Rod Gander, 76; led college, served in Vt. Senate

BRATTLEBORO - Rod Gander, a former chief of correspondents at Newsweek who went on to the presidency of Marlboro College and to serve in the Vermont Senate, died of heart failure Monday, his family said. He was 76.

A native of Bronxville, N.Y., Mr. Gander spent most of his career at Newsweek, where he was a force behind its coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, said Osborne Elliot, who led the magazine during the 1960s and 1970s and served as dean at the Columbia School of Journalism.

"Rod kept coming into my office and urging me to kill this section and kill that section to make room for that awful news," Elliot said of the assassination coverage.

"It was thanks to him that we gave it that much prominence, as compared with Time that week. . . ., That issue of Newsweek was a very important turning point for the magazine."

By 1980, Mr. Gander had tired of his role in management at Newsweek, said his wife, Isabelle, and decided to apply for the open job at Marlboro.

"He really loved his work as a journalist at Newsweek, but he had a wonderful time at Marlboro because he loved the kids so much," she said. "It was a challenge because he had never done anything like that before."

Will Wootton, president of Sterling College in northern Vermont, served as development director under Mr. Gander at Marlboro.

"Rod repeatedly saved the place," Wootton said. "When he got there, the college was somewhere around $700,000 in debt."

He retired from Marlboro in 1996 and decided to pursue a lifelong dream of running for public office, winning an open seat in the Vermont Senate as a Democrat in 2002.

US Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, was president pro-tem of the Senate during Mr. Gander's four years as a member and called him "the conscience of the Senate."

"He was unique in his combination of passion and tolerance," Welch said. "He was an inspiration for all of us. He's one of the few people in politics I would call a mentor. I respected his moral judgment and advice. His approval meant a great deal to me."

Mr. Gander was diagnosed with lung cancer during his second year in the Senate and had to be absent for significant portions of his terms.

He opted not to run for a third two-year term in 2006.