William D. Ruckelshaus, who was the keynote speaker at the NAFUSA conference in Seattle in 2009, died on November 27, 2019, at his home in Medina, Washington. He was 87.

In 1973, Ruckelshaus was named acting FBI director and then deputy attorney general during the time of the Watergate investigation. Attorney General Elliott Richardson appointed Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor, to investigate the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. When Cox requested access to the Oval Office tape recordings of the time immediately after the break-in, President Nixon refused access and ordered the Attorney General to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Ruckelshaus was then ordered by the White House to fire Cox, and he, too, refused and resigned.

At NAFUSA’s Seattle conference, Ruckelshaus spoke of the “Saturday Night Massacre” publicly for the first time. Click here to read Ruckelshaus keynote speech Remembering Watergate. It is one of the most memorable keynote speeches in NAFUSA history.

Ruckelshaus later served as the administrator of EPA, under appointment by President Ronald Reagan. He attended Princeton University and received his law degree from Harvard.