NEW YORK — William W. Scranton, the moderate Republican governor of Pennsylvania from 1963 to 1967 who lost a run for his party’s presidential nomination in 1964 and later served as the US representative to the United Nations, died Sunday in Montecito, Calif. He was 96.
The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, Mike DeVanney, a family spokesman, said.
A descendant of Mayflower colonists and the founders of Scranton, Pa., and an heir to a fortune in railroads and utilities, the soft-spoken Governor Scranton was heralded as a “Kennedy Republican” in the early 1960s. His amiable patrician style and his independence as a fiscal conservative who supported civil rights and other liberal programs proved popular with voters. He seemed poised for a national political future.
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But after he won a seat in Congress in 1960 and a stunning victory for governor in 1962, his rosy political horizons clouded over. An effort to wrest the 1964 Republican presidential nomination from the archconservative Senator Barry M. Goldwater fizzled. State law limited him to one term as governor. And his last months in office dissolved into a bitter struggle with Democrats trying to wing him politically.
Governor Scranton abruptly announced that he would not run “ever again for any public office under any circumstances.” His decision to abandon an obviously promising political career was greeted with derision and skepticism. But it turned out that he meant what he said.
Though not yet 50, he became a youngish elder statesman. He served on government commissions, advised the White House on arms control and took on presidential missions, for Richard M. Nixon in the Middle East, for Gerald R. Ford at the United Nations, for Jimmy Carter on urban policy and intelligence oversight, and for Ronald Reagan on Soviet-US relations.
William Warren Scranton was born on July 19, 1917, in Madison, Conn., where his family had a summer home. He was the youngest of four children and the only son of Worthington Scranton, a descendant of New England and Pennsylvania pioneers, and Marion Margery Warren Scranton, a Republican national committeewoman for decades, whose ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in 1620.
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He attended the Scranton Country Day School, the Fessenden School in West Newton, Mass., and the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., excelling in tennis, debate, and dramatics. He studied history at Yale and graduated in 1939.
He left Yale Law School in 1941 to join the US Army Air Forces; he became a pilot, ferrying planes in many parts of the world, but did not see combat in World War II.
In 1942, he married Mary Lowe Chamberlin. Besides his wife, he leaves a daughter, Susan Scranton Dawson; three sons, William, Joseph, and Peter; and three grandchildren.
After the war, he finished law school at Yale, joined a Scranton law firm, then became involved in textbook publishing, banking, and industrial development in Pennsylvania.
Active in the state Republican Party in the 1950s, Governor Scranton drew the attention of President Eisenhower and was invited to Washington in 1959 to be a special assistant to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and later his successor, Christian Herter.
A year later he ran for Congress in a Democratic stronghold, but won easily. In his 1961-63 term, he voted with the Democrats on foreign aid, civil rights, and the Peace Corps. In 1962, at the behest of Eisenhower, he ran for governor against Mayor Richardson Dilworth of Philadelphia and won decisively. His name was nationally known as the 1964 presidential race began.
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Moderate and liberal Republicans — concerned about the drift of their party to the right and fearing that the polarizing conservative views of the front-runner, Goldwater of Arizona, might bring defeat in November — first coalesced around Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York as an alternative. But when the Rockefeller bandwagon lost steam, the dissident focus shifted to Governor Scranton.
Denouncing Goldwater as an agent of fear, Governor Scranton won the support of 10 state delegations at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. But Goldwater captured the nomination on the first ballot. He lost the election to President Lyndon B. Johnson by one of the largest landslides in history.
As Pennsylvania’s chief executive, Governor Scranton pushed education reforms, creating a state community college system, a state Board of Education, and a Higher Education Assistance Agency. He increased the sales tax to subdue a deficit, brought unemployment to new lows, and promoted state trade nationally and abroad. He could not run for reelection in 1966, but helped write a new constitution that allowed governors a second term.
Over the years, Governor Scranton was a director of IBM, Scott Paper, The New York Times, Pan American Airways, Mobil Oil, and other corporations. He was also a Yale trustee, president of the National Municipal League and a White House workhorse for domestic and international tasks.
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