Robert D. McFadden

Stern’s son Jared said the cause was complications of advanced Parkinson’s disease.

A brilliant, combative grandstander who clowned in costumes, kissed catfish and crawled through the seal house in Central Park to get publicity, Stern was the commissioner under Edward I. Koch from 1983 to 1990 and under Rudy Giuliani from 1994 to 2002. He was also a councilman at large for Manhattan for eight years and held other municipal posts in a four-decade career.

Civic historians generally give Stern high marks for his stewardship, although his eccentricities sometimes overshadowed his accomplishments, and in his last year in office a lawsuit accused him of discriminating against thousands of black and Hispanic employees — a case that the city settled years later for $20 million and sweeping changes in the parks department’s salary and promotion practices.

As a liberal in Koch’s Democratic administration in the 1980s, Stern was a general in charge of an army of nearly 5,000 workers, commanding generous public spending for city parks. But as a centrist under Republican Mayor Giuliani, he had to manage with 2,400 employees and struggled to meet the needs of a department increasingly reliant on private donors, volunteers and civic groups.

Nevertheless, despite shrinking budgets, vandalism, litter, lawsuits and opposition by special interests, Stern was generally credited with making the city’s vast archipelago of parks, playgrounds, ball fields, swimming pools, recreation centers and beaches cleaner, safer, and more attractive and accessible.

He also managed to add 1,600 acres of parkland, bringing the city’s total to more than 28,000. His acquisitions were second only to those of Moses, the legendary, imperious urban planner and master builder who, as the commissioner from 1934 to 1960, virtually created the department by unifying the parks of all five boroughs in one system and building hundreds of playgrounds and miles of parkways and beaches.

Without the federal funds that Moses had cadged or the big budgets of the Koch years, Stern, under Giuliani, recruited 40,000 volunteers to work in the parks, used thousands of welfare recipients to perform cleaning and maintenance tasks, and solicited millions in donations from private groups in exchange for their use of the parks. He also gave cocktail parties to encourage young professionals to make the parks their first charity, dispensing social cachet by recognizing 10,000 contributors as “members of the park family.”

Aides said he was not above dipping into capital funds for routine repairs. Still, in the Giuliani years alone, Stern put $1 billion into capital improvements, restored 2,200 acres of forest and wetlands, collected $1.5 million in restitution for damage to trees, planted 100,000 new street trees, labeled 40,000 trees with botanical and common names, and planted trees and grass in 2,000 street and highway median strips.

A lightning rod for controversy, Stern proposed a new crime, “arborcide,” with jail time for tree-killers and a tree victim’s compensation fund. He suggested that anyone caught littering be forced to work in the parks, with repeat offenders fined $1,000. He declared war on unleashed dogs.

None of it worked. But both Koch and Giuliani called him one of the best parks commissioners the city ever had.

Stern made headlines with panache — taking his golden retriever, Boomer, almost everywhere and leaping out of his chauffeur-driven limousine at City Hall, at his headquarters at the Arsenal in Central Park or at the scene of some stunt, in the costume of a toy soldier, a matador, an astronaut, King Neptune or a shepherd with Little Bo Peep at his side.

Like a latter-day Andy Warhol, he collected unopened cans of Campbell’s tomato soup in his Arsenal office, which was not air-conditioned. One hot summer weekend, when no one was around, 70 cans of tomato soup exploded. When the staff arrived on Monday, the office looked as if it had been attacked by terrorists.

Stories of Stern’s eccentricities were legion. He staged an elaborate funeral for a dead tree. He snacked on canned soups and peas, offering visitors tastes from his own spoon and appearing genuinely disappointed if they refused. He fell asleep during an interview with a reporter, prowled 99-cent stores and created “park names,” or “noms du parc,” for 6,000 staff members (to use for communications by walkie-talkie) and for celebrities: Starfish, Roadrunner, Turtle. He was Starquest.

Fascinated with animals, alive and sculptured, he released wood frogs, quail and screech owls in parks where they might once have lived, despite ecologists’ complaints that the original environments had to be re-created first for them to flourish.

Off duty, he sometimes drove around town gazing up, exclaiming at stone-carved animals on facades and parapets. He said he was the founding president of the American Association for the Advancement and Appreciation of Animals in Art and Architecture: the AAAAAAA.

One of New York’s most visible and colorful officials, Stern was a small, rumpled man who looked like a leprechaun, sounded like Woody Allen and said precisely what he was thinking most of the time, even if it was found to be offensive.

Coming of age in a mixed immigrant neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, Stern had a tendency to see the world in ethnic terms, colleagues said. In private, they said, he sometimes told ethnic, Jewish or anti-gay jokes and used terms that could be construed as racist, like a derogatory Yiddish word for black people.

In an interview in the mid-1990s, he acknowledged that he could be “certainly politically incorrect” and dismissed what he saw as the reflexive attitudes of liberals. “I don’t feel guilty,” he said, “because I am Jewish, white, male or heterosexual.”

Defenders noted that he had spent the summer of 1964 working for civil rights in the South, and scoffed at notions that he harbored biases.

Near the end of his years in office, however, Stern was accused in a federal class-action lawsuit of having discriminated against black and Hispanic employees in awarding jobs and setting salaries, while rewarding a hand-picked coterie of less experienced white workers with plum assignments and relegating anyone who complained to lesser roles.

The city’s $20 million settlement in the case, in 2008, covered back pay, legal expenses and compensatory damages for 3,500 current and former employees. The city also agreed to new pay scales and promotion practices. But it did not admit wrongdoing, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed eager to move on from charges that had been pending since 2001.

“We decided that it would be better to settle than to litigate,” the mayor said. “It was something that took place a long time ago, and I think we are satisfied that our procedures today in that department, and I think in all departments, do not discriminate against anybody.”

Stern denied the allegations, calling the idea of racial discrimination “repulsive” and saying that race had been taken into account in his department only under the auspices of court-ordered affirmative action. “We have never discriminated on the basis of race,” he said.

Henry Jordan Stern was born in Manhattan on May 1, 1935, one of four children of Walter and Jean (Friedlander) Stern. His father, an immigrant from Germany, manufactured tents, and his mother, who was of Russian descent, was a bookkeeper. Both were Jewish. Henry and his siblings, Susanne, Kenneth and Jerome, grew up in Inwood, then a mix of Jewish, Irish and Greek immigrants.

In public school, Henry could read and write by the time he went to kindergarten and was skipped to the third grade. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1950, from City College in 1954 and from Harvard Law School in 1957, at 22.

As a young man, he had been enthralled by the persona of actor James Dean. When Dean died in a car crash near Cholame, California, in 1955, Stern went to the accident scene and brought back the intersection sign: U.S. Route 466 and California Route 41.

Stern was a clerk to Justice Matthew M. Levy of the state Supreme Court from 1957 to 1961, and from 1962 to 1965 was an assistant to two Manhattan borough presidents: Edward R. Dudley, a former ambassador and civil rights activist, and Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to become a federal judge.

He was named executive director of the city parks department by Commissioner Thomas P.F. Hoving in 1966. From 1967 to 1969, he was an assistant administrator in the city Consumer Affairs Department. Over the next four years he was an associate commissioner, then the deputy to two commissioners of consumer affairs, Bess Myerson and her successor, Betty Furness.

Stern was elected councilman at large from Manhattan in 1973, running on the Liberal Party line, and re-elected to another four-year term in 1977. In that post he led fights for noise-control and gay-rights bills and became known as a nonstop public servant, attending thousands of community, civic and planning commission meetings.

Jeffrey Sussman, who was Stern’s press secretary in 1981, recalled recently that Stern had arranged to have a site in Central Park near 72nd Street named Strawberry Fields, after the Beatles song, in honor of John Lennon after he was murdered outside his home at the nearby Dakota apartment building in 1980. Stern, he said, also created a consumer truth-in-dying regulation for the city’s funeral home industry and a regulation to protect carriage horses.

Stern, who lived on East 84th Street in Manhattan for more than 50 years, married Dr. Margaret Ewing, a pediatrician, in 1976. She and his son Jared survived him, as do another son, Dr. Kenan Stern; his sister, Susanne Bonnet; his brother Kenneth; and five grandchildren. His brother Jerome died before him.

Political observers said that Stern, who was long identified with liberal causes, drifted from left to center under Koch and Giuliani. Critics said his outlook was governed by expediency as municipal budgets were cut and programs reshaped.

While out of city government during the Democratic administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins from 1990 to 1994, Stern was president of Citizens Union of the City of New York, which monitors city government.

In 2002, he co-founded and became president of New York Civic, a Manhattan-based good-government group. In recent years he wrote hundreds of articles on public policy for the organization, sending them to thousands of subscribers. They were regularly published by The Huffington Post (now HuffPost), The Queens Tribune and other publications.

“I have remained friends with Henry throughout the years,” Sussman, his former press aide, recalled. “When he attended my wedding reception in 1984, he sold ties with the city seal to my guests. The money from the sale was donated to the city’s libraries.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/obituaries/henry-j-stern-dead.html" id="0f2eea6f-f8eb-3afb-a879-823349b87a13">The New York Times</a>.

Henry J. Stern, Whose Urban Domain Was Green, Dies at 83

Henry J. Stern, who presided over New York City’s emerald empire for 15 years as commissioner of parks and recreation under two mayors, surpassing all but the Napoleonic Robert Moses in tenure and enhancements to the city’s greenswards and playgrounds, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

Her death was announced by her daughter Susan Dryfoos.

As the granddaughter, daughter, wife, sister, aunt and great-aunt of six successive publishers of The Times, and as the wife of Andrew Heiskell, the chairman of Time Inc., Heiskell moved in the circles that dominated New York’s philanthropic and social world. And that might have led to a whirling life of cotillions and charity balls.

But she discovered as a young woman — “much to my horror,” as she put it — that she was good at fundraising and getting things done, and she soon found herself in demand on the civic circuit. Mayor Robert F. Wagner named her to a “Keep New York City Clean” campaign, and before long her first husband, Orvil E. Dryfoos, the publisher of The Times, was picking up scraps of paper on his morning walks.

Her work caught the eye of the Kennedy administration, and she was named to its Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission — a natural fit because she loved fishing, canoeing and hiking. That led Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall to name her to a seat on the National Park System Advisory Board.

From 1970 to 1992, Heiskell held a series of mayoral appointments as the chairwoman or co-chairwoman of the Council on the Environment of New York City, a privately funded group that she founded with Mayor John V. Lindsay. It created scores of community-run parks, playgrounds and gardens, as well as the city’s first modern-era farmers’ markets. It also organized environmental education programs in schools and was an early advocate of paper recycling.

Heiskell became a leader in the campaign that prompted Congress in 1972 to create the Gateway National Recreation Area, a 26,000-acre park of beaches and wildlife refuges on scattered sites around the entrance to the New York-New Jersey harbor. The Interior Department, honoring her in 1980, said she had been “responsible for the acceptance of the urban recreation concept within the National Park Service.” At her death she was the chairwoman of the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy.

But her most striking contribution to the cityscape was her work on the restoration of the theaters along 42nd Street just west of Times Square, which dated from the early 20th century. These once-grand theaters, where Flo Ziegfeld and George M. Cohan had dazzled the top-hatted limousine trade, had degenerated into a seedy lineup of triple-X and martial-arts movie houses, a shadow of Broadway’s fabled Great White Way.

As chairwoman of New 42nd Street Inc., a nonprofit organization created by the city and the state, Heiskell began in 1990 with a mandate to revive the grandeur of the New Amsterdam, the Victory and other theaters with millions of dollars provided by the developers of office towers in Times Square, pledges made in exchange for big tax breaks. As the projects went on, they began to generate income — rents, ticket sales, fundraisers, grants from the city and private foundations — that drove more projects to fruition.

A decade after it began, the work was substantially done, including a new theater for children at the renamed New Victory and a 10-story building housing rehearsal studios and offices for nonprofit cultural organizations. Heiskell and Cora Cahan, the president of New 42nd Street, said in a letter to The Times that visionary public officials and preservationists deserved the credit.

“Although it was anticipated that the planned office buildings at the four crossroads sites would spur the redevelopment of 42nd Street, it turned out that the abandoned theaters led the parade,” they wrote. “The lineup of legitimate theaters, built at the turn of the century, made 42nd Street the most famous block in the world. Once again the theaters light the way.”

A Publisher’s Granddaughter

Marian Effie Sulzberger was born on Dec. 31, 1918, in Manhattan, the first of four children of Arthur Hays and Iphigene (Ochs) Sulzberger. Her maternal grandfather was Adolph S. Ochs, who bought The Times in 1896 and was its publisher until his death in 1935, when his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, succeeded him. He died in 1968, and Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger died in 1990.

Marian was the last surviving member of her generation of the Sulzberger family. Her siblings were Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, who was the publisher of The Chattanooga Times for 28 years, and who died in 2017; Judith P. Sulzberger, a physician, who died in 2011; and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who died in 2012. He was publisher of The New York Times from 1963 to 1992 and chairman and chief executive of the company from 1973 to 1997, when he became chairman emeritus.

In addition to her daughter Susan Warms Dryfoos, Heiskell is survived by two other children from her marriage to Dryfoos: a daughter, Jacqueline Hays Dryfoos, and a son, Robert Ochs Dryfoos, as well as two stepchildren from her marriage to Heiskell, Peter Chapin and Diane Schetky; seven grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and three step-great-grandchildren.

Marian attended the experimental Lincoln School, affiliated with Teachers College at Columbia University, but did not fare well in its unstructured classes; she could barely read or write by the seventh grade. As was discovered later, she had dyslexia, a learning disability that was not then recognized and that had also affected her mother.

After a year of tutoring, Marian was admitted to Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Greenwich, Connecticut. Always athletic, she played tennis and jumped horses, but the school concluded she was not meeting its academic standards. She toured Europe for a summer with a tutor and was admitted to Lenox, a prep school in Manhattan. She disliked her studies, tested poorly and was barely able to graduate.

A psychologist finally diagnosed her dyslexia, and after more tutoring she was enrolled at the Froebel League, a three-year training school for prospective kindergarten teachers. She graduated in 1941 but did not pursue a teaching career.

She met Dryfoos at a dance given by her parents. A Dartmouth College graduate, he was a Wall Street investor who held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. They were married in 1941.

A Place on the Board

Dryfoos soon joined The Times and began a long apprenticeship that included a year as a reporter and many years as an assistant to his father-in-law, the publisher. In 1957 he became president, and in 1961, when Arthur Hays Sulzberger retired, Dryfoos became publisher. Two years later, after the strain of a 114-day newspaper strike, he died of a heart ailment related to the rheumatic fever he had as a child.

Soon after her husband’s death in 1963, Marian Dryfoos was elected a director of The Times, a position she held for 34 years. (Her sisters also served for many years as directors of the company.) She worked for the newspaper’s promotion department, focusing on educational projects, such as distributing copies of The Times to schools and colleges.

Heiskell also served on the boards of the Ford Motor Co. and Merck &amp; Co. and was a trustee of the Consolidated Edison Co. of New York.

She married Heiskell, the chairman of Time Inc., in 1965, a week after his divorce from actress Madeleine Carroll had been granted. With her new husband, Heiskell, who had been active for years in community and environmental projects, expanded her involvement in urban affairs and philanthropic causes. They gave money, lent their names and appeared at affairs to promote education, urban renewal and other causes.

A Champion for Parks

Heiskell and Lindsay formed the Council on the Environment in 1970. Over more than two decades, with Heiskell at the helm, the organization, joining with city agencies, sought to improve the local environment by, among other things, reclaiming trash-strewn lots and creating 40 community-run parks, playgrounds and gardens. The Marian S. Heiskell Garden, on West 48th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, was opened in 1997.

The recipient of many awards for her environmental work, Heiskell was a director of the National Audubon Society, the National Park Foundation, the New York Botanical Garden, the New York City Partnership and the Community Service Society of New York.

Andrew Heiskell retired from Time in 1980 and died in 2003. In a memoir, “Outsider, Insider: An Unlikely Success Story,” privately published in 1998, he wrote that Marian, his third wife, had given him a sense of family and security that he had craved since childhood.

Marian Heiskell stepped down as a director of The Times in 1997 but remained a principal owner of the company under a trust that passed to the four children of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger upon her death in 1990. The trust, set up in 1986 under an agreement intended to preserve family control of the company, holds 92 percent of the Class B stock, which is not publicly traded and elects 70 percent of the board members. Class A stock, traded on the New York Stock Exchange and widely held, elects 30 percent of the directors, whose numbers fluctuate slightly.

In succeeding years, Heiskell maintained an office at The Times, dining in the cafeteria with staff members and conferring with her brother, the chairman emeritus, known all his life as Punch, and her nephew, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded his father as publisher and chairman At the end of 2017, Arthur Jr. was succeeded as publisher by his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, known as A.G. Sulzberger, while remaining chairman. Heiskell’s daughter Jacqueline Dryfoos served on the board of The Times from 2000 to 2005.

Heiskell also supported journalism education. In 2005, she and her sisters contributed $4 million to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism for advanced management training for news executives, and another $4 million to the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, which opened in 2006, for internships and scholarships. Both gifts were made in honor of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/obituaries/marian-sulzberger-heiskell-dead.html" id="8d31ed52-4c3c-3b6c-a6ff-fb3de1f6e89e">The New York Times</a>.

Marian Sulzberger Heiskell, Civic Leader, Dies at 100

Marian Sulzberger Heiskell, a New York civic leader and philanthropist who led campaigns to create the Gateway National Recreation Area and restore the grandeur of theaters on 42nd Street, and who was a member of the family that controls The New York Times, died Thursday night at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.

From 1970 to 1992, she held a series of mayoral appointments as the chairwoman or co-chairwoman of the Council on the Environment of New York City, a privately funded group that she founded with Mayor John V. Lindsay. It created scores of community-run parks, playgrounds and gardens, as well as the city’s first modern-era farmers’ markets. It also organized environmental education programs in schools and was an early advocate of paper recycling.

Heiskell became a leader in the campaign that prompted Congress in 1972 to create the Gateway National Recreation Area, a 26,000-acre park of beaches and wildlife refuges on scattered sites around the entrance to the New York-New Jersey harbor. The Interior Department, honoring her in 1980, said she was “responsible for the acceptance of the urban recreation concept within the National Park Service.” At her death she was the chairwoman of the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy.

As chairwoman of New 42nd Street Inc., a nonprofit organization created by the city and the state, Heiskell began in 1990 with a mandate to revive the grandeur of the New Amsterdam, the Victory and other theaters with millions of dollars provided by the developers of office towers in Times Square, pledges made in exchange for big tax breaks. As the projects went on, they began to generate income — rents, ticket sales, fundraisers, grants from the city and private foundations — that drove additional projects to fruition.

Marian attended the experimental Lincoln School, affiliated with Teachers College at Columbia University, but did not fare well in its unstructured classes, and could barely read or write by the seventh grade. As was discovered later, she had dyslexia, a learning disability that was not then recognized and that had also affected her mother.

At a dance given by her parents she met Dryfoos, a Dartmouth College graduate and Wall Street investor who held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. They were married in 1941.

In 1965 she married Heiskell, the chairman of Time Inc., whose divorce from actress Madeleine Carroll had been granted a week earlier. With her new husband, Heiskell, who had been active for years in community and environmental projects, expanded her involvement in urban affairs and philanthropic causes. They gave money, lent their names and appeared at affairs to promote education, urban renewal and other causes.

In 1970, she and Lindsay formed the Council on the Environment, which joined city agencies in trying to improve the local environment. Over more than two decades, with Heiskell at the helm, the organization reclaimed trash-strewn lots and created 40 community-run parks, playgrounds and gardens. The Marian S. Heiskell Garden, on West 48th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, was opened in 1997. The council also organized 33 farmers’ markets, began environmental education programs in 15 schools and promoted early wastepaper recycling programs.

While Marian Heiskell stepped down as a director of The Times in 1997, she remained a principal owner of the company under a trust that passed to the four children of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger upon her death in 1990. The trust, set up in 1986 under an agreement intended to preserve family control of the company, holds 92 percent of the Class B stock, which is not publicly traded and elects 70 percent of the board members. Class A stock, traded on the New York Stock Exchange and widely held, elects 30 percent of the directors, whose numbers fluctuate slightly.

In succeeding years, Heiskell maintained an office at The Times, dining in the cafeteria with staff members and conferring with her brother, the chairman emeritus, known all his life as Punch, and her nephew, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded his father as publisher and chairman, and at the end of 2017 was succeeded as publisher by his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, known as A.G. Sulzberger. Heiskell’s daughter Jacqueline Dryfoos served on the board of The Times from 2000 to 2005.

Charles G. Koch announced the death in a statement, which provided no other details but noted that David Koch had been treated for prostate cancer in the past. “Twenty-seven years ago,” the statement said, “David was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given a grim prognosis of a few years to live. David liked to say that a combination of brilliant doctors, state of the art medications and his own stubbornness kept the cancer at bay.”

Hitching his star to the soaring ambitions of Charles, his older brother, David Koch (pronounced coke) became one of the world’s richest people, with assets of $42.2 billion in 2019 and a 42% stake in the global family enterprise, Koch Industries. He also became a nationally known philanthropist and the early public face of the Koch political ascendancy, as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president in 1980.

Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the tea party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party.

A gregarious, socially prominent New Yorker who loved the ballet, Koch saw his name emblazoned on cornices at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital — the Manhattan institutions on which some of his $1.2 billion in charitable gifts were bestowed.

He was a familiar figure at society galas, a 6-foot-5 former college basketball star who long held the single-game scoring record — 41 points — for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, the Engineers. He also had what New York magazine called a “seemingly limitless storehouse of Elks club-inflected jokes, which are often followed by his loud, wheezy honk of a laugh.”

Koch had palatial homes in Manhattan; Southampton, New York; Aspen, Colorado; and Palm Beach, Florida. He kept a yacht in the Mediterranean for summer getaways and rented it out for $500,000 a week. His friends and acquaintances included Winston Churchill Jr., Prince Charles, and Bill and Melinda Gates.

He had both bad experiences and good luck. He survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people at Los Angeles International Airport. He broke down in tears on a witness stand in Kansas during a civil trial that nearly tore his family apart over money. And for years, he and Charles faced, and denied, accusations of having exploited libertarian principles for self-serving purposes.

They insisted that they adhered to a traditional belief in the liberty of the individual, and in free trade, free markets and freedom from what they called government “intrusions,” including taxes, military drafts, compulsory education, business regulations, welfare programs and laws that criminalized homosexuality, prostitution and drug use.

An Electoral Force

Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.

But they said they had not given money to any Tea Party candidates. “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event,” David Koch told New York magazine in 2010. “No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.”

Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.

Among the groups they supported was the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. ALEC, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.

As part of their long-standing crusade for lower taxes and smaller government, the Koch brothers in recent years opposed dozens of transit-related initiatives in cities and counties across the country, a review by The New York Times found. Campaigns coordinated and financed by Americans for Prosperity fought state legislation to fund transportation projects, mounted ad campaigns and public forums to defeat transit plans, and organized phone banks to convince citizens that public transit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

By early 2017, Charles and David Koch, with a combined net worth of more than $100 billion, had become the leaders of a libertarian juggernaut loosely allied with the Republican Party, which, after eight years in the wings, again controlled the White House, both houses of Congress and many state legislatures.

Under the administration of Donald Trump, the Koch brothers’ prospects in Washington seemed improved, at least superficially. But beneath the surface lay substantive political and personal differences between the Kochs and Trump. While the Kochs did not endorse Trump, David Koch attended his election night victory party and later met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The Kochs contributed heavily to Vice President Mike Pence’s two campaigns for governor of Indiana, and counted a half-dozen close allies among the president’s cabinet choices and Republican advisers.

“The Kochs will be key figures in any discussion about what direction the party takes after 2016,” The Times reported in September that year, “and they are determined to steer it toward their free-market vision.”

That proved prophetic. As the 2018 congressional elections approached, the Kochs’ frustrations with Trump broke into an ugly and open exchange between Charles Koch and the president. Charles denounced Trump’s restrictive trade and immigration policies as divisive, and threatened to withhold the family’s support for Republican candidates who opposed the free-trade, government-shrinking policies at the heart of the Koch political philosophy. Trump struck back on Twitter, calling the Koch political apparatus “overrated” and “a total joke in real Republican circles.”

Politics and Profits

Critics accused the Kochs of buying influence and using their political machine to manipulate elections and government policies under a guise of patriotism and freedom. Those efforts, critics said, cloaked an agenda to cut taxes and federal regulations governing business, the environment and other interests, primarily to benefit the Koch family and its enterprises.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer and a critic of the Koch brothers, said in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” (2016), that the libertarian policies they embraced benefited Koch chemical and fossil fuel businesses, which were among the nation’s worst polluters, and paid millions in fines and court judgments for hazardous-waste violations.

“Lowering taxes and rolling back regulations, slashing the welfare state and obliterating the limits on campaign spending might or might not have helped others,” Mayer wrote, “but they most certainly strengthened the hand of extreme donors with extreme wealth.” The Koch brothers rejected the allegations.

Koch money also funded initiatives to undercut climate science and to counter efforts to address climate change. As Mayer put it in her book, “The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits.”

In interviews after the book was published, Mayer said that investigators who she believed were hired by the Koch brothers had tried to intimidate her by digging up false information, including accusations of plagiarism, to smear her reputation.

While the brothers portrayed themselves as equal partners promoting libertarian ideas, Charles was the major decision-maker, just as he was the dominant voice in Koch enterprises, according to Daniel Schulman’s 2014 biography, “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.”

There were other differences. Charles has lived most of his life in a walled compound in Wichita, Kansas, a secretive kingpin surrounded by lawyers, public relations retainers and security guards. By all accounts he reads economics, history and political philosophy, listens to opera, eats lunch in the company cafeteria with his employees and rarely gives press interviews.

David, by contrast, was an extrovert who attended several dinner parties a week and bantered with reporters, politicians and friends in New York society. His outgoing personality was on display in a nationally televised interview with Barbara Walters on ABC in 2014. His vice-presidential run with Ed Clark, an oil company lawyer nominated as the Libertarian presidential candidate, drew nearly 1 million votes.

Brothers against brothers

David Hamilton Koch was born in Wichita on May 3, 1940, the third of four sons of Fred Chase Koch, an oil engineer and entrepreneur, and the former Mary Clementine Robinson, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a Kansas City physician.

David and his brothers — Frederick, seven years older; Charles, five years older, and David’s twin, William — grew up in Wichita under the discipline of an emotionally distant father, who taught them to fight and compete with one another. That spirit carried into adulthood, engendering feuds and lawsuits that became public displays of avarice and fraternal malice.

Fred Koch made millions in the 1920s and ’30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. Fiercely anti-Communist, he co-founded the right-wing John Birch Society and created the Wichita company that became Koch Industries.

After Fred Koch’s death in 1967, his sons inherited significant stakes in the company. Charles became chairman, chief executive and the strategist behind its expansion into chemicals, pipelines and consumer goods, eventually making Koch Industries the nation’s second-largest private conglomerate, with interests in 60 countries, more than 100,000 employees and annual revenue of more than $100 billion.

David graduated from the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at MIT, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s in 1963. He worked for engineering firms in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City before joining the family company in 1970 as a technical services manager. But he did not settle in Wichita, as Charles had.

Instead, he founded a Koch Industries office in New York City, where he had already put down roots. He was known as a playboy whose penthouse parties were attended by models. In 1979, he was named president of his own division, Koch Engineering, which later morphed into Koch Chemical Technology Group. He became executive vice president of the parent company in 1981.

The oldest brother, Frederick, was the only sibling who took no active role in the family business; he attended Harvard and Yale and became a collector and patron of the arts. He was estranged from his father, who disowned and partly disinherited him, but Frederick’s shares in Koch Industries made him wealthy and proved critical later in a family fight for control of the company.

After earning a doctorate in chemical engineering, David’s twin, William, joined the company as a consultant in 1971, but never fit in. He moved from one job to another and complained that Charles was devoting too much money to libertarianism. In 1980, William attempted a boardroom coup to seize control of the company. It failed, and he was dismissed.

In a series of lawsuits that dragged on for years, William and Frederick claimed that Charles and David had cheated them out of $2 billion in a 1983 settlement that paid $1.1 billion for their 5.5 million shares of Koch Industries. Accusations of instability, greed and nefarious conduct peppered the trial, and at one point David sobbed as he testified of family tensions so bitter that private investigators had been hired to pilfer trash and bribe janitors to dig up dirt.

In 1998, a federal jury in Topeka, Kansas, finally ruled that the plaintiffs were owed nothing more, and in 2001 Charles, David and William reconciled, signing a settlement whose terms were not disclosed. They shared a meal for the first time in nearly two decades.

Setbacks and a Retirement

On Feb. 1, 1991, a Boeing 737 USAir flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles, carrying 89 people, including David Koch, crashed into a small commuter plane on landing. All 12 people on the commuter plane and 22 passengers on the jetliner were killed. In a smoky, crowded cabin, Koch pried open an exit and leaped to the tarmac, escaping with cuts and burned lungs.

He learned he had prostate cancer in 1992. He had surgery and radiation and hormone treatments that kept the disease in check for decades. All his brothers had prostate cancer and were said to have been cured.

Koch stepped away from his political and business interests in June 2018. In a letter to employees of Koch Industries announcing his brother’s retirement, Charles Koch said that David’s deteriorating health had made it impossible for him to continue working. The letter did not disclose the nature of his illness. David’s presence in social and political circles, which once ran at the highest levels, had been declining for several years.

A bachelor until he was 56, Koch married Julia Flesher, a former Adolfo fashion assistant, in 1996. They had three children: David Jr., Mary Julia and John Mark. All survive him.

Koch’s philanthropies went mostly to medical, educational and cultural institutions. He listed gifts of more than $395 million in recent decades. The largest was $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to build the David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care in a 23-story structure in Manhattan.

At Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the ballet venue became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 after he pledged $100 million. Another $100 million went to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for an ambulatory center, and he gave $65 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was a trustee, for the reconstruction of its plaza along Fifth Avenue. Both were named after him.

A dinosaur buff as a boy, Koch also gave millions to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing and to the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, for the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils, which opened in June.

“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/us/david-koch-dead.html" id="da528e56-6349-3309-a2ba-ee32b30ff58c">The New York Times</a>.

David Koch, Billionaire Who Fueled Right-Wing Movement, Dies at 79

David H. Koch, who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles from the corporate behemoth they ran and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, has died. He was 79.

Morgenthau’s wife, Lucinda Franks, said he died at Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness.

In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors, who came and went while he stayed on — for nearly nine years in the 1960s as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney.

For a Morgenthau — the scion of a family steeped in wealth, privilege and public service — he was strangely awkward, a wooden speaker who seemed painfully shy on the stump. His grandfather had been an ambassador in President Woodrow Wilson’s day, and his father was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary. His own early political forays, two runs for governor of New York, ended disastrously.

But from Jan. 1, 1975, when he took over from an interim successor to the legendary district attorney Frank S. Hogan, to Dec. 31, 2009, when he finally gave up his office in the old Criminal Courts Building on the edge of Chinatown, Morgenthau was the face of justice in Manhattan, a liberal Democrat elected nine times in succession, usually by landslides and with the endorsement of virtually all the political parties.

He presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget and a torrent of cases every year that fixed the fates of accused stock manipulators, extortionists, murderers, muggers, wife-beaters and sexual predators, and in turn helped to shape the quality of life for millions in a city of vast riches and untold hardships.

While he rarely went to court himself, Morgenthau, by his own count, supervised a total of 3.5 million cases over the years. Many of them were run-of-the-mill drug busts, but there were also highly publicized trials, like those of subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

His victories included the 2005 conviction of L. Dennis Kozlowski, chief executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtains and a $2 million birthday party for his wife on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia came to symbolize corporate greed. Found guilty of misappropriating more than $100 million from his company, Kozlowski was sentenced to eight to 25 years, although he won parole in 2014.

In a bizarre case, Morgenthau may have been the only prosecutor in history to convict a mother and son for murder without a body or a witness. The defendants, Sante and Kenneth Kimes, were accused of a scheme in 1998 to assume the identity of their landlady, 82-year-old socialite Irene Silverman, and take over her $7.7 million Manhattan mansion.

Her body was never found, but they were convicted of her murder and scores of other charges in 2000, partly on the basis of Sante Kimes’ notebooks detailing the plot and notes by the victim expressing fear of her lodgers. Sante Kimes denied everything, but Kenneth confessed later that his mother had used a stun gun on the victim and that he had then strangled her, stuffed the body in a bag and left it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Morgenthau’s pursuit of crime sometimes took him beyond Manhattan. In 2004, he won a bribery-conspiracy case against state Sen. Guy J. Velella, a Republican whose district lay entirely outside Manhattan, in the Bronx and Westchester County. Prosecutors using surveying equipment showed that one crime scene was within 500 yards of Manhattan, and argued successfully that it fell within their jurisdiction.

Federal prosecutors said Morgenthau also did not respect jurisdictional lines when he followed the money trails in white-collar crimes to Paraguay, Iran, the Cayman Islands and Belgium. Two weeks before he retired, Morgenthau reached a $536 million settlement with Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, which had helped Iranian, Libyan and Sudanese clients hide shady business in America.

But Morgenthau spent years working with federal prosecutors investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a global enterprise founded by Middle Eastern investors as a nexus for money that flowed in and out of drug cartels, terrorist groups and dictatorships. In 1991, the bank pleaded guilty to federal and state charges in what Morgenthau called the largest bank fraud in financial history, with losses estimated at $15 billion. It was forced to close, pay fines and forfeit all its assets.

He also indicted Clark M. Clifford, an adviser to Democratic presidents, and his law partner Robert A. Altman on charges of taking $40 million in bribes for helping the bank gain control of a large bank holding company. Clifford’s failing health led to the dismissal of charges against him, and Altman was acquitted.

Although he cultivated an image of imperviousness to public pressure, Morgenthau was often barraged with criticism, particularly in cases involving racial bias or police brutality. Critics said he was slow to respond to an epidemic of police corruption in the 1980s, including cases in which transit officers falsely arrested eight black men, who sued and collectively won $1 million in damages.

After the 1983 death in custody of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old black graffiti artist arrested for spray-painting on a subway station wall, six white transit officers who had handcuffed him and were seen forcing a nightstick down on his neck were acquitted of criminal charges in 1985. The verdicts touched off protests by people who contended that Morgenthau had mishandled the prosecution.

And in a case that seemed to confirm national impressions of New York City as a cesspool of crime and race hatred, Morgenthau was vilified for what many called a waffling prosecution of Goetz, a white loner who shot four young black men on a subway train in 1984 after they surrounded him and demanded money. One victim was left paralyzed and partly brain-damaged.

“You don’t look so bad, here’s another,” the gunman told one prone victim as he fired again and fled.

Variously hailed as a hero who acted in self-defense and denounced as a racist self-appointed vigilante, Goetz was first indicted only for illegal possession of a gun. After a public outcry, another grand jury indicted him for attempted murder. But the more serious charges were dismissed on a technicality, and he was finally convicted in 1987 on a weapons charge and served six months in jail.

The disappearance of a 6-year-old boy, Etan Patz, from a Manhattan street in 1979 — a case that generated a movement to raise public awareness, increase law-enforcement resources and pass new legislation to find missing children — riveted the city and the nation for decades, as theories and suspects came and went without enough evidence for a prosecution during Morgenthau’s tenure.

But the case was reopened by District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in 2012, and Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring Etan into a basement and attacking him, was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering the boy. Hernandez, 56, who had lived in New Jersey for years, was traced through a tip from his brother-in-law. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Morgenthau lost about a quarter of his cases, and some that he won proved to be miscarriages of justice. The most glaring example was the conviction of five young black and Latino men from Harlem, four of whom falsely confessed on videotape to the 1989 beating and rape of the 28-year-old investment banker who became known as the Central Park Jogger.

After serving terms of 7 1/2 to 13 years, the five were exonerated in 2002 after an imprisoned serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime. Morgenthau ordered a new investigation, including DNA tests that confirmed the Reyes account, and moved to clear the men in court.

“If only we had DNA 13 years ago,” Morgenthau lamented.

“I think it was his finest hour,” said Barry Scheck, a founding director of the Innocence Project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which promotes the use of DNA to reverse wrongful convictions. “Very few DAs would have done that, but he could with his stature, self-confidence, guts and commitment to principle. In that and other cases I’ve seen, I believe he has asked, ‘Is this the right thing to do?’”

Morgenthau was probably the most innovative prosecutor in the city’s history. To pursue financial crimes, he hired scores of accountants and detectives with financial expertise. He promoted DNA testing and other modern investigating techniques. Enlarging the homicide bureau and other units, he hired Spanish-speaking interpreters and hundreds of black, Hispanic and female prosecutors, and he created the office’s first sex-crimes and consumer affairs units.

He stressed the prosecution of career criminals, drug pushers, child pornographers, landlords who harassed tenants and perpetrators of attacks on gay men and lesbians. And throughout his tenure he opposed the death penalty, arguing that it was inhumane and was ineffective as a deterrent.

In later years, many New Yorkers wondered if he was too old for the job. As he ran for a ninth term in 2005, he faced rigorous opposition in a Democratic primary for the first time in decades. The challenger, Leslie Crocker Snyder, a former state court judge, was endorsed by a number of longtime Morgenthau supporters. But Morgenthau won the primary, 59-41%, and the general election, with 99% of the vote. He had run unopposed in general elections for 20 years, and did so again in this, his last race.

In a grandfatherly cardigan, his lanky legs propped on a desk and his wispy white hair afloat, Morgenthau looked like an aging prep-school master, not America’s best-known DA, a model for the prosecutor played by Steven Hill on the long-running TV drama “Law &amp; Order.” Some took his occasionally mismatched socks for absent-mindedness and his guttural voice for gruffness. He was typically mild-mannered.

Despite his highbrow upbringing, his inflections were New York: “had to” came out “hadda.” He loved Dunhill Montecruz cigars, allowing himself two a day until he quit years ago. His health seemed good even in his later years. But decades of strain in one of the city’s most demanding jobs were apparent in the stooped shoulders and the gaunt face lined with legal decisions.

By 2009, when he decided not to run for another term, Morgenthau was a virtual institution, despised by the enemies a prosecutor inevitably acquires but widely admired by New Yorkers and revered by generations of assistants he had hired and mentored, many of whom had gone on to judgeships and careers in politics and the law — extensions of his influence who regarded him as an embodiment of integrity.

His former protégés included Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court; Gov. Andrew Cuomo; former Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division; and Vance, who succeeded him as the district attorney.

Looking back on Morgenthau’s career, Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, said in 2011, “He turned the district attorney’s office into the premier law-enforcement office in the country, apart from the United States attorney general’s office.”

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919. His grandfather, the real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau Sr., was President Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in World War I and a prominent voice against Armenian genocide. Robert’s father, Henry Jr., was Roosevelt’s treasury secretary from 1934-45, and his mother, Elinor (Fatman) Morgenthau, was a niece of Herbert H. Lehman, the New York Democratic governor and U.S. senator.

Robert grew up with his brother, Henry III, and his sister, Joan, in New York City, on the family’s farm in upstate East Fishkill, New York, and in a privileged world of estates, private schools and social connections, notably with the Kennedys of Boston and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, New York. He attended the Lincoln School in Manhattan and graduated from the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1937 and from Amherst College in 1941 with high honors and a political science degree.

As a young man, he raced sailboats with Jack Kennedy off Cape Cod, spent memorable New Year’s Eves at the White House with his father, and in 1939 roasted hot dogs for King George VI and the future Queen Elizabeth II of Britain at the home of his Hudson Valley friends Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (On leave from the Navy during World War II, he served mint juleps to Winston Churchill and FDR on the lawn of his family’s apple farm.)

While studying at Amherst, Morgenthau met Martha Pattridge, a Smith College student. They were married in 1943 and had five children. His first wife died in 1972. In 1977 he married Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. They had two children.

Besides his wife, he is survived by the children of his first marriage, Jenny Morgenthau, Anne Morgenthau Grand, Elinor Morgenthau, Robert P. Morgenthau and Barbara Morgenthau Lee; the children of his second marriage, Joshua Franks Morgenthau and Amy Elinor Morgenthau; and by six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 2014, Franks published a memoir, “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me,” that focused on her long and passionate union with a man almost 30 years her senior.

Morgenthau had been in the Naval Reserve in college, and after graduation he went on active duty as an ensign. He passed his physical exam by concealing the near-deafness in his right ear from a boyhood mastoid infection. An officer aboard three destroyers and a minesweeper during World War II, he survived enemy attacks and won decorations for bravery under fire.

His destroyer, the USS Lansdale, was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers in the Mediterranean off Algiers on April 20, 1944. Cut by explosions, the ship went down with a heavy loss of life. Morgenthau, the executive officer, saved several shipmates, leapt into the water and swam for three hours in the darkness until he and others were picked up by an American warship. In 1945 his ship, the USS Harry F. Bauer, was hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane off Iwo Jima, but its 550-pound bomb did not explode.

Mustering out after the war as a lieutenant commander, he enrolled in Yale Law School, finished a three-year course in two years and graduated in 1948. He soon joined the New York law firm Patterson, Belknap &amp; Webb and became the personal assistant to the senior partner, Robert P. Patterson, who had been President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of war.

Besides practicing corporate law, Patterson defended people swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, including actor Edward G. Robinson, who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and resisted blacklisting. “Unlike most Wall Street lawyers of that day, he would take loyalty cases,” Morgenthau said of Patterson, one of his early heroes. “He didn’t care what anybody else thought. He did what he thought was right.”

Patterson died in a plane crash in 1952. Morgenthau was supposed to have been on the flight — he had accompanied his boss on every other trip — but stayed behind to write a brief. Morgenthau was a partner in the firm from 1954-61.

After practicing law for 12 years, Morgenthau, who had dabbled in Democratic politics in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he lived, jumped on the Kennedy bandwagon in 1960 and became chairman of Bronx Citizens for Kennedy. His reward was appointment in 1961 as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, embracing Manhattan, the Bronx and six upstate counties.

His most notable early case was the 1962 conviction of State Supreme Court Justice J. Vincent Keogh and Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo, a mobster who got his nickname ducking subpoenas and convictions, on charges of attempted bribery to influence a federal bankruptcy fraud case.

But after 17 months in office, Morgenthau left at the urging of the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for a quixotic 1962 run to unseat Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a rising star in the Republican Party’s moderate wing. It was a fiasco. Distant and seemingly distracted at campaign stops, from which he sometimes wandered away, Morgenthau lost by 500,000 votes.

After the election, President John F. Kennedy reappointed him to the federal prosecutor’s job, and he waded in zealously. He created the office’s first special unit to investigate Wall Street and over the next seven years brought charges against stock manipulators, money launderers, tax lawyers and Internal Revenue Service accountants. He also indicted 150 organized crime figures.

Always close to the Kennedys, Morgenthau was with Robert Kennedy at his home in McLean, Virginia, on Nov. 22, 1963, when the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called to report that the president had been shot in Dallas. Years later, facing criticism for hiring John F. Kennedy Jr. as an assistant district attorney, he snapped, “If having a famous father were a disqualification, I wouldn’t have gotten my job.”

He had overwhelming conviction rates but lost two cases against Roy M. Cohn, the aggressive former counsel to the anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. Acquitted in 1964 of perjury in a stock swindle and in 1967 of mail fraud in a bus-line takeover, Cohn accused the prosecutor of waging a vendetta against him.

“A man is not immune from prosecution just because a United States attorney happens not to like him,” Morgenthau remarked.

In 1968 he again convicted Corallo, this time for bribing James L. Marcus, a former city water commissioner, to win contracts for renovating the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx. In 1969, Carmine De Sapio, the last Tammany Hall power broker, whose prescription dark glasses gave him a sinister air, was also convicted of conspiring to bribe Marcus, who went to prison for taking kickbacks.

After resisting pressure from the Nixon administration for a year, Morgenthau resigned as federal prosecutor in January 1970. He was briefly a deputy to Mayor John V. Lindsay, but quit to again run for governor. Short of funds and support, he soon withdrew from the Democratic primary. Rockefeller defeated the Democratic candidate, Arthur J. Goldberg, in the general election.

Morgenthau practiced law privately until 1974. He then jumped into a special election necessitated by the resignation (and impending death) of Hogan, Manhattan’s district attorney for 32 years, and easily defeated the interim appointee, Richard H. Kuh.

When he took office in 1975, the city was in trouble, threatened by bankruptcy, public-employee strikes and a fraying social fabric. Buildings were abandoned and burned. Garbage piled up in the streets. Graffiti covered subways and buses. Crime was rampant, with 648 murders in Manhattan alone that year. (There were 58 the year he left office.)

The prosecutor’s office was in disarray, too. Many of its 195 lawyers had no phones. Its $8 million budget ran out halfway through the fiscal year. There was little expertise for combating sophisticated criminality. Case processing was inefficient, with different lawyers handling arraignments, indictments and trials.

Morgenthau streamlined the system, achieving greater speed and higher conviction rates by having one lawyer see each case through to completion. His growing influence helped win new laws mandating forfeiture of gains from criminal activity and limiting jury trials for misdemeanors.

His victories included the 1981 convictions of Chapman in the killing of John Lennon, and of a Metropolitan Opera stagehand, Craig Crimmins, in the murder of a violinist at Lincoln Center; the 1988 manslaughter guilty plea of Chambers in the strangulation of Jennifer Levin in Central Park; the 1989 manslaughter conviction of Joel Steinberg in the beating death of his adopted daughter, Lisa; and the convictions in 1991 and 1992 of seven men in the subway murder of a Utah tourist, Brian Watkins.

At the end of his last term, Morgenthau was 90 and had served three years longer than Hogan. He joined the Manhattan law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &amp; Katz. Besides pro bono work, he wrote numerous op-ed articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News and The New York Times calling for immigration reform, crackdowns on illegal guns, and improved care for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2009 after announcing that he would not seek a 10th term, Morgenthau ruminated on the night in 1944 when his ship was torpedoed by Nazi warplanes and went down with 47 of his shipmates.

“I was swimming around without a life jacket,” he recalled. “I made a number of promises to the Almighty, at a time when I didn’t have much bargaining power.”

“That I would try to do something useful with my life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/nyregion/robert-morgenthau-dead.html" id="af2147c1-3af7-3bf6-a33a-7b0c60d0ea03">The New York Times</a>.

Robert Morgenthau, Longtime Manhattan District Attorney, Dies at 99

Robert M. Morgenthau, a courtly Knickerbocker patrician who waged war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York state and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 99.

For 25 years, from the dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s to the threshold of almost routine launchings in the 1980s, Kraft played crucial roles in the space program. He devised the protocols for exploration beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, orchestrated early orbital missions and spacewalks, and developed projects that put astronauts on the moon and into the first reusable space shuttles.

Aside from the astronauts who made history — including Alan B. Shepard Jr., with his suborbital flight; John Glenn, in orbiting the Earth; and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to land on the lunar surface — Kraft was the most familiar face of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s early years, the steady ground commander who often explained missions to a rapt world at news conferences.

In an era of perilous experiments hastened by the Soviet success of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Kraft presided over triumphal breakthroughs in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. He also stood by helplessly when a fire killed three astronauts on a launchpad in 1967, but he helped devise the ingenious plan that saved the Apollo 13 crew after an explosion crippled their spacecraft en route to the moon in 1970.

At a time when there were no rules or procedures for space travel, Kraft, a brilliant aeronautical engineer, virtually wrote the book for NASA. He originated the concept of mission control, with authority vested in a ground-based flight director, not in a pilot-astronaut soaring through space at 7 miles a second who might be overwhelmed by pressures, especially during launch or re-entry.

Kraft also developed the templates for a generation of space exploration: global tracking and communications networks; instruments to monitor the condition of astronauts; spacecraft propulsion and operating systems; flight plans; emergency procedures; techniques for splashdowns and recoveries at sea; even programs to train and coordinate the work of thousands of ground personnel. His plans for each mission were thicker than the New York telephone books of those days.

Appearing before hundreds of reporters as NASA’s spokesman in the early missions, first at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and later in Houston, he seemed a mild-mannered, soft-spoken technocrat. But in the windowless mission control room, he became a blunt taskmaster, demanding obedience and precision from subordinates and astronauts.

Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the legendary founder of NASA’s mission control, who directed America’s first piloted orbital flights, oversaw the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, died on Monday in Houston, two days after the 50th anniversary of that historic moment on the moon. He was 95.

Robert D. McFadden

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