William C. Doherty; Envoy, Postal Union Leader

William C. Doherty, retired president of the National Assn. of Letter Carriers, a former vice president of the executive committee of the AFL-CIO and a one-time ambassador to Jamaica, has died.

Doherty died in a nursing home here Sunday. He was 85. His home in retirement had been Nalcrest, Fla., a community that he established for retired mail carriers.

After delivering mail for more than 20 years, Doherty was elected to head the carriers union in 1941. He was elected unopposed on a platform of higher wages at a time when postal work was becoming increasingly automated. Until he left the union in 1962 to accept President John F. Kennedy’s appointment as envoy to Jamaica, he continued to battle for increased pay and benefits for the carriers.

Doherty began working as a telegraph messenger in his teens in Cincinnati. He joined the Army at 17 in 1919 by lying about his age and was sent as part of a secret American force to Siberia in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. (“The Army still won’t tell you what we were there for,” he said in a 1958 interview.)

He later became chief radio operator on Corregidor in the Philippines and returned to civilian life as a substitute mailman in Cincinnati.

His first union post came in 1928 when he was elected to lead his local and then was named president of the Ohio Letter Carriers Assn. in 1932. After World War II he was named a delegate to the Trade Union Congress in England and in 1949 helped organize the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

In October, 1962, he became America’s first ambassador to Jamaica following that nation’s independence from Great Britain. He resigned in April, 1964.