Norbert A. Schlei, key lawyer in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who found legal underpinning for the 1962 blockade of Cuba, wrote landmark civil rights legislation and once waged a strong bid to replace an entrenched Republican California secretary of state, has died. He was 73.
Schlei died Thursday at an acute care hospital in Los Angeles of infections caused by long-term immobility, his wife, Joan, said Saturday. She said Schlei had been virtually unconscious since suffering a heart attack March 25, 2002, while jogging in Santa Monica.
Considered a legal wunderkind, Schlei was the Democratic candidate for the 57th California Assembly District in 1962 when he was tapped by President John F. Kennedy as an assistant attorney general in charge of the office of legal counsel.
At the time, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, the president's younger brother, quipped that Schlei -- only 33 -- had been named so there would finally be "someone younger" than he in the Justice Department.
But Schlei, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Harlan after graduating from Yale Law School, proved a scholarly asset to the Kennedys and later to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Atty. Gen. Nicolas Katzenbach during crises and in forging the landmark Kennedy-Johnson civil rights reforms.
Schlei was the principal draftsman of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Immigration Reform Act of 1967.
"I felt I was lucky," Schlei told the New York Times in 1995, "because I was able to turn what ability I had to something important."
Schlei had barely moved into his quarters in August 1962 as head of the office of legal counsel just vacated by Katzenbach, when he was put to work. The University of Mississippi had refused to allow James Meredith, a black student, to enroll that fall, and Kennedy sent Schlei to Oxford, Miss., to get Meredith into the school.
Hardly a month later, as the Cuban Missile Crisis developed, Kennedy asked Schlei to study the legal basis for presidential action in connection with Cuba after U.S. surveillance confirmed that Russia was installing surface-to-air missile sites in the Communist island nation. Schlei responded with what became Kennedy's October justification for a naval quarantine on all offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba.
