William H. Schaap,'64: 1940-2015

William H. Schaap, ’64, Radical Lawyer, Author and Publisher, Dies at 75

MARCH 2, 2016

William H. Schaap, a radical lawyer, author and publisher who fought against investigative abuses by government agencies at home and abroad, died on Feb. 25 in Manhattan. He was 75.

The cause was pulmonary disease, his niece Rosie Schaap said.

Mr. Schaap began his activism in law school, counseling students arrested in Chicago for protesting segregated housing.

As a lawyer, he defended Columbia University students arrested in 1968 for occupying campus buildings to protest the war in Vietnam. In the late 1960s, he left a Wall Street law firm where he was an associate and moved to Japan and Germany with his wife, Ellen Ray, to counsel resisters to the war in Vietnam.

In 1976, they formed what became CovertAction, a publication that reported on illegal Central Intelligence Agency activities. It also identified C.I.A. agents by name, from unclassified sources, a practice outlawed by Congress in 1982. Mr. Schaap also represented C.I.A. whistle-blowers, like Philip Agee.

In 1980, in a letter to The New York Times, Mr. Schaap, Ms. Ray and Louis Wolf, the editors of what was then called The Covert Action Information Bulletin, wrote, “We do not object to intelligence gathering; we object to the covert interference in the affairs of other nations, the refusal to let the people of those nations decide for themselves upon their leaders, their systems of government and the forms of institutions they desire.”

Mr. Schaap and Ms. Ray often singled out The Times for criticism through their Institute for Media Analysis and later a monthly news-media watchdog magazine, Lies of Our Times. They criticized, among other articles, what they called favorable coverage of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and of F. W. de Klerk, the president of South Africa during apartheid, in The Times and other mainstream publications.

They also founded Sheridan Square Press, which published the New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy,” which was a source for Oliver Stone in making the 1991 film “JFK.”

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mr. Schaap lived part time in New Orleans, representing displaced homeowners.