John Doar, a top Justice Department lawyer during the 1960s who was the face of the federal government during some of the most sensitive conflicts of the civil rights era, escorting the first black student into the University of Mississippi and prosecuting the notorious murders of three civil rights workers, has died. He was 92.
Doar, a Republican who later drafted the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon as special counsel for the House inquiry into Watergate, died Tuesday at his New York City home of congestive heart failure, his son Burke said.
Although not well-known outside the civil rights movement, Doar was one of its pivotal figures, who believed he could not do his job from behind a desk in Washington, D.C.
He accompanied James Meredith in repeated attempts to integrate the University of Mississippi, finally succeeding in October 1962 after rioting that left two dead.
He successfully prosecuted the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers killed by Ku Klux Klan members in rural Neshoba County, Miss., in 1964.