William Rogers, who died on January 2nd aged 87, was one of Richard Nixon's closest and most loyal friends, but was treated abominably by the US president, whose early political career he had saved from extinction.
As Nixon's secretary of state between 1969 and 1973, William Rogers was repeatedly sidelined by the White House. The president conspired with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to withhold from William Rogers all knowledge of the administration's three main foreign policy initiatives - the US reconciliation with China, its secret approaches to Hanoi to end the Vietnam War, and its strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.
Even worse, having agreed that William Rogers should determine US Middle East policy following the Six-Day War of 1967, Nixon and Kissinger deliberately undermined the socalled Rogers plan for a return of the Israeli-occupied West Bank territories, with consequences that we are living with to this day. The Clinton administration's recent negotiations have been largely based on what William Rogers proposed three decades ago.
Later, Nixon and Kissinger offered belated apologies for their behaviour, but William Rogers kept his own counsel. He wrote no memoirs, observing that it was "hard to write interestingly without being critical of people". In the aftermath of Watergate, a scandal from which Rogers was one of the few senior figures to emerge unstained, he described the disgraced president as a great world leader whom history would eventually rehabilitate.
William Rogers was born in Norfolk, New York, and educated at Colgate and Cornell universities. He first met his patron on Capitol Hill in 1947; he was a senate committee lawyer, Nixon a recently-elected Republican congressman. Their collaboration began when William Rogers encouraged Nixon to pursue charges against Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official accused of secret Communist Party membership. In spite of President Truman's dismissal of the allegations, William Rogers was convinced they were true and persuaded Nixon to keep up the pressure. Amid huge controversy, Hiss was eventually jailed for perjury.
The case established Nixon so firmly as a rising star that he was nominated as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in the 1952 presidential election. But his candidacy was threatened by accusations that he operated a secret slush fund financed by California business interests. As Eisenhower distanced himself from him, Nixon turned desperately to William Rogers, who largely drafted the famous Checkers television broadcast, built around the Nixon daughters' black and white puppy, that kept the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket.
William Rogers's support for the Eisenhower campaign was initially rewarded with the job of assistant attorney general. Later, as attorney general, he found himself embroiled in the racial unrest sparked in Arkansas by the US Supreme Court's desegregation rulings. He played a large part in drafting the original Civil Rights Act, and later set up the justice department's civil rights division, which established the present legal framework against racial and other discrimination in the US.
With the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, William Rogers returned to private practice. Among his clients was the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, whom he represented in a libel action that eventually reached the Supreme Court, and significantly enhanced newspapers' ability to comment adversely on public figures.
His nomination as secretary of state in 1969 was a deliberate move by Nixon to pick someone with little knowledge of foreign policy in the hope that this would nullify the influence of a department the president saw as a hotbed of his Democratic opponents. In his memoirs, Kissinger also speculated that the choice might have been founded on Nixon's neurotic need to establish supremacy over a friend on whom he had been dependent for too long.
The inevitable result was a growing alienation between the president and William Rogers, and a ferocious bureaucratic war between William Rogers and Kissinger. In the end, even Nixon found it intolerable and, in 1973, abruptly demanded William Rogers's resignation and gave the job to Kissinger.
After this political humiliation, William Rogers again retreated into the law. He was, nonetheless, picked by President Reagan to head the official inquiry into the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. One of his early conclusions was that the accident had come not simply through a mechanical failure, but from deep-seated administrative flaws in NASA. He consequently declined to take evidence from any of the officials directly involved in the launch.
In a fierce attack on the space agency's inappropriately machoculture, he recommended that "mission schedules should be based on what NASA can do safely and well, not on what is possible with maximum effort".
It was yet another product of a sharply analytical mind which had, down the years, been focused on problems ranging from the war against New York gangsters to the use of a small dog as a diversion from his boss's seamy politics.
William Pierce Rogers: born 1913; died, January 2001