In Memoriam: Harris L. Wofford - Scranton Citizen
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In Memoriam: Harris L. Wofford

Liberal lion and former Pennsylvania United States Senator Harris L. Wofford died yesterday in Washington, D.C.  A Democrat, Wofford marched with Martin Luther King, served in the Kennedy White House as special assistant for civil rights, helped establish the Peace Corps, led Bryn Mawr College, and served in the cabinet of Governor Robert P. Casey.  He was 92.

According to the Associated Press, Wofford died from complications from a fall taken in his Washington, D.C. apartment.

The liberal intellectual was a rare breed in Pennsylvania politics.  Born in New York City, he was a lifetime advocate of national service and volunteering.  As an advisor on the Kennedy campaign, he is credited with helping swing the election – one of the closest in American history – away from Richard Nixon.  When King was imprisoned shortly before the election, Wofford and Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who faced the specter of her husband sentenced to hard labor in a Georgia prison for a minor traffic violation while she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy.  This prompted Martin Luther King Sr. to switch his endorsement from Richard Nixon to Kennedy.

Wofford served in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations as a special assistant and later associate director of the newly created Peace Corps.  He was the fifth president of Bryn Mawr College from 1970 to 1978, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party in 1986, and worked under Governor Casey Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry.

In 1991, following the sudden and tragic death of Republican U.S. Senator John Heinz, Casey appointed Wofford to the vacant seat.  In the special election the followed he defeated former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh in a stunning upset managed by Casey political operatives Paul Begala and James Carville.  The win propelled the two to stardom and then Governor Bill Clinton had Wofford on his short list of potential vice presidential running mates.

Three years later, as the wave of the Gingrich Revolution washed over America, he was defeated in a particularly negative race by Rick Santorum.

He was an early booster of the political fortunes of then U.S. Senator Barack Obama and helped propel the outsider to victory as a surrogate in the Iowa caucuses.

In 1948, Wofford married Clare Lindgren and they later had three children. She died in 1996.  In 2016, Wofford announced that he would marry interior designer Matthew Charlton, a man fifty years his junior and his companion since 2001.

In his inaugural address as President of Bryn Mawr College, he challenged students to use their intellects.  He said, “All the world is in a crisis of authority and a crisis of the intellect — of law and reason. There will be no way out unless people dare to trust their intellects in action—unless on a scale never known before reason is used with courage to right a careening world.”

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