Harry C. McPherson Jr., Counsel to L.B.J., Dies at 82 Harry C. McPherson Jr., an influential White House counsel and speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 to 1969 and the author of a classic insider's memoir on Washington-style politics, died on Thursday in Bethesda, Md. His death was from complications of cancer, his wife, Mary Patricia McPherson, said. A liberal from Texas who read literature and history for pleasure, Mr. McPherson went to Washington in 1956 "to do good," by his own account, a naïve, idealistic young lawyer who, like many Americans, thought political integrity meant making decisions based on sound principles and standing up for your convictions. Then he went to work for Lyndon Johnson. Thirteen years later - after a realpolitik education as Johnson's aide in the Senate, as a Pentagon and State Department official and as a presidential confidant and wordsmith - he looked back on the battles for civil rights, the crises of American cities and the corrosive war in Vietnam with a keener appreciation for the arts of horse-trading and compromise, and for Johnson's Machiavellian ways of getting things done. Mr. McPherson helped draft bills that became the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Later, with Joseph A. Califano, the president's special assistant for domestic affairs, he helped shape Johnson's Great Society programs, the most sweeping social legislation since the Roosevelt era, including antipoverty and equal opportunity laws covering employment and housing, Medicare, Head Start and scores of other innovations. For years he supported the military policies in Vietnam, but by 1968, Mr. McPherson had come to believe that the war was unwinnable. And as antiwar demonstrations swept the country, he and Defense Secretary Clark M. Clifford helped persuade the president to scale back the bombing of North Vietnam. It was Mr. McPherson who drafted Johnson's landmark address to the nation that spring, announcing the cutbacks of United States bombing, although the stunning conclusion of that speech - disclosing the president's decision not to seek re-election that fall - was drafted by another Johnson aide, Horace Busby. After leaving the White House in early 1969, Mr. McPherson became a partner in Verner, Liipfert & Bernhard, a prominent Washington law firm and one of the capital's most successful at lobbying. His clients included businesses, foreign governments and nonprofit organizations. Among other cases, Mr. McPherson helped to negotiate the 1998 master settlement in which major tobacco companies and 46 states agreed on advertising limitations, partial immunity from lawsuits and payments of hundreds of billions of dollars to the states to cover the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. Mr. McPherson also served on presidential commissions, including the 1979 panel named by Jimmy Carter to investigate the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and another named by Bill Clinton to recommend the closing of military installations to streamline the Defense Department. Mr. McPherson wrote numerous articles on foreign and domestic policies for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. His memoir, "A Political Education" (1972), was well received and has become a perennial favorite of students of Washington's crafty, duplicitous political merry-go-round and of Johnson's years in the Senate and the White House. Reviewing it for The Times, Anatole Broyard called it "a lesson not only for Harry McPherson, but also for most of us," adding: "To put it bluntly, few Americans have a realistic idea of how our government works. We have instead a series of naïve assumptions. If the message of this book were common knowledge, much of the sound and fury that currently caricatures our politics and our national image could be averted. Harry Cummings McPherson Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1929, in Tyler, Tex., the son of Harry and Nan Hight McPherson. He attended Southern Methodist University and graduated from the University of the South in 1949. He intended to be a writer and poet and enrolled in a graduate program in literature at Columbia in 1949. But when the Korean War broke out in 1950, he enlisted in the Air Force and served as an intelligence officer in Germany, assessing Soviet troop deployments. His first marriage, to Clayton Read in 1952, ended in divorce. He married Mary Patricia DeGroot in 1981. Besides his wife, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Coco and Peter, and a son from his second marriage, Samuel. He earned a law degree in 1956 at the University of Texas. At the urging of a cousin who worked for Johnson, who was then a senator, Mr. McPherson went to Washington and was hired by the Democratic Policy Committee, which fashioned the legislative agenda for Senate Democrats. Johnson, the majority leader, was its chairman. Over the next seven years, Mr. McPherson rose to general counsel of the committee, serving under Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana after Johnson became vice president in 1961. He was appointed deputy under secretary of the Army for international affairs in 1963 and assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs in 1964. Nearly two years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. McPherson joined President Johnson's White House staff in 1965, and over the next four years, he became one of Johnson's most trusted advisers. In 1966 he helped organize a White House conference on civil rights, a gathering that included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Thurgood Marshall, who was then the solicitor general but would become America's first black Supreme Court justice a year later; and representatives of almost every major civil rights group in the country. Mr. McPherson also became Johnson's chief speechwriter, shaping all of the president's major addresses from 1966 to 1969. In 2008, he was honored with a lifetime achievement award by American Lawyer magazine.