Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
My Father's Estate A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: "I saw that your father had died," she wrote. "He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us. He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service. The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15 years ago. There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry. But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero. My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence. He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called "Route 29") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled "Only You") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete. Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. ("He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' " my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.) This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it. So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, "Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax." The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.

<question>:
What was the apparent status of the father that passed away?

<options>:
A Locally-famous mayor
B Agent in the CIA
C Independent business person
D Political figurehead

<answer>:

D