Erwin N. Griswold; Former Solicitor General

Former Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold, who served under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon and whose more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court included the Pentagon Papers arguments, has died. He was 90.

Griswold, who lived in Belmont, died Saturday at Massachusetts General Hospital after a brief illness.

His legal career spanned 65 years, more than half of them as a faculty member at Harvard Law School. He was dean there for 21 years before joining the Johnson Administration in 1967 as solicitor general, the federal government’s top-ranking courtroom lawyer.

At the time of his death, he had argued more cases, 127, before the nation’s highest court than any other living attorney.

Griswold’s most famous case may have come in 1971, when he argued on behalf of the Nixon Administration in attempting to halt publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, which chronicled the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Griswold, a liberal Republican, argued unsuccessfully that publishing the federal documents would “have the effect of causing immediate and irreparable harm to the security of the United States.”

In later years, however, Griswold said his heart hadn’t been in the case because the federal government had little legal ground to stop the Washington Post and the New York Times from going to press. In hindsight, he said, publishing the Pentagon Papers was harmless.

Still, Griswold had a sense of humor about the cases he lost. A plaque on his bookcase read: “Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times.”

Another major case handled by Griswold involved the 1st Amendment and the Johnson Administration’s contention that the federal government could force radio and TV stations to broadcast opposing viewpoints. The Supreme Court agreed, and in 1969 upheld the so-called “fairness doctrine.”

Aside from his ability in the courtroom, Griswold was a noted constitutional scholar and champion of civil rights.

As dean of Harvard Law School at the height of the McCarthy era, Griswold in 1954 wrote the book, “The Fifth Amendment Today,” examining the constitutional protection against self-incrimination and denouncing Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.

McCarthy led a campaign to identify supposed Communists in the government and in public life, ruining many careers.

“If we take these rights for granted, if we accept them as a matter of course, we may simply fritter them away and end up losing them, and we probably deserve to lose them,” Griswold said in a 1954 speech included in the book.