Political Satirist Strauss Dies at 60

William A. Strauss ’69, a satirist whose penchant for parody left no political scandal without a song routine, died Dec. 18 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 60.

The cause of death was complications from pancreatic cancer, according to his wife Janie K. Strauss.

As an author, comedian, active alumnus, and inventor of his own board games, Strauss “packed several lifetimes into one life,” said Elaina Newport, who co-founded the Capitol Steps, a singing satirical troupe, with Strauss in 1981.

“He was always off doing so many projects. Every once in a while he would be like, ‘Oh, I wrote another play.’ And I would be like, ‘What? When did you do that?’” Newport recalled.

Friends and family remember Strauss, known as Bill, for his diversity of interests, wit, social awareness, and untiring work ethic.

Richard J. Zeckhauser ’62, Strauss’ undergraduate thesis adviser and a professor at Kennedy School of Government, called his former student a “successful Don Quixote.”

“The regular Don Quixote kept tilting at windmills without ever winning,” Zeckhauser said. “But Bill takes on impossible dream missions, and he wins.”

While still in high school in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, Strauss created Politico, a homemade board game of political campaign strategy, and served as a page at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1965, he arrived at his five-person Hurlbut Hall suite. An indefatigable student, Strauss was in bed by 10 p.m. every night, his former roommates said.

Later in his Harvard career, Strauss devoted himself to civil rights, founding the Fellowship of Concerned University Students (FOCUS), a group that helped more than 400 black students gain admission and find funding to attend previously segregated colleges.

During the summer and school vacations, the former Adams House resident would hitchhike across the South with 11 fellow undergraduates to look for promising black students.

Though Strauss eventually secured $130,000 in grants from the Carnegie and Ford Foundations for the project, the early days of the project were less financially stable. On one occasion, he and his friends had to convince a bus driver to let them on board by offering postage stamps as currency.

Strauss was inspired to embark on the project while working as a counselor at Prairie View A&M University, an all-black college in Texas, during the summer following his sophomore year.

“He was very struck by the fact there were some very bright folks who weren’t able to go to colleges that he felt would really prepare them,” Janie Strauss said.

ENLIGHTENED ENTERTAINER

After graduating from the College, Strauss spent the next four years earning degrees from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School, where he was one of 18 members of the school’s first graduating class.

Strauss seemed to show little interest in practicing law. After a honeymoon in Africa while his classmates took the bar exam, Strauss moved to Washington with his new wife to begin work as a policy aide before becoming a staffer for former Illinois senator Charles H. Percy in 1979.

At a Christmas party for Percy in 1981, Strauss and his coworkers sang parodies ridiculing a number of federal government officials, including President Ronald Reagan—and so the Capitol Steps began.

Strauss prepared heavily for the Steps’ debut performance, Newport said.

“When we first started making up some songs for the Capitol Steps, he started writing charts with little arrows like you’d see in football games, and stage directions for each song,” she said with a laugh. “He basically wrote a whole book on where each person would stand.”

Strauss wrote a number of songs for the Capitol Steps to satirize everything from the Kennedy family to secret agents to Paris Hilton. Many of his compositions incorporated "Lirty Dies," a routine that uses spoonerisms, a play on words created by switching the first letters of two words.

Even after earning three Harvard degrees, Strauss never stopped being a student as he thought up sharp lyrics and catchy tunes for the Capitol Steps.

“I guess I’m one of those unusual people in the entertainment industry who after the show is over, I’ll go home and read Emerson and Steinbeck and write notes about what happened in the 1870s rather than what some other people in the business are known to do after shows,” Strauss said in a 1991 C-SPAN appearance.

The Capitol Steps now performs more than 400 shows per year across the United States, including an annual performance at Sanders Theatre.

NOT A ‘DULL’ MOMENT

In 1999, the year he was diagnosed with cancer, Strauss founded the Critics and Awards Program for High School Theater and Journalism, known as “The Cappies,” to encourage students to pursue artistic careers by putting on shows and reviewing each other’s performances at local high schools.

In his final years, Strauss remained a prolific writer, co-authoring three books with Neil Howe about “Millennials,” those born beginning in 1982. Though Strauss and Howe predicted a major “crisis” by around 2010 in a previous book, The Fourth Turning (1997), they maintained their optimism that Millennials would be able to rise to the challenge.

Strauss’ civic-mindedness extended to his criticism of what he saw as Harvard’s “money culture.” He decried tuition hikes at universities and the multimillion-dollar salaries of Harvard’s endowment managers, writing four op-eds on the topic in The Crimson over the past four years.

Before his death, Strauss was helping high school students film and produce “Senioritis,” a movie based on a student-produced musical, which will debut in March. Last summer, the student camera crew came regularly to his house and stayed up filming one night until 2 a.m., Janie Strauss said.

“On my second date, I knew that I wanted to marry him because I decided that life would never be dull with Bill Strauss,” Janie Strauss said, “and that turned out to be true.”

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.