Douglass Cater; Journalist, Presidential Aide

Douglass Cater, journalist, author, educator and special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, has died at age 72.

Cater died Friday at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., of pulmonary fibrosis. He had lived in Montgomery, Ala., since retiring as president of the college in 1990 and was stricken during a visit to the campus.

Educated at Harvard University, Cater was an original editor for The Reporter magazine in Washington, writing about government for 14 years before Johnson tapped him to join the White House. Cater specialized in education and health matters, and helped create the first legislation establishing long-range federal aid to education.

He later served as an executive for the London Observer and directed a program on communications and society for the Aspen Institute while continuing to write books and articles.

Cater, whose nonfiction writing analyzed the power structure in Washington, veered into fiction in 1970 with the well-received novel “Dana: The Irrelevant Man.”

Fiction, he told The Times that year, is “exhilarating and liberating. It gets points across better. You can probe inside people in a way a reporter never can.”

The longtime observer from inside and outside the presidency once mulled the problems of the office at a conference at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara: “The whole constitutional reason for a single leader is to have a man with vision who can see what needs to be done and get on with it. . . . We need to work out ways by which a President can declare a priority, and then when laws are passed we can stay on target. We can’t try something this week for education, next week for health, next for a clean environment and expect to see results.”

Cater is survived by his wife, Libby, four children, a brother and four grandchildren.