Former Sec. of State Rogers Dies

Wednesday, January 3rd 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) â€” 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. 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 the Washington area.

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.

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 â€” 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.