'A reminder of how civilized the world used to be'

Massachusetts Republicans may be headed for Whig-ville, as Howie Carr writes today, but once they were a proud party.

Christian Herter, above, was one of their leading lights: in William F. Buckley's words, "a reminder of how civilized the world used to be," and in Tom Dewey's, "the cream of the bottle."

Herter, the Globe's Martin F. Nolan writes, "proved that politics is an honorable calling":

No one was deeper "inside" than Christian Archibald Herter. A Republican, he lived on Beacon Hill. His father painted the murals in the House chamber where Herter was speaker before he went to Congress in 1942, serving five terms before being elected governor in 1952.

"Chris Herter was the toughest, smartest politician I ever knew," his frequent opponent Tip O'Neill once said. "He had Brahmin manners, but was thoroughly partisan."

Herter went on to serve as secretary of state for President Eisenhower and trade negotiator for President Kennedy. He was on the cover of Time twice, in 1953 and 1959.

Bow-ties figure prominently in these archival images of him, via Corbis: Election night, 1954 * Governor, 1954 * Sec'y of State, 1959 * His sartorial example lost on Castro

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His father, Albert, was a noted artist. Among the elder Herter's works: Young Girl * Garden of the Hesperides * And the murals beneath the Sacred Cod in the Massachusetts Statehouse