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Biography
Richard Schultz Schweiker (June 1, 1926, Norristown, Pennsylvania – July 31, 2015, Pomona, New Jersey), Republican.
Richard S. Schweiker represented Pennsylvania's 13th District in the U.S. House (1961–1969) and the state at large in the U.S. Senate (1969–1981), then served as the 14th U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Reagan (1981–1983). He began his career as a moderate Rockefeller Republican and grew steadily more conservative after Reagan named him his preemptive running mate ahead of the 1976 Republican National Convention — an alliance told in full on the Deep Dives tab. The complete chronological record, including his Senate Intelligence Committee work reviewing the original JFK assassination investigation, is on the Timeline tab.
As Secretary, he spent much of his two years defending the department's budget against the administration's own proposed cuts, and his name went on the 1981 Social Security proposal Congress rejected. The more lasting record is quieter: the plan that became Medicare's prospective payment system for hospitals, the Medicaid waiver that let Katie Beckett be cared for at home and became a national option for disabled children, and the first federal tamper-resistant packaging rules after the Tylenol murders. The full account is the "Two Years at HHS" Deep Dive; the regulations he signed and the lawsuits brought against the department are on the Policy tab.
Claire Schweiker
His wife, Claire Joan Coleman Schweiker, was a Philadelphia native and the valedictorian of her high school class. Before their 1955 marriage, she was the original "Miss Claire" on Romper Room, the pioneering children's educational program then broadcasting out of Philadelphia — one of the show's earliest hostesses, from 1954 to 1956 — and gave it up after she and Richard met and married six months later. Raised, like her husband, in what she called a "strictly Pennsylvania Dutch family that stressed values and service," she would later say the two of them "see our primary purpose in life as serving God."
A 1953 radio and television broadcasting graduate of Temple University — later the first recipient of the school's Alumni in the Media award and a member of its hall of fame — she moved to Washington after her husband's election to the House in 1960. She gave speeches on public service, health, and faith into the early 1990s, served as vice chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation Ball, and was a former president of the District's Republican Wives Club, alongside memberships in the International Club of Washington, the Senate Wives Club, and the Senate Ladies Red Cross Unit. In September 1981, The Washington Dossier put the couple on its cover for a profile titled "For a Healthy America."
Claire Schweiker died April 28, 2013, of respiratory failure at Inova Loudoun Hospital in Leesburg, Virginia, at age 81 — survived by her husband of 57 years, their five children, a sister, and 23 grandchildren.
Legacy: How His Story Gets Retold
His 1976 selection remains the standard historical reference point whenever a presidential candidate considers naming a running mate before securing the nomination. This is a representative sample of that recurring coverage, not an exhaustive news archive.
Contemporary coverage calling Reagan's move "one of the most astonishing and bizarre turnabouts in a campaign full of surprises" after it failed to swing the nomination.
Read it →When Ted Cruz named Carly Fiorina his running mate before the 2016 nomination was decided, outlets across the board cited the Reagan-Schweiker gambit as the direct historical precedent — and the cautionary tale, since it failed both times.
Read it →A Trump-era retrospective using the 1976 episode as the history lesson for modern speculation about unconventional running-mate strategy.
Read it →Authored Works
Three works he wrote or contributed to, drawn from Wikipedia's own bibliography for him.
An early, detailed case for shifting the United States to an all-volunteer military, later used as a blueprint for the actual transition.
Written the same year as the Church Committee's review of the original Kennedy assassination investigation.
A chapter-length statement of his health-policy views, published the year before he became HHS Secretary.
- Richard Schweiker — Wikipedia
- Congress.gov member record (S000159)
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives
- Miller Center — Richard Schweiker (1981–1983)
- GovTrack.us member profile
- Social Security Administration — History
- American Olean — "The AO Story" (Franklin Tile Company founding and history)
- Washington Post, Aug. 3 2015 — "Richard Schweiker, former congressman, senator and Reagan Cabinet secretary, dies at 89" (Emily Langer)
- Washington Post, May 21 2013 — "Claire J. Schweiker, 'Romper Room' hostess, wife of U.S. politician" (Megan McDonough)
- The Washington Dossier, September 1981 — "For a Healthy America" (cover) and "Looking After the Nation's Welfare: Richard and Claire Schweiker" (Don Oldenburg)
Home Life & Career
Timeline
His life and career year by year, from Norristown and the Navy through Congress, the 1976 campaign, HHS and after.
Sources are cited with each entry.
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Home Life & Career
Deep Dives
Long-form, sourced narratives on the chapters of his career that need more than a timeline entry.
Sources and notes follow each piece.
Home Life & Career
Connections
The presidents, senators and other public figures whose careers crossed his, and what the record shows they did together.
Sources: Congress.gov, Voteview.com (UCLA), and this archive's news collection.
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Home In Congress
Topics
Everything on the site about one subject, from bills and floor speeches to archive folders.
Congress.gov policy areas and Penn State's folder categories.
Legislation, floor-record mentions, and archive folders grouped by subject, drawn from Congress.gov's own policy-area tags and the archive's folder categories rather than a separately curated list. Select a topic to view everything on this site connected to it.
Home In Congress
Legislation
The bills he sponsored and cosponsored in the House and Senate, 1961–1980.
Sources: Congress.gov (Library of Congress), with House-years bills from the Congressional Record.
Congress.gov's bill database reliably covers 1973 (the 93rd Congress) onward; his House years (1961–1969) are represented unevenly as a result. Bills marked from the floor record were identified instead through the Congressional Record's bill-introduction announcements for that period — they carry no committee, cosponsor, or related-bill data, but supplement the earlier record. The Speeches page covers the remainder of that period. Select any bill to view its details.
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Home At HHS
HHS Regulations
The Federal Register documents he signed or approved as Secretary of Health and Human Services, 1981–1983.
Source: the Library of Congress's scans of the Federal Register.
Every Federal Register Document Bearing His Signature
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Home At HHS
HHS Litigation
Published court opinions captioned with his name, as every case against the department was while he was Secretary.
Source: the Caselaw Access Project, Harvard Law School Library.
Published Court Opinions Naming Him as a Party
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Home In Congress
Voting Record
Every recorded roll-call vote he cast: House 1961–1969, Senate 1969–1981.
Source: Voteview.com (UCLA).
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Home In Congress
Speeches & Floor Record
His floor statements and other appearances in the Congressional Record, 1961–1983, with full transcripts where available.
Source: GovInfo.gov's digitized Congressional Record.
Full Floor Record
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Home Coverage & Media
In the News
Newspaper coverage that names him, 1955–1995.
Sources: The New York Times, Penn State's Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive, and the Library of Congress.
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Home Coverage & Media
Photographs
Public-domain photographs, and a guide to the photograph collection in his papers.
Sources: the U.S. Senate, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and Penn State.
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Home Coverage & Media
Video & Audio
Footage of him from C-SPAN, the Reagan Library and documentaries about the Church Committee.
Sources: C-SPAN and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
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Home For Researchers
Archive Finder
A searchable guide to the boxes and folders of his papers at Penn State.
Source: Penn State's finding aid for the Richard S. Schweiker papers.
This site covers what is digitized and publicly searchable. For personal correspondence, internal drafts, press statements, and other material not represented elsewhere here, the primary source is the physical collection below. Search a topic to identify the box and folder that hold it, so a research visit can begin with a precise list rather than an open-ended search.
The bulk of the collection concerns legislation. It also includes newsletters, newspaper clippings, press releases, transcripts of testimony, speeches, correspondence, and campaign materials, plus audio and video recordings of news conferences and campaign debates. Materials are stored offsite; the finding aid notes to allow 2-3 business days for retrieval before a research visit.
View the finding aid on PSU's archives site →Indexed from the finding aid's Collection Inventory through page 542 (Legislation, Meetings, Memos, Miscellaneous, News Conferences, Newsletters, Newspaper Clippings, and Photographs). The finding aid's own table of contents estimated the whole guide at 526 pages, but content now runs past that with the Photographs series alone extending well beyond where the table of contents expected it to end -- so the true total length is uncertain and more sections (Press Releases, Public Works, Religion, Senate Press Files, Speeches, Television Tape, Testimonies, Transcripts, Voting Record) are still expected beyond page 542.
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