John Brademas

John Brademas, a political, financial and academic dynamo who served 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of New York University in an all-but-seamless quest to promote education, the arts and a liberal agenda, died on Monday July 11 2016 in Manhattan. He was 89. As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Mr. Brademas became known as Mr. Education and Mr. Arts. He sponsored bills that nearly doubled federal aid for elementary and secondary education in the mid-1960s and that created the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. He was also instrumental in annual financing of the arts and humanities and in the passage of Project Head Start, the National Teachers Corps and college tuition aid and loan programs. He opposed the Vietnam War and many defense measures, rebuked President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal and voted for civil rights legislation, environmental protections, day care programs and services for the elderly and people with disabilities. He became majority whip, the House’s third-ranking official, and was re-elected 10 times in a mostly conservative district, winning up to 79 percent of the vote. But he was swept out of office in the 1980 Republican landslide that elected Ronald Reagan president. Mr. Brademas lobbied hard for the N.Y.U. job and, as president from 1981 to 1992, transformed the nation’s largest private university from a commuter school into one of the world’s premier residential research and teaching institutions. He joined the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (he later became chairman), the New York Stock Exchange, the Rockefeller Foundation, RCA and the Loews Corporation. In 1945, he graduated from Central High School in nearby South Bend, where he was valedictorian and the star quarterback on the football team. He enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he joined a Navy officer training program. After his freshman year, he won a scholarship and transferred to Harvard, a change he called head-spinning. He became a top student and president of the Wesley Foundation, the campus Methodist student group. In successive summers, he worked at an auto plant in South Bend, lived among Indians in Mexico and was an intern at the United Nations temporary headquarters in Lake Success, N.Y. After graduating from Harvard with high honors in 1949, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and in 1954 earned a social studies doctorate. After losing races in 1954 and 1956, he gained political experience as an aide to two members of Congress and in Adlai E. Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. He taught political science at St. Mary’s College for a year, was active in civic affairs and in 1958 finally won the seat for Indiana’s Third Congressional District. Mr. Brademas was unmarried for most of his political career, but in 1977 he married Mary Ellen Briggs, a third-year medical student at Georgetown University and the mother of four children by a former marriage. After the couple moved to New York, she became a dermatologist at N.Y.U. Medical Center. She survives him, as do three stepchildren, John Briggs, Katherine Goldberg and Jane Murray; a sister, Eleanor Brazeau; and six step-grandchildren. His stepson Basil Briggs Jr. died in 2003.