J. Lee Rankin, 88, Dies; Ex-Chief Counsel For Warren Commission

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - J. Lee Rankin, the U.S. solicitor general in the Eisenhower administration and chief counsel for the Warren Commission, is dead. He was 88.

Mr. Rankin, who had suffered a series of strokes recently, died Wednesday.

He joined the U.S. Justice Department in 1953. The most celebrated case he was involved with was Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling in which the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation.

Mr. Rankin argued for the government that segregation was unconstitutional, but contended that desegregation must happen gradually to prevent violence. He developed a system in which local school districts submitted desegregation plans to federal judges in their states for approval.

He became solicitor general, the No. 3 job at the Justice Department, in 1956 and argued dozens of cases before the nation's highest court.

After the assassination of President Kennedy, Mr. Rankin served as chief counsel for the Warren Commission. The commission's 800-page report, issued in 1964, concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

"He was the ideal of what a lawyer should be and what a lawyer in government service should be," said Norman Redlich, a New York attorney who worked under Mr. Rankin in the Warren Commission. "He was a person that had no personal ego at all, which made him so valuable to presidents."

Recently released documents on the assassination suggest Mr. Rankin was concerned early on about conspiracy theories that quickly began to circulate.

Files released in 1993 included a memo about a 1964 meeting at which Allen Dulles, former CIA director and a member of the Warren Commission, discussed a letter he had gotten from Mr. Rankin "expressing the desire to reach a modus vivendi in order to allay the story of CIA's possible sponsorship of Oswald's activity."

According to the memo, Dulles declined Mr. Rankin's request that he serve as CIA file reviewer for the commission, but agreed to provide a statement saying he had no knowledge of Oswald prior to the assassination.

In 1965, Mr. Rankin was named New York City's corporation counsel, the city's chief attorney. He also taught at the New York University School of Law. He retired in the mid-1970s.

The Hartington, Neb., native graduated in 1930 from the University of Nebraska Law School in Lincoln and practiced law in the state capital for 22 years.

Mr. Rankin is survived by his sons, James Jr. of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Roger C. of Mansfield, Texas; a daughter, Sara Stadler of New Haven; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.