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12 FEBRUARY 1924 * 28 FEBRUARY 2010
ADVANTAGED BY INTELLIGENCE and energy and blessed / % with a knack for turning aspiration into accomplishment, TheJL JL odore Cross lived a life of achievement. He was a successful entrepreneur and investor, a trustee or member of the board of directors of many organizations, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Amherst College. Many interests commanded his attention, and it was no accident that his wide circle of friends included a great diversity of people and views. Politically liberal, he liked to describe himself as a "yellow dog" Democrat, joking that if the Democrats ran a yellow dog, he might vote for it. Nevertheless, sharp minds of many stripes interested him and he had many friends whose politics were quite different from his. For example, he enjoyed lunches with Donald Rumsfeld, with whom he struck up a friendship many years ago. They met when he, Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney were in the Nixon White House, at one time all three of them collaborating on crafting strategies to lift the economic fortunes of blacks. After his stint advising the administration, Ted continued as an activist philosopher of social justice, managing to push the door of educational access for all farther ajar than he found it. In middle age, he took up the camera and became a noted and beautifully published photographer of birds. Achievement in any of the areas mentioned is notable; distinguished accomplishment in all of them identifies a remarkable life.
Ted grew up in the Boston suburb of Wellesley and attended secondary school at Deerfield Academy, college at Amherst, and law school at Harvard, where he made editor of the Review. Fifty years later, he was still regularly extolling the benefits and satisfactions of a first-rate education. Very likely it was his recognition of the advantages his education brought him that inspired his dedication to widening the access to such an education. But it was the Pacific theater of World War II, not the classrooms of New England, that taught him the confidence in his decisions and intuitions that was such a critical enabler of his subsequent successes.
Like those of so many of his...