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 September 1952 a Pottstown paper called him the "electronic production manager" of the American Encaustic Tiling Company, the family firm's manufacturing company, and by 1960 he was president of the American-Olean Tile Company and vice president in charge of sales of the National Building Materials Company, both in Lansdale.² He founded the Montgomery County Young Republicans in 1952 and was an alternate delegate to the 1952 and 1956 Republican conventions. Back from the 1952 convention, he told 150 Pottstown foremen that politicians needed training as much as doctors and lawyers: "we elect politicians without training at random." He 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.

He announced that campaign on January 11, 1960, and took a leave of absence from both companies the same day. Running against the county Republican organization, he worked 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. He campaigned in three ways. On the street he stopped anyone he met: "Hi, I'm Dick Schweiker, your candidate for Congress. I'm running independent and need all the help I can get. I hope you vote for me." In voters' living rooms he held coffee gatherings, more than 115 by mid-April, where he figured he had met 5,000 to 6,000 people; "the hostess is actually speaking for you," he said. And he spoke to service clubs and veterans' groups, then started meeting factory shifts, greeting close to 1,000 men at the Standard Pressed Steel plant in Jenkintown at 7 one morning. When the incumbent's side invited House Republican Leader Charles Halleck to speak at the county rally, moved to the night Schweiker and Lafore were both to appear in Upper Merion, his backers "burned up the telephone lines to Washington" and Halleck withdrew rather than take sides. He liked the Bulletin's account of all this well enough to have it reprinted as campaign literature. Not every paper agreed with it. On April 21 the Main Line Times of Ardmore scoffed in its political column, "On The Line," at the Bulletin's suggestion that he might win: "Lafore is going to win the election by more than a comfortable margin. With just about every Republican organization in the county except that of Schweiker's home Lansdale backing Lafore, any other outcome would necessitate a miracle. And miracles are rather hard to come by. . .even for fledgling candidates and naive newspapermen."⁵ The primary cost $24,414, more than half of it for advertising, and most of the money came from his family.⁴ After winning the seat in November he resigned from both companies. In 1964 he won a third term by about 43,000 votes even though President Johnson carried the district by about 33,000, and in 1966 he took 72.5 percent of the vote. The family had sold the business to the National Gypsum Company in August 1958, in an exchange of about $14 million in National Gypsum stock, and stayed on to run it as National Gypsum's tile division. By his own account in 1980, he "resigned all positions with American Olean Company when he entered Congress in 1961."³

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. ↩
2. His titles follow the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin's report during the 1960 primary (April 17, 1960, p. 12), the earliest account found. National Gypsum's own 1960 history shows how the titles were divided in the family. His father, Malcolm A. Schweiker, was president of the American-Olean Ceramic Tile Division and of American Encaustic Tiling Company, the manufacturing company. Richard is listed as the division's "Vice President—Sales" and, separately, as president of American-Olean Tile Company, Inc., the division's sales company, although the book's organization chart puts his father's name in that box (Dean Richmond, Design for Growth: The Story of National Gypsum Company, 1960, pp. 114–118, 124). No other source found uses the name National Building Materials Company. The New York Times profile after his 1968 Senate victory (Nov. 6, 1968) called him vice president of both companies, and in April 1960 the Associated Press called him "a Lansdale sales executive." When he took either title is not known; in September 1952 he was still a production manager (Pottstown Mercury, Sept. 20, 1952, p. 12). The start in the personnel department is from Current Biography (1977): he "immediately joined the family business as an assistant in the personnel department and, within a few years, advanced to the post of vice-president in charge of sales." ↩
3. The statement came in March 1980, after a Philadelphia labor coalition accused him of a conflict of interest for cosponsoring an OSHA bill, S. 2153, two months after the agency cited American Olean's Lansdale plant for lead and noise exposures. He called the accusation "absolutely false and a disgusting slur." The Daily Collegian, which drew on a New York Times report, said American Olean had been controlled by the family and sold to National Gypsum, and that he and his family then owned at least $330,000 of National Gypsum stock (The Daily Collegian, March 21, 1980, p. 1). The episode is told in The Senate Years. ↩
4. From the expense account his campaign filed with the county board of elections ("Schweiker Spent $24,414 to Get GOP Nomination," Pottstown Mercury, May 27, 1960, p. 8). In the last week of the primary he also accused Lafore of falsely claiming Vice President Nixon's support; he said Nixon's legislative aide, Charles McWhorter, had written him that Nixon stayed out of all Republican primaries (Associated Press, Gettysburg Times, April 21, 1960). ↩
5. "On The Line," The Main Line Times (Ardmore, Pa.), April 21, 1960, from a clipping in the family's scrapbook. The "wrap-up story that appeared Sunday" it mocks is the Bulletin's April 17 article. ↩

He was raised in 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.