Henry Roemer McPhee Jr.

1925 - 2022

McPhee

Henry Roemer McPhee Jr.

1/11/1925 – 11/12/2022

Henry Roemer McPhee, former Associate Special Counsel to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a member of his White House staff from 1954 to 1961, died at the age of 97, Saturday, November 12, 2022. From the halls of the Eisenhower White House to his beloved family and home in Potomac, Maryland, Roemer McPhee had an outsized influence on all who gathered in his orbit. He was born January 11, 1925 in Ames, Iowa, where his father, Harry McPhee, was serving in his first post as a physician at Iowa State University. When Roemer was three years old, the family, including his mother Mary (Ziegler), Roemer, and his baby sister Laura Anne moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Dr. McPhee ultimately served for 36 years as university physician at Princeton University, and team doctor for the Princeton football team. His brother John, six years his junior, was born in Princeton in 1931.

Roemer was, as he was fond of saying, educated "in a cloud of orange and black" in Princeton public schools and at Princeton University (A.B., Cum Laude, Economics, 1947). His Princeton years were interrupted when he left to become a U.S. Naval Officer, serving on destroyer escorts in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. He completed his education at Princeton after the war and went on to study law at the Harvard Law School (LLB, 1950). He was admitted to the bars of the District of Columbia, New Jersey, Illinois, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Upon graduation from Harvard, Roemer began his career in the executive branch of government, first serving for two years as Executive Assistant and Associate Counsel to New Jersey Governor Alfred E. Driscoll. Following a brief period in a private law practice, he was asked to join the staff of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, serving in the White House from 1954 until the end of President Eisenhower's second term, in January 1961. While at the White House, he worked with Dr. Gabriel Hauge, Special Assistant to the President for Domestic and International Economic Affairs, then moved to the West Wing as Assistant and then Associate Special Counsel to the President. His duties extended to legal and other matters involving the Presidency in nearly every area of the President's responsibilities.

Early in his time in the Special Counsel's office, Roemer proposed an original solution to the longstanding, politically hypersensitive Tidelands Oil dispute between the federal government, on the one hand, and Texas and other states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The issue was jurisdiction over vast oil deposits known to be under the Gulf. The federal government maintained that a "three-mile limit" was the extent of the states' ownership, while the states claimed a ten-mile limit based on their unique status before entry into the Union (Texas had been a sovereign nation before entry and had enjoyed a 10-mile limit). Roemer's contribution was to note that the three-mile limit had been adopted solely as to the surface of the Gulf (principally to keep enemy warships beyond the range of their cannon) and therefore had no application to the "subsoil and seabed" where the oil lay. This being so, Roemer pointed out, no obstacle existed to honoring valid claims of the few states bordering the Gulf. Subsequently, in arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice Department held to its three-mile limit position but the State of Texas, knowing of Roemer's reasoning, had made it its own – and that was the basis on which the Supreme Court in 1960 decided the Tidelands Oil case for the petitioning states.

In Roemer's subsequent career, as a partner at the Washington law firm of Hamel, Park, McCabe & Saunders (now Foley & Lardner), 1961 to 1993, the scope of his practice was broad, but he specialized in solving problems businesses and industry have with the federal government, particularly the executive branch (including Defense, State, and Treasury). He was his law firm's founding partner for Interlex, an international affiliation of law firms to provide better services for international clients, was counsel for many years to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and served as the firm's Managing Partner (1980 to 1983).

"Life has been generous to me," Roemer said in a Princeton reunion publication, "and it is still unfailingly interesting." A raconteur and bon vivant in the best sense, Roemer applied his boundless enthusiasm for life to classical music and wine; Washington politics and the inner workings of the federal government; the Kentucky Derby, the Washington Commanders and the Princeton football team; Broadway musicals and the Bible. Roemer's love of tropical weather led him to spend countless winter vacations on Sanibel Island in Florida with his great friend Ted Cross, where, as Ted stood capturing photos of birds in a shoreline forest of cameras, tripods, and giant lenses, Roemer became deeply knowledgeable about sea and shore birds and the shells that gather in abundance on the Sanibel shores. He loved taking his whole family on Caribbean vacations, where his grandchildren, lathered with lotion against the Caribbean sun, would line up to show him their treasures from the sea or, with snorkels and masks, to follow in his wake on his investigations of undersea life.

To his children, and their generation, Roemer was known as the grizzly bear, the Grizz, for his exacting standards and quixotic flashes of temper, episodes they utterly ignored, knowing the passion with which he held them in his heart. For Roemer's 65th birthday, his son Roemer III published a book, The Sayings, Remarks & Commentary of Chairman Grizz, an artful collection that captured the family's favorite and oft repeated Roemer aphorisms. One, "Nobody ever plans to burn his house down, but it does happen" counseled caution, while another "Never do anything you wouldn't want to have examined under a spotlight" counseled discretion. "Brains are a dime a dozen," he noted. "Judgment is what counts." And finally – "What's the biggest thing in the world? Love, because there is always room for more."

Roemer was also for two years president of the Princeton Club of Washington, and served as General Counsel of the Republican National Finance Committee from 1968 to 1973. He was a longstanding director of the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, a founder of the Capital Hill Club in Washington and a member of the Metropolitan Club (Washington DC) for more than five decades. He was founder and for many years host and friendly competitor in the Potomac Tennis and Conversation Club at his home in Potomac, Maryland.

Roemer and his first wife, Joan Lambert, had four children: Roemer III, Joan, Larkin, and his youngest son, Charles, who died of ALS in 2011. Roemer is survived by his second wife, Selby Fleming, his three living children, his brother, the writer John McPhee, nine grandchildren, two stepdaughters, and four step grandchildren. His sister Laura Anne Burton died in 2015.

A memorial service in celebration of his life will be held in the New Year. Donations in Roemer's memory, and that of his son Charles, may be made to the ALS Association (donate.als.org).

Please view and sign the family guest book at:

www.PumphreyFuneralHome.com