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      G. Gordon Liddy, Mastermind Behind Watergate Burglary, Dies at 90

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      Unlike other defendants in the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, Mr. Liddy refused to testify and drew the longest prison term.G. Gordon Liddy, a cloak-and-dagger lawyer who masterminded dirty tricks for the White House and concocted the bungled burglary that led to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974, died on Tuesday in Mount Vernon, Va. He was 90. His death, at the home of his daughter Alexandra Liddy Bourne, was confirmed by his son Thomas P. Liddy, who said that his father had Parkinson’s disease and had been in declining health.Decades after Watergate entered the lexicon, Mr. Liddy was still an enigma in the cast of characters who fell from grace with the 37th president — to some a patriot who went silently to prison refusing to betray his comrades, to others a zealot who cashed in on bogus celebrity to become an author and syndicated talk show host.As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, Mr. Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were far-fetched — bizarre kidnappings, acts of sabotage, traps using prostitutes, even an assassination — and were never carried out.But Mr. Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James W. McCord Jr., a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mr. McCord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.In the context of 1972, with Mr. Nixon’s triumphal visit to China and a steam-rolling presidential campaign that soon crushed the Democrat, Senator George S. McGovern, the Watergate case looked inconsequential at first. Mr. Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed it as a “third-rate burglary.”But it deepened a White House cover-up that had begun in 1971, when Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, looking for damaging information on him. Over the next two years, the cover-up unraveled under pressure of investigations, trials, hearings and headlines into the worst political scandal — and the first resignation by a sitting president — in the nation’s history.G. Gordon Liddy after his release from prison in Danbury, Conn., on Sept. 7, 1977.Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesUnlike the other Watergate defendants, Mr. Liddy refused to testify about his activities for the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President, and drew the longest term among those who went to prison. He was sentenced by Judge John J. Sirica to 6 to 20 years, but served only 52 months. President Jimmy Carter commuted his term in 1977.“I have lived as I believed I ought to have lived,” Mr. Liddy, a small dapper man with a baldish pate and a brushy mustache, told reporters after his release. He said he had no regrets and would do it again. “When the prince approaches his lieutenant, the proper response of the lieutenant to the prince is, ‘Fiat voluntas tua,’” he said, using the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer for “Thy will be done.”Disbarred from law practice and in debt for $300,000, mostly for legal fees, Mr. Liddy began a new career as a writer. His first book, “Out of Control,” (1979) was a spy thriller. He later wrote another novel, “The Monkey Handlers” (1990), and a nonfiction book, “When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country” (2002). He also co-wrote a guide to fighting terrorism, “Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style” (2006), and produced many articles on politics, taxes, health and other matters.In 1980, he broke his silence on Watergate with his autobiography, “Will.” The reviews were mixed, but it became a best seller. After years of revelations by other Watergate conspirators, there was little new in it about the scandal, but critics said his account of prison life was graphic. A television movie based on the book was aired in 1982 by NBC.Mr. Liddy found himself in demand on the college-lecture circuit. In 1982 he teamed with Timothy Leary, the 1960s LSD guru, for campus debates that were edited into a documentary film, “Return Engagement.” The title referred to an encounter in 1966, when Mr. Liddy, as a prosecutor in Dutchess County, N.Y., joined a raid on a drug cult in which Mr. Leary was arrested.In the 1980s, Mr. Liddy dabbled in acting, appearing on “Miami Vice” and in other television and film roles. But he was better known later as a syndicated talk-radio host with a right-wing agenda. “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” begun in 1992, was carried on hundreds of stations by Viacom and later Radio America, with satellite hookups and internet streaming. It ran until his retirement in 2012. He lived in Fort Washington, Md.Mr. Liddy, who promoted nutritional supplements and exercised, was still trim in his 70s. He made parachute jumps, took motorcycle trips, collected guns, played a piano and sang lieder. His website showed him craggy-faced with head held high, an American flag and the Capitol dome in the background.George Gordon Battle Liddy was born on Nov. 30, 1930, in Brooklyn to Sylvester J. and Maria (Abbaticchio) Liddy. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., a fearful boy with respiratory problems who learned to steel himself with tests of will power. He lifted weights, ran and, as he recalled, held his hand over a flame as an act of self-discipline. He said he once ate a rat to overcome a repulsion, and decapitated chickens for a neighbor until he could kill like a soldier, “efficiently and without emotion or thought.”Like his father, a lawyer, Gordon attended all-male St. Benedict’s Prep School in Newark and Fordham University in the Bronx. After graduating from Fordham in 1952, he took an Army commission with hopes of fighting in Korea, but was assigned to an antiaircraft radar unit in Brooklyn. In 1954, he returned to Fordham and earned a law degree three years later.In 1957, he married Frances Ann Purcell. The couple had five children. Along with his son Thomas and daughter Alexandra, he is survived by another daughter, Grace Liddy; two other sons, James Liddy and Raymond J. Liddy; a sister, Margaret McDermott; 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Mr. Liddy’s wife died in 2010.From 1957 to 1962, Mr. Liddy was an F.B.I. field agent in Indianapolis, Gary, Ind., and Denver, and a supervisor of crime records in Washington. He then worked in patent law for his father’s firm in New York for four years. He joined the Dutchess County district attorney’s office as an assistant prosecutor in 1966.In 1968, he began a dizzying, three-year rise from obscurity in Poughkeepsie to the White House. Challenging Hamilton Fish Jr. in a primary for the Republican nomination for Congress in what was then New York’s 28th District, he fell short, but his consolation prize was to take charge of the Nixon campaign in the mid-Hudson Valley, which the president won handily.His reward was a job at the Treasury Department in Washington as a special assistant for narcotics and gun control. He helped develop the sky marshal program to counteract hijackers. Impressed, Egil Krogh, a deputy assistant to the president, recommended him in 1971 to John N. Mitchell, the attorney general, who recommended him to John D. Ehrlichman, the president’s domestic policy adviser.Mr. Nixon, furious over the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, had directed Mr. Ehrlichman to set up the “plumbers” to plug leaks and punish opponents. Among other operations, Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, who were in charge of the unit, broke into the Beverly Hills office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, for material to discredit the military analyst. They found none.When the group was disbanded in 1971, Mr. Liddy went to work for the Nixon campaign. His title was general counsel, but his role was to plot more dirty tricks under a code name, “Gemstone.” They included kidnapping radicals who might disrupt the Republican convention, sabotaging the air-conditioning at the Democratic convention in Miami, hiring prostitutes to entrap Democrats with hidden cameras, and killing the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, whom Mr. Liddy viewed as a national security risk.But only the Watergate burglaries were carried out. It was a piece of tape over the lock on a garage-level door that tripped up the burglars. A security guard called the police, and a crackling walkie-talkie in Mr. Liddy’s hotel room told the tale:“It looks like … guns!” one burglar whispered. “They’ve got guns. It’s trouble.”The team’s lookout in an apartment across the street, broke in: “Now I can see our people. They’ve got their hands up. Must be the cops. More cops now. Uniforms … ”“They got us!”It was all over. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt went home. It was 3 a.m. when Mr. Liddy got in, and his wife awoke. “Anything wrong?” she asked.“There was trouble,” he said. “Some people got caught. I’ll probably be going to jail.”Neil Vigdor contributed reporting, and Jack Begg contributed research. More

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      Bill Brock, G.O.P. National Chairman After Watergate, Dies at 90

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      A former senator, he sought to broaden his demoralized party’s base by appealing to women and Black voters and was later labor secretary under Reagan.Bill Brock, the former Tennessee senator who as party chairman revived and broadened the Republican Party machinery after Watergate to pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, died on Thursday at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 90.The cause was pneumonia, said Tom Griscom, a spokesman for the family.Mr. Brock voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a representative from Tennessee — a vote he later regretted — but as party leader he became an insistent voice for greater Republican efforts to win over Black voters.As chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1977 through 1981, he clashed with Reagan over the Panama Canal treaties and the site of the 1980 national convention. (Mr. Brock argued for Detroit, a Black majority city; Reagan preferred Dallas.) But after winning the nomination, Reagan kept him on as party chairman and later chose him to be the United States trade representative and then secretary of labor.Mr. Brock won the chairmanship of his party at a time when it was demoralized in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard M. Nixon, commanding the allegiance of only 20 percent of Americans, according to New York Times/CBS News polls.Republicans had lost the White House in 1976 and had suffered serious losses in congressional elections that year, as they had in 1974. Mr. Brock himself was among the 1976 casualties, losing his Senate re-election bid to James Sasser, a Democrat.Though he had backed President Gerald R. Ford over Reagan in the 1976 nomination race, Mr. Brock was seen as a compromise candidate between the preferred choices of Ford and Reagan: James A. Baker III, Ford’s 1976 campaign manager, and Richard Richards, the Utah Republican chairman and a Reagan backer.Mr. Brock with Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles during the 1980 presidential campaign. The two clashed at times, but Reagan kept Mr. Brock on as R.N.C. leader in the name of party unity.Associated PressEven before becoming chairman, Mr. Brock said in 1975 that the party had suffered because Republicans were perceived as “old, middle class, upper income.” When he was elected to lead the national committee in 1977, he said: “The party cannot just open its doors. It has to go out and bring people in, and in doing so give them a real voice in our leadership and in the development of our objectives. That means stirring the waters.”He worked to develop a “farm team” of candidates for local and legislative offices and the party operatives to help them win. More visibly, he strove to appeal to blue-collar workers, young people, women and Black Americans. He barnstormed the country in favor of Representative Jack Kemp’s plan for heavy tax cuts in 1978, and two years later put R.N.C. money into television advertisements with the tag line “Vote Republican for a Change.”His effort to expand the party’s appeal, particularly to Black voters, led him to campaign for Detroit to be the site of the 1980 national convention. Reagan’s backers on the national committee had wanted Dallas, but Mr. Brock prevailed narrowly.Mr. Brock had angered Reagan in 1977 by refusing to use party money in a campaign against the treaties, signed by President Jimmy Carter, that turned the Panama Canal over to Panama. Some Reagan allies wanted to punish Mr. Brock for his resistance by blocking his re-election as party chairman in 1980, but Reagan heeded advice to keep Mr. Brock on in the name of party unity.As trade representative, Mr. Brock worked out voluntary quotas on Japanese automobile sales in the United States in 1981, and focused trade energies away from manufacturing and toward services, investments and intellectual property. He began a practice of working on bilateral free trade agreements (a pact with Israel was the only one he completed), and laid the groundwork for the Uruguay Round of trade talks and the World Trade Organization that emerged from it in 1995.Mr. Brock shifted to the Labor Department in 1985. He made friends with labor (and enemies among some Reagan disciples) by supporting affirmative action programs and enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act. More broadly, he sought to redirect the department’s efforts toward job training and productivity.He left the Labor Department in 1987 to run Bob Dole’s unsuccessful bid for the 1988 presidential nomination.A native of Chattanooga, Tenn., who later moved to Annapolis, Md., Mr. Brock made his last venture in elective politics to run for the Senate from Maryland. In 1994, a generally great year for Republicans, he was soundly beaten by Paul Sarbanes, the incumbent Democrat.His other major interest after leaving government was working on two national commissions to reform American education with the goal of producing a work force ready for the 21st century. He also started a trade consulting firm in Washington.During the 2016 primary season Mr. Brock opposed Donald J. Trump’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination and spoke publicly and ruefully about a loss of civility in American politics.William Emerson Brock III was born on Nov. 23, 1930, to William E. Jr. and Myra (Kruesi) Brock. He grew up in a Democratic family and attended schools in Chattanooga and nearby Lookout Mountain.He graduated from Washington & Lee University in Virginia and served in the Navy, then went into the family business in Tennessee, becoming a vice president of the Brock Candy Company. It had been founded by his grandfather William E. Brock, who served as a Democratic senator from Tennessee from 1929 to 1931, appointed to fill a vacancy.Mr. Brock in his office in Annapolis, Md., in 2000. His last venture in elective politics was to run unsuccessfully for the Senate from Maryland in 1994.Justin Lane for The New York TimesMr. Brock married Laura Handly, who was known as Muffet, in 1957. She died of cancer at 49 in 1985, when Mr. Brock was labor secretary. He later married Sandra Schubert Mitchell.He is survived by his wife; three sons from his first marriage, William E. IV, John and Oscar (who has been active in Republican politics in Tennessee); a daughter, Laura Hutchey Brock Doley, also from his first marriage; two stepchildren, Julie Janka and Stephen Cram; two brothers, Pat and Frank; 17 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Brock won a House seat in 1962 and served four terms before challenging Albert Gore Sr. in his bid for a fourth Senate term in 1970. Mr. Gore’s opposition to the Vietnam War had made him a prime target of the Nixon White House, which funneled money and advisers to Mr. Brock.The Brock campaign ran advertisements attacking the incumbent, a Democrat, over busing and prayer in schools, and painted him as out of touch with ordinary Tennesseans, proclaiming in billboards, “Bill Brock Believes in the Things We Believe In.” That message, rather than anything Mr. Brock said himself, led the journalist David Halberstam to write in Harper’s Magazine that the slogan was a coded message to white racists, concluding that Brock had run a “shabby racist campaign.”In an interview for this obituary in 2009, Mr. Brock said that the racism charge had infuriated him. The billboard message, he said, had been intended only to paint Mr. Gore as out of touch with his state.But the accusation, he said, did cause him to engage in “some fairly serious soul-searching” about how some white Tennesseeans might have heard the message approvingly as a racist appeal. His concerns intensified when he became a national party leader. He said his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act — calling his own vote “stupid” in retrospect — had made the party seem “exclusionary.”“I felt, and still do, that any party that does not pay attention to every constituency group in the United States does not deserve support from any of those groups,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you have to get them. But it does mean you have to try. It does mean you have to listen. It does mean you have to understand their concerns, or else you’re in the wrong business. The longer I stay around, the more strongly I feel about that.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Joseph D. Duffey, 88, Dies; Apostle of Liberalism and Humanities

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJoseph D. Duffey, 88, Dies; Apostle of Liberalism and HumanitiesHis 1970 Senate race in Connecticut energized antiwar progressives. He later served two presidents and headed universities in Massachusetts and Washington.Joseph D. Duffey in 1969, when he was chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. He ran for the Senate the next year. Credit…Denver Post, via Getty ImagesMarch 3, 2021, 4:51 p.m. ETJoseph D. Duffey, a coal miner’s son and ordained minister whose antiwar campaign for the United States Senate from Connecticut in 1970 galvanized a generation of campus liberals, and who later served as a cultural arbiter in the Carter and Clinton administrations and presided over two major universities, died on Feb. 25 at his home in Washington. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his son, Michael.A self-described “hillbilly and a Baptist” from West Virginia, Dr. Duffey had organized Freedom Rides for civil rights in the South and protests against the Vietnam War before seeking the Senate seat from Connecticut. He lost, but his insurgent candidacy jolted the Democratic Party organization and catapulted him into appointive jobs, thanks to two other “hillbilly Baptists” who happened to become presidents of the United States.Jimmy Carter named him assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs in early 1977, and later that year Dr. Duffey was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post he held until 1982, into the Reagan years.In 1993, Mr. Clinton recruited him to be director of the United States Information Agency, which promotes American policy abroad. He was its last director as an independent agency; it was absorbed into the State Department in 1999.Dr. Duffey was chancellor of the University of Massachusetts from 1982 to 1991 and chancellor of American University in Washington from 1991 to 1993.He entered the political fray after succeeding John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, as chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. In 1970 he was going up against John M. Bailey’s Connecticut Democratic machine.Mr. Bailey supported Alphonsus J. Donahue, a wealthy Stamford businessman, to fill the seat that had been held since 1958 by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, a fellow Democrat who had been censured in the Senate for diverting campaign funds for personal use and repudiated by party leaders when he sought re-election to a third term. (His son Christopher Dodd was later elected to the Senate from the state.)Attracting an array of boldface-name supporters, including the actor Paul Newman, who had a home in Westport, Conn., Dr. Duffey upset Mr. Donahue and a state legislator to win the nomination.Dr. Duffey, with the actor Paul Newman, spoke to Connecticut delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Mr. Duffey was spearheading his state’s campaign for Eugene McCarthy, the liberal, antiwar senator who was seeking the party’s presidential nomination.Credit…Associated PressMounted two years after the failed progressive presidential candidacy of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy in 1968, Dr. Duffey’s campaign energized campus progressives, including a young Bill Clinton, then a student at Yale Law School. They embraced Dr. Duffey as an honest broker who might bridge the gap between disaffected liberal Democrats and blue-collar voters who had switched to the Republican Party and helped put Richard M. Nixon in the White House in 1968.“At a time when young people were so desperately hungry for honesty and conviction, he met that moment with grace and eloquence,’’ Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a former law school classmate of Mr. Clinton’s, said of Dr. Duffey this week.But Dr. Duffey’s campaign was dealt a setback when Mr. Dodd entered the general election race that fall as an independent. Mr. Dodd wound up splitting the Democratic vote, allowing the Republican nominee, Lowell P. Weicker, to slip into office with less than 42 percent. (Mr. Dodd died less than seven months later.)“In the fall of 1970, I missed about half of my law school classes trying to help get Joe Duffey elected to the Senate,” Mr. Clinton said in a statement. “There were so many of us who were drawn to his deep commitment to peace, economic fairness, and civil rights. Joe lost the election, but he left us all proud, wiser in the ways of politics, and richer in lifelong friends, including Joe himself.”A bumper sticker from Dr. Duffey’s 1970 Senate campaign. Emilio Q. Daddario, a former Connecticut congressman, was the Democratic nominee for governor. Both men lost. Joseph Daniel Duffey was born on July 1, 1932 in Huntington, W. Va., in the western foothills of the Appalachians. His father, Joseph Ivanhoe Duffey, lost a leg in a mining accident and became a barber. His mother, Ruth (Wilson) Duffey, a telegraph operator, died when Joe was 13.Raised in the Baptist church and later ordained as a Congregational minister, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Marshall University in Huntington in 1954; a bachelor of divinity degree from Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts (now the Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School) in 1957; a master’s from Yale Divinity School in 1963; and a doctorate from what is now the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut in 1969.In 1952, Dr. Duffey married Patricia Fortney, whom he had met at a Baptist youth convention; they divorced in 1973. A year later, he married Anne Wexler, who ran his 1970 campaign, became an aide to President Carter and then a prominent Washington political operative and lobbyist; she died in 2009.In addition to his son Michael, from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Marian Burros, a former food writer for The New York Times; two stepsons, Daniel and David Wexler; two sisters, Ida Ruth Plymale and Patrica Duffey Keesee; and four grandchildren.Dr. Duffey brought his progressive sensibilities to his job as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Mr. Carter. He defined the job to The Times in 1977 as awarding federal grants to support “disciplines whose function and purpose are self‐discovery and the exploration of the human experience.” And he acknowledged that he had encountered flak for focusing on what he called “neglected areas of research,” like the study of women and minority groups in America and the history of the Middle East.His background as chief administrative officer for the American Association of University Professors from 1974 to 1976 helped pave the way for his appointments to the chancellorships of the University of Massachusetts and American University.As a product of the antiwar movement, Dr. Duffey cautioned against romanticizing the era, recalling it as a time of deep national division.But at a reunion of some of his 1970 campaign volunteers in 1993, after Mr. Clinton had risen to the White House, he reminded them that while it had taken Mr. Clinton’s election to reunite them, they should hold fast to their liberal principles and continue to work for what could bring them together again.“Looking at you, I’m sure there’s another president here,” Dr. Duffey said. “And I’m sure we’ll all be together again when she is inaugurated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Don Fowler, Democratic Co-Chairman Under Clinton, Dies at 85

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDon Fowler, Democratic Co-Chairman Under Clinton, Dies at 85He and Christopher Dodd ran the party organization, raising record sums, expanding the voter and donor bases, and sometimes raising eyebrows.Don Fowler taking the oath as he appeared before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1997. He had a long career in South Carolina and national politics.Credit…Joe Marquette/Associated PressDec. 17, 2020, 5:07 p.m. ETDon Fowler, a former co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a mainstay of South Carolina and national politics for decades, died on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. He was 85.Trav Robertson, the chairman of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, confirmed the death, at a hospital. Jaime Harrison, the associate chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Mr. Fowler had had leukemia.Mr. Fowler led the South Carolina party from 1971 to 1980 and was named by the national party to run the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, which launched Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts on an unsuccessful general election campaign against his Republican rival, Vice President George Bush.Mr. Fowler served as national chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997. He was picked by President Bill Clinton to run the party’s day-to-day operations in a power-sharing arrangement with Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who was named general chairman.The two were credited with raising record-breaking sums for the party, deepening its pool of donors, expanding its army of volunteers and leading a successful voter-registration drive focusing on African-Americans, The Washington Post reported.Mr. Dodd, the more well known of the two, was largely the public face of the party leadership. But Mr. Fowler was thrust into the spotlight himself when he was accused of improperly trying to enlist the help of the C.I.A. in 1995 to aid a major donor to President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.The donor, an oilman who had developed a relationship with the C.I.A. on previous ventures, was seeking to build a pipeline in Turkey and sought help from the White House.Testifying to a Senate committee, Mr. Fowler professed that he could not remember speaking to a C.I.A. agent who claimed that he had done precisely that. “I have in the middle of the night, high noon, late in the afternoon, early in the morning, every hour of the day, for months now searched my memory about conversations with the C.I.A.,” Mr. Fowler told the senators. “And I have no memory, no memory of any conversation with the C.I.A.”He was not charged with any wrongdoing.Mr. Fowler, center, with President Bill Clinton and the actor Alec Baldwin at a reception in Culver City, Calif., in 1996 during Mr. Clinton’s re-election campaign. The president had named Mr. Fowler co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee.Credit…Joe Marquette/Associated PressMr. Fowler also found himself defending a plan to entice potential donors with a variety of perks in exchange for their dollars, including dinners with the Clintons, private meetings with administration officials, participation in “issue retreats” and “honored guest status” at the party’s 1996 convention in Chicago. In an editorial, The New York Times called the plan “seedy.”In 1996, Mr. Fowler successfully fought off a lawsuit by the fringe candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for the fifth time. He filed the suit after Mr. Fowler had instructed state parties to disregard votes for him. Mr. Fowler had described Mr. LaRouche’s views as “explicitly racist and anti-Semitic” and had accused him of defrauding donors and voters. Mr. LaRouche was not, he said, “a bona fide Democrat.”Donald Lionel Fowler was born on Sept. 12, 1935, in Spartanburg, S.C. He earned a degree in psychology from Wofford College in Spartanburg, where he was a star basketball player; he was later inducted into its Hall of Fame. He received a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science from the University of Kentucky.While holding his political posts and running an advertising and public relations business in Columbia, he taught political science for five decades at the University of South Carolina and also at the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college.His first wife, Septima (Briggs) Fowler, with whom he had two children, died in 1997. In 2005, Mr. Fowler married Carol Khare. They had worked together at the Democratic National Committee and at his communications firm. Carol Fowler became chair of the state party in 2007.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.This year, the Fowlers’ home in the Five Points area of Columbia, the state capital, became a regular stop for many Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination in the run-up to the South Carolina primary in February. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Bill de Blasio were among those who showed up as dozens of people crowded into the Fowlers’ living room.Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House majority whip and a frequent guest lecturer in Mr. Fowler’s classes, told the South Carolina newspaper The State, “Don was always the connector, the one bringing political friends and, sometimes, enemies together.”The New York Times contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Lillian Blancas, Candidate for a Texas Judgeship, Dies of Covid-19

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLillian Blancas, Candidate for a Texas Judgeship, Dies of Covid-19Ms. Blancas, a widely respected lawyer, died six days before a runoff election in El Paso but remained on the ballot and was expected to win. She was 47.Lillian E. Blancas’s plan was to work as a prosecutor, public defender and private lawyer before winning a judgeship. Credit…via Blancas familyDec. 10, 2020, 3:33 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Lillian E. Blancas, a widely respected lawyer in El Paso, always wanted to be a judge. She was expected to achieve her goal on Saturday in a runoff election, in which she was the favorite.Ms. Blancas died at a hospital in the city on Monday. She was 47. The cause was Covid-19, her brother Moises Blancas said.Ms. Blancas, was an assistant district attorney and public defender for nearly a decade before she opened her own law firm in 2019, came in first in a field of three on Nov. 3 in the race for an open seat in El Paso’s municipal court. Because she did not win a majority of the votes, the race went to an automatic runoff.Her death came too late to remove her name from the ballot. If she wins, the City Council would appoint a replacement.Ms. Blancas was known as much for her tireless work on the part of indigent defendants as she was for her wit and charm, inside and outside the courtroom.Among her many friends, who called her Lila, was her opponent in the runoff, Enrique A. Holguin, who met her in 2013 when he joined the district attorney’s office. She helped mentor him, and later took care of his dog when he went on trips.“She was a straight shooter, very professional, but always polite,” Mr. Holguin said. “When we were on opposite sides of a case, we never locked horns.”Lillian Elena Blancas was born in El Paso on May 2, 1973 to Victor Blancas and Maria Elena (Montelongo) Blancas, immigrants from Mexico who met while working at a meatpacking plant in El Paso. Her father later became a plumber, while her mother stayed at home to raise the children.In addition to her brother Moises, she is survived by her mother, another brother, Victor, and a sister, Gabby. Her father died in 2014.Neither of her parents went to college, and it was important to them that their children received a good education. All four siblings graduated from college; Lillian received a degree in political science from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2002.Rather than go directly to law school, she spent several years teaching middle school science in El Paso. “The kids just flocked to her, because she had this no-holds-barred personality,” said Christina Klaes, a fellow teacher and friend.Ms. Blancas left teaching in 2006 and graduated three years later from the Texas Tech University School of Law. She quickly joined the El Paso district attorney’s office. It was part of her plan: gain experience as a prosecutor, switch to being a public defender, hang out her own shingle and run for a judicial seat.As a public defender, she handled capital murder cases, and defended poor, often very young clients, said Heather Hall, a lawyer in the public defender’s office. In her spare time, Ms. Blancas mentored lawyers who wanted to work with clients who were indigent or had mental-health issues.“Lila had this silver tongue as a lawyer,” said Amanda Enriquez, a lawyer and friend, “but she was full of empathy and compassion.”Ms. Blancas tested positive for Covid on Halloween; three days later, she won 40 percent of the vote in the election, sending her and Mr. Holguin to a runoff. The disease kept her from actively campaigning. She entered the hospital twice before being sent to intensive care, where she died.El Paso County has been hit hard by the pandemic, recording 10,813 total cases per 100,000 residents as of Wednesday, more than twice the statewide rate, while the city’s intensive care units were running at 97 percent capacity.After the election, Mr. Holguin, her opponent, texted her his congratulations. “You’re going to have a head start, because I have Covid,” Mr. Holguin said she responded.“I was ready to lose this election,” he said, “but I wasn’t ready to lose a friend.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rafer Johnson, Winner of a Memorable Decathlon, Is Dead

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRafer Johnson, Winner of a Memorable Decathlon, Is DeadHis triumphant performance at the 1960 Olympics was his farewell to track and field. He went on to become a good-will ambassador for the United States and a close associate of the Kennedy family.The gold medalist Rafer Johnson carried the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the 1984 Games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In 1960, he carried the American flag into Rome’s Olympic Stadium.Credit…Robert Riger/Getty ImagesBy More