Joseph Duffey, educator and antiwar activist behind influential Senate campaign, dies at 88
Source: Washington Post
By Harrison Smith
Feb. 27, 2021 at 12:54 p.m. EST
Joseph D. Duffey, a coal miner’s son who led two large universities and two federal agencies and whose enduring luster in the Democratic Party stemmed from his unsuccessful but high-profile Senate bid in 1970, an antiwar campaign that drew support from Hollywood star Paul Newman and was staffed by a young Bill Clinton, died Feb. 25 in Washington. He was 88.
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A former United Church of Christ minister with a PhD in the history of theology, Dr. Duffey chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Jimmy Carter and led the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1982 to 1991. After a brief stint as president of American University, he served six years as the last director of the U.S. Information Agency.
But he was perhaps best known for his political activism in the 1960s and early ’70s, when he helped organize Freedom Rides to the South and immersed himself in liberal politics, distressed by what he called the “carnage in Vietnam.” He was a leader of Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy’s (D-Minn.) antiwar presidential campaign in Connecticut, where he was teaching at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, and succeeded economist John Kenneth Galbraith as head of Americans for Democratic Action.
In 1970, at age 38, he won the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut, beating a wealthy Stamford businessman favored by the state’s party machine. Although Dr. Duffey lost in the general election to Lowell Weicker, a Republican congressman, his campaign made him one of the nation’s most prominent antiwar activists and a hero to young political idealists, including a Yale law student named Bill Clinton.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/joseph-duffey-dead/2021/02/27/957b659a-784d-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html
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