Richard S. Schweiker

He was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on June 1, 1926, to Malcolm Alderfer Schweiker and Blanche Schultz Schweiker, in a Pennsylvania Dutch family whose forebears had come to the colony as Schwenkfelders in the eighteenth century. He was valedictorian of his class at Norristown High School and enlisted in the Navy in 1944, serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Tarawa until 1946 and leaving as an electronics technician, second class.

A brother was killed in the fighting on Okinawa. Schweiker later traced his interest in public life to that loss, which he said taught him "that we are affected by things outside our own sphere." When he first ran for Congress he gave his "main reason" for entering politics as the desire "to work in the field of international relations and world peace," and in 1957 he and Claire named their first son for his father and for the brother he had lost.

After the Navy he was admitted to Penn State, which had no room on its main campus for first-year students in 1946, so he began his studies as a Penn State student at Shippensburg State Teachers College.¹ At Penn State he joined the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity, and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1950 with a degree in psychology. He went to work in the family's tile business in Lansdale, starting in the personnel department; by 1960 he was vice president for sales. He founded the Montgomery County Young Republicans in 1952, was an alternate delegate to the 1952 and 1956 Republican conventions, stepped aside for the party's candidate in a 1957 congressional race, and in 1960 beat the same man, Rep. John Lafore, in the primary on his way to the House.

1. Several published biographies say he spent two years at Slippery Rock State College before transferring to Penn State. The claim appears in Robert Sobel's Biographical Directory of the United States Executive Branch, 1774–1989 (1990), and Wikipedia repeats it from there. It is wrong on three counts. First, he was a Penn State student from the start. When the GI Bill brought a flood of veterans in 1946, Penn State lacked housing and ruled that "no freshmen (men or women) were to be admitted to the main campus in 1946-47." It sent its first-year students to thirteen cooperating state teachers colleges and other centers instead, and guaranteed them a place on the main campus as sophomores (Michael Bezilla, Penn State: An Illustrated History, 1985, "Challenges of the Post-War Era"). His eldest daughter, Lani Shelton, a genealogist, says he spent that first year at Shippensburg. Second, the school was Shippensburg, not Slippery Rock. Both were state teachers colleges at the time, and that is the likely source of the error: a record that he began at a state teachers college before Penn State seems to have been read as an enrollment at a separate school, followed by a transfer, and the college was misnamed. That explanation is an inference; we have not found Sobel's source. Third, the timing rules out two years elsewhere. He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 and graduated from Penn State in 1950. His own biography in the Congressional Directory, which members of Congress supply themselves, lists only Penn State (B.A., 1950) in both the 1969 and 1979 editions. ↩

He was a lifelong member of the Central Schwenkfelder Church in Worcester, one of the country's smallest Protestant bodies, which grew out of the Reformation's struggle for liberty of conscience; by the family's account the Schweikers helped pay for its 1951 building, and he is buried in its Garden of Memories. The concern for conscience ran through his public life, from a sixteen-year effort to exempt the Amish from Social Security to a 1979 law protecting medical students on both sides of the abortion question. That story is told in Faith and Conscience.

He left the Cabinet in February 1983 to become president of the American Council of Life Insurance, which he led until 1994, and served on the board of National Medical Enterprises, a hospital company. Claire, his wife of 57 years, died in 2013. He died on July 31, 2015, at 89, survived by their five children and their grandchildren.

His wife, Claire Joan Coleman Schweiker, was a Philadelphia native and the valedictorian of her high school class. She was the original "Miss Claire" on Romper Room, the pioneering children's program, hosting the Philadelphia edition on WFIL's Channel 6 from 1954 to 1956 (photograph); she and Richard married in 1955, six months after they met. 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, at age 81 — survived by her husband of 57 years, their five children, a sister, and 23 grandchildren.

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.

Three works he wrote or contributed to, drawn from Wikipedia's own bibliography for him.