Celebrity Deathwatch: William Rogers, Former Nixon & Eisenhower Official, 87

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/stories/01/03/obit.rogers.ap/index.html

Rogers, former Nixon and Eisenhower administration official, dies
January 3, 2001
Web posted at: 11:50 AM EST (1650 GMT)


WASHINGTON (AP) -- William Pierce Rogers, the urbane lawyer who was attorney
general in the Eisenhower administration and secretary of state under
President Nixon, has died, a spokesman for his law firm said Wednesday.

He was 87.

Rogers died Tuesday night after a brief illness. Tom Mariam, communications
director for Clifford, Chance, Rogers & Wells, said Rogers had been in frail
health. "It wasn't one of those sudden things," he said.

Rogers died at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He had lived in Bethesda.
A close friend and adviser to Nixon for many years, Rogers was untouched by
the Watergate scandal and later harshly critical of the actions that forced
the president from office.

During five decades as a public official and private attorney, Rogers was
involved in the Alger Hiss investigation, the civil rights movement, the
diplomatic opening to China and the search for peace in the Middle East. As
a private attorney, he represented Martin Luther King Jr. before the Supreme
Court in a landmark libel case.

Rogers had been a senior partner in the New York-based Roger & Wells law
firm, which evolved from a firm created in 1871 to handle insurance claims
from the Great Chicago Fire of that year, Mariam said. Rogers' firm merged
on Jan. 1, 2000, with Clifford Chance of Britain and Punder, Volhard, Weber
& Axster of Germany. Rogers was a senior partner in the firm, which now has
offices in New York, London and Washington.

The Washington office of the firm will move on Monday to a new building
named after Rogers, the firm said.

While Rogers was Nixon's secretary of state he often found himself sidelined
by Henry A. Kissinger, the president's national security assistant who
played a secret and prominent role in advancing Nixon's foreign policy --
especially an opening to communist China.

In 1973, Rogers gave up the post and Kissinger was named secretary while
retaining his White House post. Rogers' long relationship with Nixon was
strained by Watergate and the fierce infighting between Rogers and
Kissinger.

"The way I treated Rogers was terrible," Nixon was quoted as saying in a
book published four years after his death in 1994. "I had Kissinger, and he
and I kept so many things from Rogers, and that was inexcusable," the former
president told aide Monica Crowley, author of "Nixon in Winter."

Though he was secretary of state, Rogers knew nothing of Kissinger's secret
negotiations with North Vietnam and his trip to China to prepare the way for
Nixon's dramatic opening to the communist country.

Rogers was last in the spotlight in 1986, when he chaired the commission
that investigated the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.

For his part, Rogers remembered Nixon with mixed feelings.

"I never before had a friend who turned out to be not quite a friend," said
Rogers in a 1997 interview. As for the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon
from office, Rogers said, "He never asked me about any of that nonsense
until much too late."

He recalled Eisenhower far more warmly. Rogers was attorney general for the
final 15 months of Eisenhower's presidency and described him as "one of the
smartest people I ever knew," a man of unquestioned integrity who never
interfered with Justice Department activities. During his tenure as attorney
general, Rogers established the Civil Rights Division as a permanent part of
the department.

Rogers had little foreign policy experience when Nixon named him secretary
of state.

"I recognized when I took the job that President Nixon wanted to run things
himself and that's what he did. He did it through Kissinger. He always sort
of resented the State Department," he later recalled.

Turning his attention to the Middle East, a region Kissinger was showing
little interest in, Rogers proposed the recognition of the rights of all
states in the region and the return of territories Israel had captured in
the 1967 war. Both Arabs and Israelis rejected the plan. Rogers later had
the satisfaction of feeling that his plan's principles were the basis for
much of the current peace process.

Not long after Nixon began his second term, he decided it was time to make
Kissinger secretary of state.

In his diary, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, wrote that the
president "wants me to talk to Rogers, make the point that the P is closest
to him, but feels that anyone who has been in for four years should go." Two
days later Haldeman recorded that "had a meeting with Rogers this afternoon
and got into the separation. It didn't work out very well in that Rogers
obviously was shocked to be told that he was to leave."

Rogers and Nixon met in 1948 when Rogers was a young lawyer on the staff of
a Senate committee and Nixon, a freshman congressman from California, was
agonizing over whether to believe Whittaker Chambers' allegation that Alger
Hiss, a high State Department official, was a member of an underground
communist group.

Chambers made the claim in testimony before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities. Few believed him. Hiss appeared voluntarily before
the panel. He denied under oath any ties to the Communist Party and said he
had never heard of Chambers.

Not certain whom to believe, Nixon turned to Rogers who had earned his spurs
as a prosecutor on the staff of New York District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey.

"I read the testimony of both guys," Rogers said. Nixon wanted to know if he
could prove one of them was lying. "I said I'm sure you can. I based it on
the fact that Chambers had given a lot of particulars that you can't make
up."

Subsequently, Hiss was convicted of lying and Nixon's political career was
on the rise.

Nixon also turned to Rogers for advice during the 1952 presidential
campaign. Nixon's position as Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice presidential
nominee was threatened after disclosure that a group of California
supporters had set up a fund to help pay the Republican senator's office
expenses.

Nixon's position on the Republican ticket was in jeopardy. Influential
newspapers supporting Eisenhower ran editorials calling on Nixon to
withdraw.

Eisenhower refused to endorse or condemn his running mate. It was decided
that Nixon would make his case to the voters in a televised appearance that
came to be known as the "Checkers" speech.

In his book "Six Crises," Nixon said that the night before speech, "I took a
long walk with Rogers up and down the side streets near the hotel to get
some fresh air and exercise and to test out the first outline of my speech
on him. He encouraged me to go forward with the plan I had adopted." Nixon
saved his career with a brilliant speech that referred to his wife's
"respectable Republican cloth coat" and the Texan who gave the Nixons the
cocker spaniel they named Checkers.

Born in Norfolk, N.Y., Rogers was a graduate of Cornell University and
Cornell Law School. His first job as a lawyer was on Dewey's staff. "I was
the youngest guy in the office so I tried cases in the lowest court where
the misdemeanors are tried. The two principal crimes were bookmaking and
numbers," he recalled. Rogers noted the irony that today both activities are
legally operated by the state and provide New York with its second largest
source of revenue.

During Eisenhower's second term, Rogers served as attorney general. When
Eisenhower left office, Rogers went into private practice.

He represented King before the Supreme Court in the libel case that made it
more difficult for public figures to win judgments against the news media.

After the court ruling, King held a luncheon for Rogers, who recalled the
civil rights leader saying that he "never in my wildest dreams imagined I
would be represented in litigation in the Supreme Court by a former attorney
general of the United States."

Among his other clients were media organizations, including The Associated
Press.

"I've been extremely lucky in my lifetime," he said in the 1997 interview.
"Having had so many different kinds of experiences, so many different kinds
of people that I've known."

Rogers is survived by his wife, Adele, and four children: daughter Dale
Rogers Marshall and three sons, Douglas, Jeffrey and Anthony Rogers.

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This mailing list is brought to you by Slick.ORG at http://www.slick.org
to remove yourself from the list, send e-mail to majordomo@slick.org
and include the words "unsubscribe deathwatch" in the message (not in the
subject).  For web-based help, go to:

http://www.slick.org/cgi-bin/majordomo

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *