Harold Reis; Justice Lawyer Under Kennedy

Harold Frank Reis, 90, a lawyer with the Justice Department under attorney generals Robert F. Kennedy and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, died March 23 of cancer at his home in the District.

In October 1962, Mr. Reis was part of a group of Justice officials Kennedy dispatched to Oxford, Miss., to ensure that James Meredith, an African American, would be allowed to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

In his biography of Kennedy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. recalled that Mr. Reis, whom he described as "an able lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel," poked his head into the office where plans were being made for the trip. Schlesinger quoted Kennedy: "Harold, you can help. Can you go too?" Mr. Reis didn't know where he and his colleagues were headed until they were halfway to Andrews Air Force Base.

They arrived in Oxford the day before Meredith was to enroll. Throughout the night, they were under siege by a brick- and bottle-throwing mob on the Ole Miss campus. U.S. marshals discharged tear gas, and federal troops were dispatched from Memphis. Two people were killed.

"The next time I'll ask, 'Go where?' " Mr. Reis said years later.

Mr. Reis was born in the Bronx, N.Y., and graduated in 1937 from City College of New York. He received a law degree from Columbia University in 1940.

He joined the Justice Department in 1941 and worked as first assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. He was later executive assistant to Kennedy and Katzenbach.

During his 26 years at Justice, he worked on the creation of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and on the Cuban missile crisis, among numerous other Justice Department issues of the 1940s and 1950s.

Mr. Reiss, who received the Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1964, was involved with civil rights law throughout the 1960s and worked on the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He retired from government service in 1967 but continued to practice law as a partner with Wilner, Scheiner and Greeley, where his specialty was communications law, and with Lowenstein, Newman, Reis and Axelrad (now Morgan, Lewis and Bockius LLP), where he specialized in nuclear energy law. He retired again in 1996.

Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Ruthanne Reis of the District; three children, Alan B. Reis of New York City, Kate Grogan of Augusta, Ga., and Deborah Kennedy of Manchester, Maine; and five grandchildren.