WASHINGTON — Burke Marshall, Robert F. Kennedy's right-hand man in the Justice Department's struggle to desegregate the South in the early 1960s, died Monday at his home in Newtown, Conn. He was 80 and suffered from myelodysplasia, a bone marrow disorder.
As the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division, Marshall helped manage pivotal events of the tumultuous era, from the federally supervised integration of public universities in Mississippi and Alabama to the enactment of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
After leaving government, he became general counsel of IBM Corp., and later joined the faculty of the Yale Law School, his alma mater, where he taught for more than 30 years until his death.
Marshall was an unlikely crusader -- a rising partner at a Washington law firm, Covington & Burling, where he specialized in antitrust law -- when Kennedy tapped him for the civil rights post in 1961.
Quiet and unassuming, Marshall thought he had blown his job interview with the new attorney general.
But Kennedy hired him because his advisors had convinced him that Marshall was the brightest young lawyer in Washington. His lack of background on civil rights issues was considered a plus; the new administration feared that hiring a partisan might hinder its agenda.
"No man ever came into the U.S. government with looks more deceiving than Marshall," Edwin O. Guthman, a former Los Angeles Times national editor and press aide to Kennedy at both the Justice Department and in the Senate, wrote in "We Band of Brothers," a memoir of the Kennedy years. "Beyond a solemn, self-effacing manner, a slight build, spectacles and a creaky voice were a brilliant mind, a great amount of exceptionally penetrating logic and a terse, dry sense of humor."
Marshall and Kennedy "became the closest of partners and friends, and were deeply trustful and respectful of each other," Guthman said in an interview. "It was like it was made in heaven. Yet you never would have thought of it when they first met."
To civil rights leaders, Marshall became a voice of reason in a developing storm.
John Lewis, a leader of the Freedom Riders that traveled the South starting in 1961 to test a Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in public transportation, said Marshall quickly came to be known as someone to call if trouble arose.
