw him cry, sweat, tremble, saw him angry, hurt, vindictive. The tapes even let us eavesdrop on those embarrassing conversations.”

The future President was born Jan. 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, Calif., near Los Angeles. His father, Francis Anthony Nixon, worked in the Quaker community of Whittier, where he met Hannah Milhous. They were married in 1908, and Frank bought a general store and filling station.

“It was not an easy life, but it was a good one,” Richard Nixon, the second of the couple’s five sons, recalled in his memoirs.

He daydreamed of faraway places, worked hard to win good grades, and attended a strict Quaker church. One brother died when Richard was 12, another when he was 20.

After graduating from Whittier College and Duke University Law School in Durham, N.C., he returned to California to practice law. He also acted in a little theater group, where he met Thelma Catherine Ryan, a schoolteacher called Pat, and they married two years later.

After serving in the Navy in World War II, he was asked by a committee of California Republicans if he were interested in running for Congress against the incumbent, the liberal Jerry Voorhis. Mr. Nixon won the primary, and in the general election he developed a technique he would use time and again: discredit your opponent. Mr. Nixon won the election and headed for Washington.

The Alger Hiss case made Richard Nixon a national celebrity. In 1948, Mr. Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused by Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist and an editor at Time magazine, of having given Mr. Chambers secret Government documents for delivery to the Soviet Union. Mr. Hiss denied the charges before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the matter might have been dropped had Mr. Nixon not pursued it as head of a special subcommittee. Mr. Chambers produced from a pumpkin on his Maryland farm microfilm of documents that he said had been given to him by Mr. Hiss. Mr. Hiss was convicted in 1950.

In 1950, Mr. Nixon faced off against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, a liberal Democrat, for a California Senate seat. He set out to discredit her loyalty, attacking her as “the pink lady,” insinuating that she had Communist sympathies. It was in this contest that Mr. Nixon, the winner, was first called “Tricky Dick.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero running for President as a moderate Republican, picked Richard Nixon as his running mate in 1952, but the campaign was barely under way when newspapers disclosed that wealthy California businessmen had raised a fund of $18,235 to defray Nixon’s political expenses.

Many demanded that Mr. Nixon resign from the ticket on ethical grounds, but Eisenhower gave him the opportunity to state his case on national television, and Mr. Nixon maintained that he had done nothing wrong.

His best remembered remarks were in reference to his wife and a dog named Checkers. “Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours,” he said. “I should say this—that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.”

Then he said a man in Texas had given the family a cocker spaniel. “And our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids love the dog, and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they do about it, we’re going to keep it.”

Public response was positive, and he remained on the ticket.

Mr. Nixon proved an active Vice President, visiting 56 countries. His 1958 trip to South America turned out to be one of the “Six Crises” he would recall in his book of that title, with crowds erupting in an anti-Nixon frenzy. There followed the celebrated “kitchen debate” with the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, in 1959 while Mr. Nixon was in Moscow to open an American exhibit at a fair. In the kitchen of a model home, the two leaders debated the relative merits of the capitalist and Soviet systems.

After the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won again in 1956, Mr. Nixon groomed himself for the 1960 Presidential nomination. Once nominated, he chose Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts as his running mate. The Democratic ticket was Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.

The campaign went badly from the beginning, and Eisenhower did not help. Asked to cite a major idea of Mr. Nixon’s that the Administration had adopted, he replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

Nor was Nixon at his best in the four television debates with Mr. Kennedy. He declined the use of makeup: his dark beard made him resemble the shadowy figure that cartoonists had often depicted.

The outcome was extraordinarily close. In the popular vote Mr. Kennedy led by 113,000 out of 68.8 million cast. Many Republicans believed that Democratic machines in Chicago and Texas had stolen the election for Mr. Kennedy.

At the age of 48, Mr. Nixon returned to California and entered the 1962 race for Governor against the incumbent, Pat Brown, but lost. That night he made an angry speech that included the line, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

He moved to New York and became a partner in a Wall Street law firm. On Jan. 31, 1968, he announced his candidacy for the Presidency. That November Mr. Nixon won the popular vote and got 301 electoral votes to 191 for Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and 46 for Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, on a third-party ticket.

As president, Mr. Nixon backed safety and health protection for workers, and agreed to legislation to pour billions into cleaning up the nation’s air and waters. He also reshaped the Supreme Court with four appointments: Warren E. Burger as Chief Justice, and three Associate Justices, candidates chosen for their ideology, particularly on such issues as tough law enforcement. The Court was transformed from the “liberal Warren Court” into a body that was attuned to conservative causes.

Most of Mr. Nixon’s energies, however, were spent in foreign affairs, and it was his actions in that field that led to his greatest accomplishments and, in the view of some, to his undoing. His faltering efforts to end the Vietnam War brought out what H. R. Haldeman, his chief aide, called his “dark side”—paranoia about enemies real and imagined and violent temper tantrums.

American casualties mounted while the heavy costs fed inflation at home and drained money from domestic programs. Opposition to American involvement grew, and the White House and the Presidency came under unprecedented siege. On one occasion, half a million protesters descended on Washington.

In many ways the seeds of the Nixon scandals were sown in the debate over Vietnam, because the public opposition, demonstrations and leaks of classified information about the war caused the President and his aides to become, in Mr. Nixon’s word, “paranoiac” about their detractors.

Mr. Nixon was particularly disturbed when, on June 13, 1971, The New York Times began printing the findings of a 7,000-page government study of American involvement in Southeast Asia. The Justice Department sought to stop further publication, but in a historic decision, the Supreme Court ruled that doing so would violate the First Amendment.

The President then began building a system of covert investigative and protective actions outside the normal legal channels he distrusted. His aides’ deeds ranged from burglaries and wiretaps to the compiling of a White House “enemies list” that included the names of many officials and journalists.

While Mr. Nixon and the nation were under great stress over Vietnam, he carried out diplomatic feats on a scale unmatched before or since.

Since the creation of the Communist Government in China, the United States had maintained the fiction that the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan was the legitimate Government of all China. But in February 1972, after his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, had laid the groundwork in secret negotiations, Mr. Nixon made a historic, five-day trip to Beijing that inaugurated a new era in international diplomacy.

Then in May of that year came the first of three summit meetings that Mr. Nixon held with Leonid I. Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders. The major achievement was an agreement in 1972 to limit the use of the defensive weapons known as antiballistic missiles.

Then, on June 17, 1972, five men employed by the Committee for the Re-election of the President were arrested in a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, and two others were later arrested. White House officials, including the President, dismissed the burglary as the work of overzealous campaign workers, and the defendants said no one close to Mr. Nixon had been involved.

Mr. Nixon went on to an overwhelming victory in November over Senator George McGovern, a liberal from South Dakota. The President took 60.7 percent of the popular vote, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Not long after his inauguration for a second term, an agreement was signed in Vietnam, on Jan. 27, 1973, ending the longest war in United States history.

The United States had never experienced another period like the one from March 1973 to August 1974, when the overriding concern about the Government was whether the President and his closest aides had ordered a burglary, sought to cover up their role in it, and had engaged in other illegal acts.

No President had been forced from office in the history of the Republic. And no President had ever been so exposed to public view, thanks to Mr. Nixon’s tape-recording system, which laid bare intimate conversations in the Oval Office for national scrutiny, providing the evidence of wrongdoing that caused his downfall.

Although the burglary of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex took place in June 1972, not until the following March would the scandal began to unfold. At that time, Judge John J. Sirica of Federal District Court threatened long jail terms for the defendants.

James W. McCord, who had been convicted on burglary charges, promised to tell all in return for leniency, and he implicated John W. Dean 3rd, the White House counsel. Mr. Dean told his story in televised hearings before the select committee of the Senate that was investigating the matter. He told of White House involvement in Watergate from the day of the burglary onward and of Mr. Nixon’s knowledge of a cover-up and his participation in it.

During this period Mr. Nixon dismissed Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman, prime targets in the investigation, and announced that Defense Secretary Elliot L. Richardson, a moderate Republican, would become Attorney General and have the authority to name a special Watergate prosecutor.

Then, on July 16, Alexander P. Butterfield, a former aide, disclosed that Mr. Nixon had secretly taped conversations in his Oval Office. There began a series of struggles by Congressional committees and prosecutors to obtain the tapes for evidence, with Mr. Nixon insisting that the President’s private counsels were protected to maintain the efficient operation of government.

As the dispute continued through September, a parallel crisis erupted involving Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, a former Governor of Maryland. In July 1973, Federal prosecutors accused Mr. Agnew of taking money from contractors who had solicited business with Maryland and said the practice continued when he was Vice President.

On Oct. 10, Mr. Agnew agreed to resign, and Mr. Nixon appointed Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan as Vice President.

Then on Oct. 20, 1973, came the “Saturday Night Massacre.” After Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, refused to support a Nixon plan for access to the White House tapes, the President ordered Attorney General Richardson to dismiss Mr. Cox. The Attorney General refused, and resigned. His deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, refused, and was dismissed. Finally Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, appointed Acting Attorney General, dismissed Mr. Cox.

The President relented on the subpoenaed tapes, after disclosing that two tapes were missing and a third contained an 18 1/2-minute “gap,” and he announced that a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, would be appointed.

At an editors’ convention in Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 17, 1973, Mr. Nixon said: “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

On March 1, 1974, the Federal grand jury indicted seven former Nixon aides in connection with Watergate, including Mr. Haldeman, Mr. Ehrlichman and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who had run the ’72 campaign. It was later disclosed that the grand jury named Mr. Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator.

In April, he announced that he would make public edited transcripts of White House conversations concerning Watergate. The tapes and other evidence showed in detail aspects of the “dark side” of the Nixon Presidency that had been concealed from public view. They included:

• Mr. Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up. He proposed paying hush money to the Watergate defendants to keep them from implicating the White House and ordered a halt to the F.B.I.’s investigation.

• Illegal burglaries. Mr. Nixon was so disturbed by leaks of official information that a “plumbers group” was set up in the White House to plug them.

• Invasion of privacy. White House officials had tapped the telephones of journalists and officials suspected of unauthorized disclosures.

• Corruption of Government agencies. Mr. Nixon and his aides drew the F.B.I. and the Central Intelligence Agency into the Watergate cover-up.

• “Dirty tricks.” Although sabotage of an opponent’s campaign had been common in American politics for years, operations set up by the Nixon White House and his election committee exceeded anything known in the past.

• Abuse of campaign funds. Some of the money for Mr. Nixon’s re-election was diverted to “dirty tricks” and used as “hush money” for the Watergate burglars.

In late July, with millions of Americans watching on television, the House Judiciary Committee deliberated articles of impeachment. At the end of the month the committee charged that “in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Richard Nixon had “prevented, obstructed and impeded the administration of justice.” It seemed almost certain that the full House would impeach the President, and his chances of avoiding conviction by the Senate seemed slim.

The same week, the Supreme Court ordered the President to turn over to Judge Sirica the records of 64 [tape recorded] conversations. In early August he released the tapes that came to be known as the “smoking gun”—recordings of conversations with Mr. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate burglary, showing conclusively that Mr. Nixon had ordered a halt to the F.B.I. investigation.

At 9 P.M. on Aug. 8, the President announced on television that he would resign the next day. After a tearful farewell to the staff, he and Mrs. Nixon boarded Air Force One and flew home to San Clemente.

On Sept. 8, President Ford granted Mr. Nixon an unconditional pardon for all Federal crimes he “committed or may have committed or taken part in” while in office, saying a trial would distract the nation from healing the wounds caused by the scandal.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS

July 28, 1929–May 19, 1994

By Robert D. McFadden

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of President John F. Kennedy and of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, died of cancer of the lymphatic system yesterday at her apartment in New York City. She was 64 years old.

Mrs. Onassis, who had enjoyed robust good health nearly all her life, began being treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in January.

In recent years Mrs. Onassis had lived quietly, working at Doubleday; joining efforts to preserve historic New York buildings; spending time with her children; getting away to her estates in New Jersey, at Hyannis, Mass., and on Martha’s Vineyard; and going about town with Maurice Tempelsman, a financier who had become her closest companion. She almost never granted interviews on her past, and for decades she had not spoken publicly about Mr. Kennedy, his Presidency or their marriage.

Although she was one of the world’s most famous women—an object of fascination to generations of Americans and the subject of countless articles and books about the Kennedy years, the terrible images of the President’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, and her made-for-tabloids marriage to the wealthy Mr. Onassis—she was a quintessentially private person, poised and glamorous but shy and aloof.

They were qualities that spoke of her upbringing in the wealthy Bouvier and Auchincloss families, of mansion life in East Hampton and Newport, commodious apartments in New York and Paris, Miss Porter’s finishing school and Vassar College. She was only 23, working as an inquiring photographer for a Washington newspaper, when she met John F. Kennedy, the young bachelor Congressman from Massachusetts, at a dinner party in 1952. A year later, after Mr. Kennedy had won a seat in the United States Senate and was already being discussed as a Presidential possibility, they were married at Newport, R.I.

After Mr. Kennedy won the Presidency in 1960, there were a thousand days that seemed to raise up a nation mired in the cold war. There were babies in the White House for the first time in this century, and Jackie Kennedy transforming her new home into a place of elegance and culture.

She redecorated the mansion with early 19th-century furnishings, museum-quality paintings and objets d’art, creating a sumptuous celebration of Americana that 56 million television viewers saw in 1961 as the First Lady gave a guided tour broadcast by the three television networks.

She also threw elegant parties, with guests lists including Nobel laureates and distinguished artists, musicians and intellectuals.

Americans became familiar with the whispering quality of her voice, with the head scarf and dark glasses at the taffrail of the yacht Honey Fitz on a summer evening on the Potomac, with the bouffant hair and the barefoot romp with her children on a Cape Cod beach.

Arriving in France, a stunning figure in her pillbox hat and wool coat as she rode with the President in an open car, she enthralled crowds that chanted “Vive Jacqui” on the road to Paris. When the state visit ended, an amused President Kennedy said, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

But the images of Mrs. Kennedy that burned most deeply were those in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963: her lunge across the open limousine as the assassin’s bullets struck, the Schiaparelli pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, her stunned face in the blur of the speeding motorcade, the anguish at Parkland Memorial Hospital as the doctors gave way to the priest, and finally, the black-veiled widow who walked beside her husband’s coffin and reminded 3-year-old John Jr. to salute. She was 34 years old.

A week later, it was Mrs. Kennedy who bestowed the epitaph of Camelot upon a Kennedy Presidency, which, while flawed in the minds of many, had for many Americans come to represent something magical and mythical. It happened in an interview with Theodore H. White, the Kennedy confidant who was then writing for Life magazine.

The conversation, he said in a 1978 book, “In Search of History,” swung between history and her husband’s death, and while none of J.F.K.’s political shortcomings were mentioned—stories about his liaisons with women were then known only to insiders—Mrs. Kennedy seemed determined to “rescue Jack from all these ‘bitter people’ who were going to write about him in history.”

She told him that the title song of the musical “Camelot” had become “an obsession with me” lately. She said that at night before bedtime, her husband had often played it, or asked her to play it, on a Victrola in their bedroom. Mr. White quoted her as saying:

“And the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot.… ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’”

Five years later, Mrs. Kennedy shattered her almost saintly image by announcing plans to marry Mr. Onassis. It was a field day for the tabloids, a shock to members of her family and a puzzlement to the public. The prospective bridegroom was much shorter than the bride, and more than 28 years older, a canny businessman and not even American.

The couple were married in 1968, and for a time the world saw a new, more outgoing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But within a few years there were reported fights over money and accounts that each was being seen in the company of others. While the couple was never divorced, the marriage was widely regarded as over long before Mr. Onassis died in 1975.

Jacqueline Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, in East Hampton, L.I., to John Vernou Bouvier 3rd and Janet Lee Bouvier. A sister, Caroline, known as Lee, was born four years later. From the beginning, the girls knew the trappings of considerable wealth at the family’s Long Island estate and its apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The Bouviers were divorced in 1940, and in 1942 Mrs. Bouvier married Hugh D. Auchincloss, who, like Mr. Bouvier, was a stockbroker.

From her earliest days, Jacqueline Bouvier attracted attention, as much for her intelligence as for her beauty. John H. Davis, a cousin who wrote “The Bouviers,” a family history, described her by saying that she possessed a “fiercely independent inner life which she shared with few people and would one day be partly responsible for her enormous success.”

At 15, Jacqueline picked Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., an institution that along with academic offerings emphasized good manners and the art of conversation. When she graduated, her yearbook said her ambition in life was “not to be a housewife.”

Jacqueline entered Vassar College in 1947, not long after she was named “Debutante of the Year” by Igor Cassini, who wrote for the Hearst newspapers under the byline Cholly Knickerbocker and who described her as a “regal brunette who has classic features and the daintiness of Dresden porcelain.”

In 1949, for her junior year at Vassar, she applied to a program that would let her study for a year in France. Mrs. Onassis would later recall her stay in Paris as “the high point in my life, my happiest and most carefree year.”

When the year was up she decided to transfer to George Washington University in Washington, from which she graduated in 1951. While she was finishing the work for her degree, she won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris contest, with an essay on “People I Wish I Had Known.” Her subjects were Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Sergei Diaghilev.

In Washington, she got a job as an inquiring photographer at The Washington Times-Herald, assigned to do a light feature in which people were asked about a topic of the day. Among the questions she asked were: “Do you think a wife should let her husband think he’s smarter than she is?”

In May 1952 she met Mr. Kennedy, who would soon capture the Senate seat held by Henry Cabot Lodge, and the couple were married Sept. 12, 1953, in Newport.

There were trials in her personal life. In 1955 she suffered a miscarriage, and in 1956 she had a stillborn child. But in 1957 Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born. Three years later she gave birth to John F. Kennedy Jr. A third child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, lived only 39 hours and died less than four months before President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

After Mr. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, the mystique around Mrs. Kennedy began to grow rapidly, especially after she and her husband made the state visit to France in 1961. Her elegance and fluency in French captured their hearts, and at a glittering dinner at Versailles she seemed to mesmerize President Charles de Gaulle.

Returning home, Mrs. Kennedy began to make her plans to redecorate the White House. Her social skills were also much in evidence, and her parties spectacular. The cello of Pablo Casals, string trios and quartets and whole orchestras filled the rooms with glorious sound.

“I think she cast a particular spell over the White House that has not been equaled,” said Benjamin C. Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, who was a friend of the Kennedys. “She was young. My God, she was young. She had great taste, a sense of culture, an understanding of art. She brought people like Andre Malraux to the White House who never would have gone there. As personalities, they really transformed the city.”

To some, Jacqueline Kennedy seemed to fall from grace as her year of mourning ended. She was photographed wearing a miniskirt and escorted to social gatherings by prominent bachelors like Frank Sinatra. To some Americans she was no longer just the grieving widow of their martyred President.

In 1964 she moved to an apartment on Fifth Avenue, but New York was not all she had hoped it would be. The photographer Ron Galella seemed to be everywhere, taking thousands of photographs of her. The preparation and publication of “The Death of a President,” William Manchester’s account of the assassination of President Kennedy, turned into an unexpected battle.

Mr. Manchester received permission from the Kennedy family to do an authorized work on the assassination, and Mrs. Kennedy, in a rare departure from her usual practice, agreed to be interviewed. But she subsequently tried to get a court injunction to stop the publication of the book. The case was settled in 1967.

The next year, Mr. Onassis and Mrs. Kennedy announced that they would be married. The ceremony was held on Oct. 20, 1968. She then became Mistress of Skorpios, the Aegean island that Mr. Onassis owned. But within a few years, there were reports that the couple were arguing and the marriage foundered. When Mr. Onassis died in 1975, Mrs. Onassis was in New York.

Mrs. Onassis began her career in publishing in 1975, when her friend Thomas Guinzburg, then the president of Viking Press, offered her a job as a consulting editor. In 1978 she joined Doubleday, where she was eventually promoted to senior editor and produced books on performing arts and other subjects. Books she published included Bill Moyers’s “Healing and the Mind” and Edvard Radzinsky’s “The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II.”

In the years following Mr. Onassis’s death, she built a 19-room house on 375 acres of oceanfront land on Martha’s Vineyard.

Mrs. Onassis, who is survived by her daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg; a son, John F. Kennedy Jr.; her sister, and three grandchildren, did not marry again. In the last few years, Mr. Tempelsman, a Belgian-born industrialist and diamond merchant, had been her frequent companion.

RONALD REAGAN

February 6, 1911–June 5, 2004

By Marilyn Berger

Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former film star who became America’s 40th president, the oldest to enter the White House but imbued with a youthful optimism rooted in the traditional virtues of a bygone era, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.

In 1994, he disclosed that he had Alzheimer’s disease. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he wrote. “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” He died with his wife, Nancy, and his three children by his side.

When he entered the White House, Mr. Reagan was a vigorous 69-year-old who promised a new beginning for a nation battered by Vietnam, damaged by Watergate and humiliated by the taking of hostages in Iran. In his first term, he restored much of America’s faith in itself and in the presidency.

But halfway through his second term, his administration was plunged into turmoil. Contrary to official policy, his subordinates sold arms to Iran as ransom for hostages in Lebanon and diverted profits from the sales to the rebels fighting the Marxist Sandinistas governing Nicaragua. A Congressional investigating committee concluded that the affair had been “characterized by pervasive dishonesty and secrecy.”

Until the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Reagan enjoyed tremendous popularity. He used it to push many of his major programs through Congress. And despite the Iran-contra affair, he crowned his two terms with a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union.

It was Mr. Reagan’s good fortune that during his time the Soviet Union was collapsing. His supporters have argued that his tough policies were the coup de grâce; his detractors attributed the end to 45 years of the American policy of containment.

The historian Michael R. Beschloss said the cold war ended more quickly under Mr. Reagan than it would have had President Jimmy Carter been re-elected. “With Reagan,” he said, “the Soviets could no longer con themselves into thinking they would prevail in the cold war because the American people had lost their will and strength and lost their taste for confronting Soviet aggression.”

Ronald Reagan never lost his ability to make Americans feel good about themselves. “America is back,” he told them. Gliding gracefully across the national stage with his lopsided grin, he escaped blame for political disasters for which any other president would have been excoriated. He became known as the Teflon president.

Ronald Reagan offered an America of boundless opportunity. And indeed, under his presidency came an end to the inflation of the Carter years, along with an economic boom. But huge deficits, brought on partly by tax cuts and increases in military spending, made a mockery of his campaign pledge to balance the budget.

Ronald Reagan was born at home in an apartment above a store in Tampico, a village in northwestern Illinois, on Feb. 6, 1911. His father, John Edward Reagan, was a clerk in a general store. Ronald Reagan later described him as a hearty Irish Roman Catholic who was restless, ambitious and an alcoholic. His mother, Nelle Wilson Reagan, was a gentle Scotch-Irish Protestant who passed on to her children her religious faith and her interest in amateur theater. The family was poor, but Mr. Reagan recalled many years later that he had never been troubled by any sense of need.

He and his older brother, Neil, moved with their parents from one small Illinois town to the next. They eventually settled in Dixon, where his father managed a shoe store. Ronald played football at Northside High School. He was not an especially attentive student but managed to get fairly good grades. He left Dixon to attend Eureka College, a small Christian school near Peoria. By his own account, he was concerned mainly with maintaining his eligibility for football and with acting in school productions.

With the nation mired in the Depression, he returned to Dixon in 1932. He admired President Roosevelt, who used his command of radio to steady a nation in despair, and a former teacher urged Mr. Reagan to try his hand at radio. He landed jobs broadcasting football and baseball games.

In 1937, Mr. Reagan looked up an old friend who had been in several movies. She arranged a meeting with an agent, and soon Warner Brothers offered a seven-year contract beginning at $200 a week.

In three years he landed the role of George Gipp, Notre Dame’s legendary Gipper, in “Knute Rockne—All American.” The film, with its heroic deathbed scene, provided Mr. Reagan with a line he came to use to inspire supporters: “Win one for the Gipper.”

He made 50 movies, a number of them about World War II. Poor eyesight had kept him from the front, and he spent his years in the Army making training films. He wrote later of wanting nothing more after the war than a good rest and time with his wife, the actress Jane Wyman; in fact, they had both been in Hollywood throughout the war.

His flights of imagination remained vivid when he went to the White House. In 1983 he told Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel that as part of his war duties he had been assigned to film the Nazi death camps.

He liked to tell a story about a pilot in World War II who told his crew to bail out of their crippled bomber. When the wounded tail gunner said he could not move, the pilot replied, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.” When he told the story to a meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, he added that the pilot was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. In fact, no medal was ever awarded for such an incident. The story came from a movie script.

Mr. Reagan had married Miss Wyman in 1940. They had a daughter, Maureen, and adopted a son, Michael. They divorced in 1948. In 1952, Mr. Reagan married Nancy Davis. An actress who was the daughter of a Chicago surgeon, she became his political partner and adviser. They had two children, Patricia and Ronald.

Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 to testify about Communist influence in the movie industry, Mr. Reagan refused to name names. But the historian Garry Wills said the Federal Bureau of Investigation file on Mr. Reagan disclosed that he had named people in secret.

In 1952 the Music Corporation of America offered Mr. Reagan the role of host on General Electric Theater. In 1964, having changed his party registration from Democratic to Republican, he burst onto the political stage, delivering a fiery anti-Communist, anti-government speech at a fund-raiser for Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate.

Wealthy backers formed a committee to initiate Mr. Reagan’s successful 1966 candidacy for California governor. When Mrs. Reagan did not like the governor’s mansion, the friends bought the Reagans a house in Sacramento, just as they would buy the couple a house in Los Angeles after they left the White House.

In Sacramento, Mr. Reagan found a Democratic legislature unwilling to adopt his proposals to cut the state payroll. He signed a succession of tax increases to erase the state’s deficit. In his two terms, the budget more than doubled and the number of state employees grew by 34,000.

In 1975, he left Sacramento to write a column and deliver radio commentary. In 1968 he briefly ran in the presidential primaries. Eight years later he nearly wrested the nomination from President Gerald R. Ford. And on July 16, 1980, in Detroit, the Republican National Convention nominated him for president.

A week before the election Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter faced each other in a televised debate. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Mr. Reagan asked the audience.

At the time, the nation was powerless to liberate 52 Americans held hostage by Iran since November 1979. At home, consumer prices had risen 12.4 percent in one year, and in October 1980 a million and a half more people were out of work than in January. On Nov. 4, Mr. Reagan won an overwhelming victory.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Reagan was a 9-to-5 president. He left details to subordinates and relied on 3-by-5 index cards they gave him for information he needed at meetings. Even with the cards, he sometimes got his facts wrong.

Mr. Reagan’s first term was marked by charges against more than a dozen officials in his administration of improper financial dealings. When top Justice Department officials resigned in March 1988, criticizing Attorney General Edwin Meese’s ethics, there were widespread calls for the attorney general’s resignation, which Mr. Meese tendered the following August.

On March 30, 1981, the president was leaving a Washington hotel where he had addressed a union convention. John W. Hinckley Jr., a 25-year-old college dropout, emerged from a crowd and shot him and three other people with a .22-caliber pistol. A bullet penetrated Mr. Reagan’s left lung.

“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he was reported to have told Mrs. Reagan when she arrived at the hospital. Less than a month later, he addressed Congress to urge passage of his economic program.

He made an equally quick recovery from surgery in 1985. On July 12, he entered a hospital for removal of a noncancerous polyp in his colon. But doctors found a previously unsuspected growth in his large intestine. Doctors removed a malignant polyp. Mr. Reagan returned to the White House a week later.

“Reaganomics” was the idea that a cut in taxes would stimulate economic growth, generating higher revenues and making the deficit disappear. In the 1980 Republican primaries, George Bush, who would become Mr. Reagan’s vice president, called the idea “voodoo economics.” And Mr. Reagan’s own director of the budget, David A. Stockman, suggested that the president was simply proposing a repackaging of economics to favor the rich, whose gains would ultimately trickle down.

Despite widespread criticism, Mr. Reagan sold the program to Congress, both a tax cut and a $28 billion increase in the military budget.

The administration cut back on job training, food stamps, welfare, Medicaid and other social programs. Despite the many budget cuts, the deficit kept growing. By the middle of 1982, with a recession continuing and deficit projections soaring, Mr. Reagan grudgingly agreed to a $98.6 billion increase in excise and other taxes.

After the 1981–82 recession, he presided over the longest economic expansion in history. Then, on Oct. 19, 1987, the stock market suffered the most severe single-day decline up to that point, dropping 508 points. The meltdown highlighted the administration’s failure to deal with the budget and trade deficits and the failure of supply-side economics to encourage investment and productivity. The president and Congress agreed to a deficit-reduction package.

Some economists credit Mr. Reagan with helping to bring about beneficial changes in tax policy. Others point to the huge budget deficits. Prof. James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale University, went so far as to say that the Reagan legacy was “a crippled federal government.”

On Nov. 8, 1984, Mr. Reagan, declaring it was “morning in America,” scored one of the biggest victories in American political history, winning 525 electoral votes to 13 for his Democratic opponent, Walter F. Mondale.

Mr. Reagan, who said over and over that “government is not the solution; government is the problem,” had pledged to put an end to the “adversary relationship” between government and business. Banking regulations were loosened, contributing later to the savings and loan scandals. The Justice Department reined in its antitrust division, and its civil rights division led a campaign against court-ordered measures to correct discrimination.

The battle against terrorism was a cornerstone of the Reagan foreign policy. On Aug. 19, 1981, American planes shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra in a dispute with the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. In April 1986, Mr. Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli to punish Colonel Qaddafi for his supposed role in a terrorist attack on a discothèque in West Germany that killed an American soldier.

The “Reagan Doctrine” was the name given to the policy of supporting forces fighting Soviet-backed governments in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola. The administration supported the contras fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. In El Salvador, the Reagan administration supported the government against a Marxist insurgency. In October 1983, Mr. Reagan sent American forces to Grenada to rescue American students and to evict a government that he called “leftist thugs.”

In 1987, he ordered American warships to the Persian Gulf to protect Kuwaiti tankers under attack by Iran. Thirty-seven American sailors were killed by a missile fired from an Iraqi plane at an American frigate. A year later, a Navy warship shot down an Iranian airliner after mistaking it for an attacking fighter jet, killing all 290 people on board.

In 1984, Mr. Reagan delivered a memorable speech at Normandy to mark the 40th anniversary of D-Day. But a year later, it became known that Nazi storm troopers were buried at a cemetery he was scheduled to visit in West Germany. He rejected advice to cancel the stop and created an uproar when he said the German soldiers buried there were victims of Nazism, “just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

By late 1986, the president had become obsessed by the hostages held in Lebanon by allies of Iran. Two national security advisers, Robert C. McFarlane and Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, and a National Security Council staff assistant, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the Marines, were emboldened by his concern.

Publicly, Mr. Reagan had condemned Iran as an outlaw state. Yet his own security council staff concocted a secret plan to supply weapons to Iran as ransom for the American hostages. Profits from the sales were earmarked for the contras.

When the secret operation was first reported, Mr. Reagan declared that “we did not, repeat, did not trade arms or anything else for hostages.” Later, he backtracked, telling the nation: “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

The facts and evidence outlined by a commission led by former Senator John G. Tower, and later in the majority report of a Congressional committee, showed that Mr. Reagan had approved shipments of weapons to Iran months before his first public denial. The findings of the Tower commission left open the question of whether Mr. Reagan had the vigor to recover from prostate surgery and the ability to reverse his lifelong habit of detachment.

On March 4, 1987, Mr. Reagan appeared on television. He outlined actions to correct flaws in White House operations and said he accepted “full responsibility” for the Iran-contra affair. Yet even after Mr. Poindexter and Mr. North were indicted, Mr. Reagan described Mr. North as a hero and said he believed his former aides were not guilty. (Mr. North and Mr. Poindexter were convicted of various felonies, but the verdicts were overturned on appeal.)

Mr. Reagan had promised in his 1980 campaign that his top strategic priority would be to close “the window of vulnerability” through which he believed the Soviet Union could launch a nuclear first strike. On March 23, 1983, he announced plans for a system of space-based defenses that would make nuclear weapons obsolete. Former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said the program, which came to be called “Star Wars,” was nothing but “a collection of technical experiments and distant hopes,” even though the president treated it “as if it were already a reality.”

Nevertheless, minutes of Politburo meetings show that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was, in the words of a Russian scholar, “obsessed” by the proposal, which he feared would escalate the arms race.

Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. Mr. Reagan proposed the elimination of all ballistic missiles by 1996. Mr. Gorbachev proposed the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons, a proposal that, to the consternation of his aides, Mr. Reagan accepted.

In February 1987, Mr. Gorbachev announced the Soviet Union’s willingness to sign an agreement to eliminate Soviet and American medium-range missiles in Europe within five years. The intermediate-range nuclear force treaty was signed the next December.

Politicians and historians differ widely in assessing Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “Most of the time he was an actor reading lines,” said the former House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., Democrat of Massachusetts. “I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became president.”

Kenneth Lynn, professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, said Mr. Reagan “fulfilled a restorative function we desperately needed.” But others contend that Mr. Reagan will not rank among great presidents. “He was too late, too little and too lame when it came to human rights abuses at home and abroad,” said Thomas Cronin, the McHugh Professor of American Institutions at Colorado College.

When Mr. Reagan was asked in a television interview how he thought history would remember him, he said he had tried to help Americans “get back that pride, and that patriotism, that confidence, that they had in our system. And I think they have.”

ANTONIN SCALIA

March 11, 1936–February 13, 2016

By Adam Liptak

Justice Antonin Scalia, whose transformative legal theories, vivid writing and outsize personality made him a leader of a conservative intellectual renaissance in his three decades on the Supreme Court, was found dead Saturday at a resort in West Texas. He was 79.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals Service, which sent personnel to the scene, said there was no information to indicate the death was the result of anything other than natural causes.

Justice Scalia began his service on the Court as an outsider known for caustic dissents that alienated even potential allies. But his theories, initially viewed as idiosyncratic, gradually took hold, and not only on the right and not only in the courts.

He was, Judge Richard A. Posner wrote in The New Republic in 2011, “the most influential justice of the last quarter century.”

Justice Scalia was a champion of originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that seeks to apply the understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution. In his hands, originalism generally led to outcomes that pleased political conservatives, but not always: His approach was helpful to criminal defendants in cases involving sentencing and the cross-examination of witnesses.

Justice Scalia also disdained the use of legislative history—statements from members of Congress about the meaning and purposes of laws—in the judicial interpretation of statutes. He railed against vague laws that did not give potential defendants fair warning of what conduct was criminal, and he was sharply critical of Supreme Court opinions that did not provide lower courts and litigants with clear guidance.

All of these views took shape in dissents. Over time, they came to influence and in many cases dominate the debate at the Supreme Court, in lower courts, among lawyers and in the legal academy.

By the time he wrote his most important majority opinion—finding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms—even the dissenters were engaged in trying to determine the original meaning of the Constitution, the approach he had championed.

That 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, also illustrated a second point: Justice Scalia in his later years was willing to bend a little to attract votes from his colleagues. In Heller, the price of commanding a majority appeared to be including a passage limiting the practical impact of the decision.

With the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, Justice Scalia became the longest-serving member of the current Court. By then, he was routinely writing for the majority in the major cases, including ones on the First Amendment, class actions and arbitration.

He was an exceptional stylist who labored over his opinions and took pleasure in finding precisely the right word or phrase. The author of a majority opinion could be confident that a Justice Scalia dissent would not overlook any shortcomings. His opinions were read by lawyers and civilians for pleasure and instruction.

At oral argument, Justice Scalia took professorial delight in sparring with the advocates before him. He seemed to play to the crowd in the courtroom.

His sometimes withering questioning helped transform what had been a sleepy bench when he arrived into one that Justice Roberts has said has become too active, with the justices interrupting the lawyers and each other.

Some of his recent comments from the bench were raw and provocative. In an affirmative action case in December, he said that some minority students may be better off at “a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.”

Justice Scalia was a man of varied tastes, with a fondness for poker, opera and hunting. His friends called him Nino.

He seldom agreed with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the important questions that reached the court, but the two for years celebrated New Year’s Eve together. Not long after Justice Elena Kagan, another liberal, joined the court, Justice Scalia took her skeet shooting.

Antonin Gregory Scalia was born on March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New Jersey, to Salvatore Scalia and the former Catherine Panaro. He was their only child and was showered with attention from his parents and their siblings, none of whom had children of their own.

Justice Scalia and his wife, the former Maureen McCarthy, had nine children.

“We were both devout Catholics,” Justice Scalia told Joan Biskupic for her 2009 biography, “American Original.” “And being a devout Catholic means you have children when God gives them to you, and you raise them.”

Young Antonin was an exceptional student, graduating as valedictorian from Xavier High School in Manhattan, first in his class at Georgetown and magna cum laude at Harvard Law School.

He practiced law for six years in Cleveland before accepting a position teaching law at the University of Virginia in 1967. Four years later, he entered government service, first as general counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy and then as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an executive branch agency that advises federal regulators.

In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, an elite unit of the Justice Department that advises the executive branch. He was confirmed by the Senate not long after Nixon resigned. In 1977, he returned to the legal academy, joining the law faculty at the University of Chicago.

Mr. Scalia turned down a seat on the federal appeals court in Chicago in the hope of being nominated instead to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose docket, location and prestige appealed to him. The first opening on the D.C. Circuit in the Reagan years went to another prominent conservative law professor, Robert H. Bork. But the second one, in 1982, went to Mr. Scalia.

In 1986, after Chief Justice Warren Burger announced his intention to retire, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Scalia to the Supreme Court. Though his conservative views were well known, he was confirmed by the Senate by a 98–0 vote. He may have benefited from the fact that the liberal opposition was focused on the nomination of Justice William H. Rehnquist, who was already on the Court, to succeed Burger as chief justice.

Justice Scalia’s commitment to the doctrine of originalism made him uncomfortable with some of the Supreme Court’s most important precedents. He appeared to have reservations about Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregation in public schools as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

Brown, decided in 1954, is widely considered the towering achievement of the Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. But for originalists, the Brown decision is problematic. The weight of the historical evidence is that the people who drafted, proposed and ratified the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 did not believe themselves to be doing away with segregated schools.

In remarks at the University of Arizona in 2009, Justice Scalia suggested that Brown reached the right result as a matter of policy but was not required by the Constitution. He added that the decision did not refute his theory.

“Don’t make up your mind on this significant question between originalism and playing it by ear on the basis of whether, now and then, the latter approach might give you a result you like,” Justice Scalia said.

Justice Scalia took pains to say that he would not follow his theory wherever it would take him. “I am a textualist,” he said. “I am an originalist. I am not a nut.”

In a C-Span interview in 2009, Justice Scalia reflected on his role and legacy, sketching out a modest conception of the role of a Supreme Court justice.

“We don’t sit here to make the law, to decide who ought to win,” he said. “We decide who wins under the law that the people have adopted. And very often, if you’re a good judge, you don’t really like the result you’re reaching.”