O’Brien Dies; Overseer of Sports, Politics

Larry O’Brien, who directed John F. Kennedy’s campaign for President and later served for a decade as commissioner of the National Basketball Assn., has died at 73.

O’Brien died at 6 p.m. Thursday at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, said Myrna Manners, a hospital spokeswoman.

He suffered from cancer, said Joseph Napolitan, a close friend.

O’Brien’s talents for organization and compromise made him one of the party’s leading strategists for two decades. He directed Kennedy’s successful senatorial and presidential campaigns, served as congressional liaison for President Kennedy and for President Lyndon B. Johnson, was postmaster general for three years and was twice named chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

O’Brien left politics in 1972, and in 1975 he was named commissioner of the National Basketball Assn. He remained in that post until 1984.

It was O’Brien’s Democratic Party office that was broken into in Washington’s Watergate complex in 1972, a burglary that set off one of the major scandals in American political annals.

O’Brien was with Kennedy when the President was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, and he was with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968.

O’Brien, the son of Irish immigrants from County Cork, was known as a canny political operator who knew the importance of voter registration drives and forging political alliances.

He joined John Kennedy when Kennedy was an ambitious congressman and directed his campaign against Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952. Kennedy upset Lodge, and in 1958 he easily won reelection.

In 1959, Kennedy decided to run for President and named O’Brien his campaign director. The candidate won each of the seven primaries he entered, and at the 1960 convention in Los Angeles, O’Brien’s delegate count was so accurate that he predicted within a half-vote the final tally.

As Kennedy’s liaison with Congress, O’Brien worked skillfully but largely unsuccessfully for the Administration’s “New Frontier” legislative package. After Kennedy’s assassination, he continued in the post under Johnson.

In the wake of the assassination, the legislative floodgates opened, and O’Brien helped usher through the greatest body of social law since the Depression.

O’Brien also served as Johnson’s postmaster general, and later was Democratic National Committee chairman until 1972.

In 1975, after spending the intervening years working on Wall Street, O’Brien was elected to succeed the late Walter Kennedy as NBA commissioner. It was a time when free agency and big money were reshaping professional sports.

It was with O’Brien’s guidance that the NBA settled the so-called Oscar Robertson suit in 1976, which paved the way to free agency in the league.