William W Scranton

Moderate Republican governor of Pennsylvania from 1963 to 1967, who lost a run for his party’s presidential nomination in 1964 and later served as the United States representative to the United Nations. Heir to a fortune in railroads and utilities, the soft-spoken Mr. Scranton was heralded as a “Kennedy Republican” in the early 1960s. He seemed poised for a national political future. But after he won a seat in Congress in 1960 and a stunning victory for governor in 1962, his rosy political horizons clouded over. An effort to wrest the 1964 Republican presidential nomination from the archconservative Senator Barry M. Goldwater fizzled. He was the youngest of four children and the only son of Worthington Scranton, a descendant of New England and Pennsylvania pioneers, and Marion Margery Warren Scranton, a Republican national committeewoman for decades, whose ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in 1620. He attended the Scranton Country Day School, the Fessenden School in West Newton, Mass., and the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. He studied history at Yale and graduated in 1939. He left Yale Law School in 1941 to join the Army Air Force; he became a pilot, ferrying planes in many parts of the world, and a captain, but did not see combat in World War II. In 1942 he married Mary Lowe Chamberlin. Besides his wife, survivors include a daughter, Susan Scranton Dawson; three sons, William, Joseph and Peter; and three grandchildren.