Warren Christopher, 1925-2011

By James Fallows

Let me break into the sequence of guest voices here to express sadness at news that Warren Christopher has just died, at age 85.

He is best known as the first Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, and his public image was of a very careful, even colorless person. I had a much more vivid and warmly positive impression of him. Even when I was a child he was a well-known figure in my home town, because he had attended the local college, the University of Redlands, under the Navy's V-12 program, before wartime service and transferring to USC to finish college. He had gone on to Stanford Law School and a Supreme Court clerkship for Justice William O. Douglas, before becoming a prominent California legal and political figure by the mid-1960s. He kept up contacts in our little town, including with my dad, who was an exact contemporary and had become a Navy doctor through the V-12 program in Pennsylvania before moving west.