William Patrick Clark Jr

During Reagan’s first term, Mr. Clark — who served as deputy secretary of state, national security adviser and secretary of the interior — was understood to be pre-eminent among presidential aides. Time magazine called him the second most powerful man in the White House. Mr. Clark joined Reagan in his first campaign for governor of California in 1966 and served as his chief of staff in Sacramento, with the formal titles of cabinet secretary and executive secretary. He recruited Edwin Meese III and Michael K. Deaver, who would later play major roles in the Reagan presidency. In 1966, Governor Reagan appointed him to a state judgeship, then to a higher court and finally to the State Supreme Court. He preferred to be called Judge. As national security adviser from January 1982 to October 1983, Mr. Clark was among the administration’s most forceful advocates for accelerating United States military involvement in Central America, warning that countries in that region could fall to communism like dominoes without American assistance. Mr. Clark moved from the No. 2 job in the State Department to the national security post after his predecessor, Richard Allen, resigned in January 1982. When Reagan announced his appointment, he promised the job would be upgraded with a “direct reporting relationship to the president.” After Interior Secretary James G. Watt was forced to resign after a joke that simultaneously managed to offend blacks, women and the disabled, Mr. Clark volunteered to take the job. Starting in November 1983, he was credited with polishing the agency’s tattered image. He stayed in the post for the rest of Reagan’s first term. William Clark, who attended Roman Catholic schools, went to Stanford, but left to study for the priesthood at the Augustine Novitiate in New Hamburg, N.Y. Only two hours of speech were permitted each day. After a year, he briefly returned to Stanford, then moved on to the University of Santa Clara, but did not graduate. He then attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, but was drafted into the Army in 1953 and spent two years as a counterintelligence agent in Germany. He returned to law school as a night student while working as an insurance adjuster. He did not finish but, studying on his own, passed the California bar exam in 1958 and helped establish a private law firm. Mr. Clark’s wife, the former Joan Brauner, died in 2009. In addition to his son Paul, he is survived by two other sons, Pete and Colin; his daughters, Monica Copeland and Nina Negranti; his sisters, Margaret Krebs and Cynthia Heffner; nine grandchildren; and one great-grandson.