Processing Your Payment

Please do not leave this page until complete. This can take a few moments.

August 28, 2018 Commentary

Remembrance: Lawrence J. DeNardis, 1938-2018

Photo | Contributed Lawrence J. DeNardis
By MICHAEL C. BINGHAM

Perhaps it’s just as well that Larry DeNardis left the political arena when he did, in 1983, for the more collegial pastures of academia. The take-no-prisoners game of 21st-century nuclear politics would not have suited him. Not at all.

Lawrence J. DeNardis, who died at Yale New Haven Hospital last Friday at age 80 after having been diagnosed with a brain tumor, was a gentleman through and through. The lifelong Hamden resident was one of Greater New Haven’s most distinguished and admired citizens and public servants. We may not see his like again.

Elected in the Reagan landslide of 1980, DeNardis was the last Republican to represent Connecticut’s Third District in the U.S. House of Representatives, a seat that has been occupied since 1991 by New Haven Democrat Rosa DeLauro. During his brief tenure in the House, DeNardis was distinguished by a quality shared by too few of his colleagues on Capitol Hill — a deep understanding of and appreciation for the role and workings of government. It was a vocation for which he was well prepared having earned a doctorate in government from New York University in 1989.

After being defeated for re-election in 1983 by Bruce Morrison, DeNardis served in the Reagan administration as assistant secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services. In 1991, he was named the fifth president of the University of New Haven, where he served until 2004.

I was fortunate enough to have known Larry and his wife, Mary Lou, who is one of the warmest people I have ever met. Larry was at UNH when the university rescued a performing-arts group, Orchestra New England, from certain death by giving it a rent-free home on campus. Mary Lou and I served on the group’s board of directors. I think of this as one of literally dozens of examples of good deeds — some large, some small — that Larry DeNardis undertook without ever seeking recognition or credit for himself. It’s an example of scant significance, but that sort of behind-the-scenes good-deed-doing fit Larry DeNardis to a T.

It was DeNardis who set the table for current UNH President Steven H. Kaplan, who succeeded him in 2004. It was Larry who first set in motion the school’s transition from commuter college to residential university, work that Kaplan has so adroitly advanced, much to the institution’s credit.

Indeed, DeNardis’ UNH presidency overlapped with an historic epoch in New Haven-area academic leadership: the transformative reign of John L. Lahey at Quinnipiac and, on a national level, Richard C. Levin at Yale, who turned the traditional New Haven-Yale dynamic on its head, much for the better.

Larry seemed to have an innate sensitivity to interpersonal dynamics and a keen feel for what both parties needed to come away with in negotiations to make a deal practical, to make it work. That was his strength, whether in government or academia.

Larry DeNardis was also a devout Catholic in word and in deed — a far cry from so many contemporary politicos who brandish their Catholicism only as an ethnic ID badge, while in private treating difficult matters of faith as though they don’t exist.

It is a coincidence that Larry’s passing coincided with that of one of his long-ago Capitol Hill colleagues: U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who died the day after Larry. Aside from their nominal Republicanism and status as naval officers (DeNardis was a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1960 to 1963), the two men had little in common, but they did share one thing.

McCain, who endured a physical and psychological trial few can imagine as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, always understood and accepted that his purpose in life was in the service of something larger than himself.

That’s a principle Larry DeNardis lived by. And we are all richer for it.

Reach Michael C. Bingham at mbingham@newhavenbiz.com

Sign up for Enews

Most Popular

Most Popular

0 Comments

Order a PDF