SEATTLE — Donald Matthews, a University of Washington political science professor who wrote a landmark text on the Senate, is dead at 82.
Matthews, author of a dozen books and founder of an international exchange program at the university, died Saturday at Swedish Medical Center following a long struggle with emphysema. His death was confirmed by the university’s political science department.
His gift of $814,000 in 1996 to start the Donald R. Matthews Endowment for Excellence in Political Science remains the largest faculty donation to the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Matthews was born and reared in Cincinnati, studied at Purdue University, served in the Navy toward the end of World War II, then earned master’s and doctoral degrees in political science at Princeton University.
He taught at Smith College, the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan before coming to Seattle to head Washington’s political science department in 1976.
Of Matthews’ 12 books on political science and behavior, his best known was “U.S. Senators and Their World,” published in 1960, reissued half a dozen times and used in some college courses.
The late President Lyndon B. Johnson, a senator when the book was written, called it “a landmark in the study of the Senate.” Another senator and president-to-be, John F. Kennedy, praised the book as “sharp, perceptive, instructive and entertaining.”
Survivors include former wives Maggie Matthews of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Carmen Matthews of Seattle; sons Jonathan Matthews of Seattle and Christopher Matthews of St. Paul, Minn.; daughter Amy Ryan of Providence, R.I.; and a granddaughter.
A memorial service in January is being planned by the university’s political science department.
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