Clark died Friday at his home in New York, his granddaughter Taylor Clark said.
Clark served as attorney general in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration in the late 1960s and is recognized for supervising the drafting of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. He later defended controversial international figures, including former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his trial for crimes against humanity by the Iraqi interim government following his overthrow.
After serving as attorney general, Clark — who had become a vocal critic of the Vietnam War — twice ran unsuccessfully for Senate in New York. In 1992, he founded the International Action Center, an organization that is “committed to building broad-based grassroots actions opposing U.S. wars abroad while fighting racism and economic exploitation of workers at home,” according its website.
Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1927, Clark was the son of former US Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, who resigned from the high court after swearing in his son as attorney general to avoid conflicts of interest. As a member of the Marine Corps, Ramsey Clark served in Europe during World War II. He graduated from the University of Texas and later earned a law degree from the University of Chicago. He worked at his father’s Texas firm, Clark, Reed and Clark, before joining the Justice Department.