ANN ARBOR—George L. Grassmuck, professor emeritus of
political science at the University of Michigan and special
assistant and adviser to the Nixon administration, died of
prostate cancer Oct. 10. He was 80.

Grassmuck, who taught at the U-M from 1957 until his
retirement in 1990, was a well-known authority on American
politics, policy and the presidency and on the Middle East.

In 1960, Grassmuck took a leave from the U-M to serve
as chief of research for then-Vice President Richard
Nixon’s presidential campaign. He later was appointed by
the Nixon administration as a special assistant for
international affairs on the staff of the Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare in 1968-69 and was a White
House staff executive assistant as deputy to Presidential
Counselor Robert Finch in 1970-71.

Grassmuck also served as a consultant to the
international division of the Ford Foundation, the North
Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools and
the U.S. Office of Education in the 1960s and ’70s.

At the U-M, Grassmuck was assistant vice president for
academic affairs and acting director of the Center for Near
Eastern and North African Studies in the late 1960s. He
also was a founding member of the national Middle East
Studies Association.

Later, he became a member of the Gerald R. Ford Library advisory committee, served as secretary of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation in the 1980s and was honored with an Amoco Foundation Good Teaching Award in 1983.

Born Sept. 17, 1919, in Nebraska City, Neb., Grassmuck earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science
from the University of California-Los Angeles in the early
1940s. He served in the U.S. Navy during and after World
War II and later received his doctorate in 1949 from Johns
Hopkins University, where he taught for three years.

After short teaching stints at Boston University and
U.C.L.A., Grassmuck spent four years as an associate
professor of public administration at the American
University of Beirut in the mid-1950s before joining the U-
M’s political science department.

He is survived by wife, Barbara; three daughters,
Janice Lilja, Karen Kraushaar and Terri Millson Dicius and
their husbands; and four grandchildren, Emily, Matthew,
Mark and Nicholas.

Cremation has taken place. In lieu of flowers, the
family suggests that those wishing to honor him consider a
donation to their favorite charity or to the Ann Arbor Area
Community Foundation.