* Diane Divers Blair; Professor, Advisor to Clinton

Diane Divers Blair, 61, a political science professor who befriended and advised President Clinton. Blair became a friend of the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton in the early 1970s, when the couple taught classes at the University of Arkansas, where she was on the faculty. In 1992, Blair was a member of the national Democratic Platform Committee at the convention that nominated Clinton to run against President George Bush, and she served as senior researcher during the campaign. When Clinton took office the next year, he named Blair to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She was elected chairman of the board in 1997 and served in the post the maximum two years permitted. A former legislative assistant to Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri, Blair began teaching at the University of Arkansas in 1968. Her 1988 textbook, “Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule?” is still in use. She held numerous offices in the state Democratic Party and was an Arkansas delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Clinton, as Arkansas governor, performed her wedding ceremony when she married James B. Blair in 1979. On Monday in Fayetteville, Ark., of cancer.