| Subject: Jane Weinberger, Author Who Became Publisher, Dies at 91 |
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July 12
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Date Posted: Thursday, July 16, 2009, 05:35:10pm
Jane D. Weinberger, the widow of former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger who became an author and started her own publishing house, died Sunday in Bar Harbor, Me. She was 91.
Her son Caspar Jr. said the cause was complications of a stroke.
Mrs. Weinberger began her press, Windswept House, in Mount Desert, Me., during the Reagan administration, in which Mr. Weinberger served as secretary of defense. It was the third administration in which he had a cabinet-level position. He died in 2006.
At first, Mrs. Weinberger’s press was a vehicle to publish children’s books she wrote herself, but she expanded it to include books she wrote for adults as well as books by other authors. Windswept, named after the family’s home on Mount Desert Island and based there, published 120 titles, of which she wrote about a dozen.
In addition to her tales of lovable puffins, ducklings and dogs, her books for adults included a collection of her very frank correspondence, often referring to famous people, and a volume of advice for the extremely elderly.
In “As Ever: A Selection of Letters from the Voluminous Correspondence of Jane Weinberger, 1970-1990” (1991), she castigated former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s acceptance of “dirty little bits of money to do what stupid favors, heaven only knows.” She called the former Soviet ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin “a wily old bastard but amusing.”
When Nancy Reagan became first lady, Mrs. Weinberger wrote a friend that she hoped Mrs. Reagan would not be “irritable and snappish.” She expanded on the thought: “We all know how easily upset she can be when things are not exactly as she wants them.”
Rebecca Jane Dalton was born in Milford, Me., on March 29, 1918, and attended the University of Maine and graduated from the Somerville Hospital School of Nursing in Somerville, Mass. She became an Army nurse and found herself playing chess with a young officer on a troop ship in the summer of 1942. She and Mr. Weinberger married three weeks later when the ship docked in Sydney, Australia.
After World War II, they settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Mr. Weinberger worked as a lawyer. Mrs. Weinberger persuaded him to run for the state legislature and managed his campaign. He served for six years in the State Assembly in the 1950s, and in the 1960s worked in the administration of Gov. Ronald Reagan.
Under President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Weinberger served, successively, as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, director of the Office of Management and Budget and secretary of health, education and welfare, a post in which he continued under President Gerald R. Ford. When Mr. Reagan was elected president in 1980, Mr. Weinberger left his executive post at the Bechtel Corporation to become secretary of defense.
Mrs. Weinberger threw herself into the social and cultural life of Washington, becoming chairwoman from 1981 to 1986 of the Folger Shakespeare Library, a major collection of Shakespeare and other Renaissance material. She also raised money for the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research institute in Maine.
She wrote one of her early children’s books about a laboratory mouse, of which Jackson has one of the largest collections. It was called “Vim: A Very Important Mouse” (1984). She donated profits to the laboratory.
When Mr. Weinberger resigned in 1987, many news reports cited his wife’s cancer of the uterus as a cause. Their son said the cancer later went into remission.
In addition to her son Caspar, who lives in Mount Desert, Mrs. Weinberger is survived by her son Arlin, of Marin County, Calif.; her sister, Virginia Garceau of Brewer, Me.; three grandchildren; and five great-grandsons.
In Mrs. Weinberger’s book about aging, “Experience the Journey” (2003), her last book, she said she was not sure how she had gone from collecting antiques to being one.
“How did I get here?” she wrote. “I seem to have been instantly transported here while I was busy doing other things.”
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