William McC. Blair Jr., a low-key eminence of Washington high society who had been a law partner and confidant of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson II in the 1950s, held ambassadorships in Europe and Asia, and helped raise money to complete construction of the Kennedy Center, died Aug. 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
The cause was complications from hypertension, said his wife, Catherine “Deeda” Blair, a noted philanthropist in medical research.
Tall, darkly handsome and exuding patrician confidence and breeding, Blair was a scion of a prominent and moneyed Chicago family that owed its fortune to the invention of the mechanical reaper. His second cousin was Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick, a force in conservative Republican politics.
Blair’s political sympathies developed in direct opposition to those of his formidable cousin. Although largely unknown to the wider public, Blair was an influential backstage figure in politics, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, through his connections to Stevenson and the Kennedy political dynasty. In those circles, he was admired for his sharp political instincts and his droll manner as well as for his prowess on the tennis court.
He had first come to Stevenson’s attention in 1940 when both were involved in a political action group that championed American intervention in World War II. It was a notable stance for Blair, given the aggressively isolationist views of McCormick and the Tribune.
Blair, who was decorated for service in World War II, earned a law degree and by virtue of his social pedigree and strong grades was recruited to a top Chicago firm. He found the legal work stultifying and, having volunteered for Stevenson’s successful 1948 run for Illinois governor, soon became an invaluable aide-de-camp. Stevenson biographer Porter McKeever noted Blair’s “talent for organization, liaison and general troubleshooting.”
Blair was part of the inner circle that advised Stevenson as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. In both runs, Stevenson was widely perceived as the party’s sacrificial lamb against Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander during the war.
Eisenhower won in landslide victories, but Stevenson remained a force in Democratic politics, worshipped by liberals and intellectuals for his erudite speaking style, his internationalist view of foreign policy and his progressive stance on the nuclear arms race.
In the 1960 presidential race, Blair was Stevenson’s emissary to the Democratic presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts. A long-standing social friend of Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, Eunice and R. Sargent Shriver Jr., Blair helped engineer Stevenson’s endorsement of Kennedy.
Another close Stevenson aide, Newton N. Minow, said Stevenson’s approval made Kennedy more palatable to those in the party’s liberal wing who had withheld their support. Their wavering, Minow said, owed to a deep distaste for the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr., long a notorious figure in business and politics.
In return, President Kennedy named Stevenson the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson’s Chicago law partners — Blair, Minow and W. Willard Wirtz — were tapped for government duty, leading Stevenson to memorably quip, “I only regret that I have but one law firm to give to my country.”
Kennedy appointed Wirtz secretary of labor, Minow chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and Blair ambassador to Denmark.
Blair showed a flair for diplomacy in Denmark, where he not only hosted soirees in Copenhagen but made frequent forays into the countryside, greeting mayors of even the smallest communities. Months into his job he wed Catherine Gerlach, a Chicago socialite known as Deeda and whose chic fashion tastes made her a staple of international best-dressed lists.
After three years in Denmark — and following Kennedy’s assassination — Blair remained in diplomatic service under President Lyndon B. Johnson as ambassador to the Philippines. His time in Manila, 1964 to 1967 coincided with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Blair often found himself defending American interests, including flyover rights for bombing runs over Vietnam, at a time of surging antiwar protests. The demonstrations targeted the presence of American bases on the islands and the fatal shooting by U.S. servicemen of locals found trespassing on military installations.
In that turbulent atmosphere, Blair was burned in effigy, and one political leader called for his expulsion.
He returned of his own accord, settling in Washington and receiving an appointment as general director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was a top administrative position that involved fundraising for the center’s $56 million completion and handling public and congressional relations.
The center opened in 1971 after more than six years of construction, and Blair left the following year amid intensifying battles with Congress over the center’s mounting financial needs.
The son of an investment banker, William McCormick Blair Jr. was born in Chicago on Oct. 24, 1916. He said his most formative influence was his maternal grandmother, Louise deKoven Bowen, a suffragist and social reformer who was chief patron of Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement in Chicago.
He graduated in 1935 from the Groton preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he befriended Louis Auchincloss, the future novelist and chronicler of the upper crust. Blair completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford University in 1940, then joined the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, whose Chicago chapter was led by Stevenson.
During World War II, Blair did intelligence work for the Army Air Forces in the China-Burma-India theater and received the Bronze Star Medal. He received a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1947.
After leaving the Kennedy Center job, Blair was a presence on Washington’s social and fundraising circuit.
At their estate on tony Foxhall Road — a Georgian mansion profiled in the pages of Vogue and House Beautiful — the Blairs hosted elaborate dinner parties for Democratic candidates and for HIV/AIDS and cancer research.
For many years, the Blairs were vice presidents of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation for medical research.
Their son, William Blair III, had bipolar disorder and committed suicide in 2004. Not long afterward, the Blairs relocated to New York. Deeda Blair is Blair’s only immediate survivor.
Profiles of Blair invariably noted that, despite his Kennedy Center post, he had limited interest in the arts. An exception was movies, which he devoured sometimes at the rate of three a day. He traced his cinema interest to politics, having befriended actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall because of their support for Stevenson in 1952.