Consultant and Assistant to LBJ

Charles M. Maguire, 79, a business and public policy consultant who served as a White House speechwriter during the Johnson administration, died April 25 of pneumonia at Georgetown Hospital. He was a resident of the District.

In 1965, Mr. Maguire was a member of the first class of White House Fellows, a leadership and public service program that allowed the 15 who were selected to "spend the next academic year moving as free spirits around some of the most important men in government," the New York Times said in 1966. Assigned to the White House, he worked for President Lyndon B. Johnson's special assistant, Jack Valenti.

After his fellowship ended, he stayed on as assistant to the president, in large part because he caught Johnson's eye as someone who could write letters that were not only grammatically and stylistically correct but also personal-sounding and free of bureaucratic jargon.

He became secretary of the Cabinet, where he responded to the president's directive to enliven Cabinet meetings. In a 1977 oral history on file at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, he recalled Johnson's concern: "I just don't want them falling asleep at the damned table." Mr. Maguire responded with a 40-page memo on how to run lively and effective Cabinet meetings.

He also did the final editing on most of the president's speeches. In the oral history, he recalled White House special assistant Horace Busby calling him in to the White House on a Sunday in March to put the finishing touches on what he thought was a speech about a pause in the bombing over Vietnam. The 1968 address was that, and more. It concluded with what Mr. Maguire called "a pregnant P.S." -- Johnson's dramatic announcement that he would not run for reelection.

"It was the first I had seen of it, it was the first I had heard of it, and I was thoroughly and I suppose even bitterly disappointed," Mr. Maguire recalled.

"Afterwards," he said, "there were bottles pulled out and some rather masochistic drinking done in the lower depths of the White House. I know I lost two bottles of bourbon somewhere."

Charles Martin Maguire was born Feb. 14, 1930, in Manhasset, N.Y., and was the oldest of seven children born to an Irish father and an Irish American mother. His father was an engineer who worked in New York on the construction of the Queens Midtown Tunnel. In 1939, when the job was done, the family moved back to Dublin, where Mr. Maguire received his undergraduate degree in mass communications in 1949, graduating first in his class from Rathmines College.

He worked in Ireland as a correspondent for the Associated Press from 1949 to 1951 and then returned to the United States to work as a writer for the Philadelphia advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Sons. He was drafted into the Army in 1953 and assigned to the Psychological Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. He also served in Europe, where he remained after his discharge to work for the State Department on the U.S. Escapee Program. Established in 1952, the program coordinated the resettlement of about 25,000 escapees from Soviet-bloc countries.

He then moved to New York to become an advertising copywriter for Young & Rubicam. His best-known ad ran the day before the 1960 presidential election. It featured a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson showing black and white chess pieces confronting one another and included the Edmund Burke quotation: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." The caption underneath read, "Vote Tomorrow."

Mr. Maguire received a master's degree in public law and government from Columbia University in 1962 and was a doctoral candidate in Sino-Soviet studies at Columbia's Russian Institute, now the Harriman Institute.

After his stint in the White House, he worked for Merrill Lynch before forming his own business and public policy consulting firm. His clients included Young & Rubicam, British Gas and the Singer Corp. He also assisted Lady Bird Johnson with her memoir, "A White House Diary" (1970).

Mr. Maguire's wife, the former Mary Beth Carroll, died in 2004.

Survivors include two children, Jennifer Maguire Isham of New York and Douglas Maguire of the District; two brothers; and three sisters.