Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III (September 18, 1917 – July 11, 1970) was an American historian and political scientist at Cornell University (1947-1970) who wrote The American Presidency, among 20 other books, and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for his book Seedtime of the Republic. Background Rossiter was born on September 18, 1917, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Winton Goodrich Rossiter, a stockbroker, and Dorothy Shaw. Clinton grew up in Bronxville, New York, as the third of four siblings: Dorothy Ann Rossiter, William Winton Goodrich Rossiter (William also attended Westminster and Cornell University), Clinton, and Joan Rossiter. He was raised to give priority to family and social expectations. He attended Westminster preparatory school in Simsbury, Connecticut and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1939, where he was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. In 1942, Princeton University awarded him a doctorate for his thesis Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. Career Immediately after American entry into World War II, Rossiter joined the United States Naval Reserves and served for three years as a gunnery officer, mostly on the in the Pacific Theater, reaching the rank of lieutenant. Rossiter taught briefly at the University of Michigan in 1946, moving to Cornell University in 1947, where he rose from instructor to full professor in eight years. He served as the chair of the Government Department from 1956 to 1959, when he was named John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions. During the 1950s, Rossiter served as series editor for "Communism in American Life," published by the fund for the Republic, a nonprofit organization funded by the Ford Foundation. He spent the 1960–1961 academic year as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, England. Personal life and death He married Mary Ellen Crane in September 1947. They had three sons (all Cornell graduates): David Goodrich Rossiter (1949), Caleb Stewart Rossiter (1951) (Caleb also attended Westminster), and Winton Goodrich Rossiter (1954). Years later, his son would state that his father suffered a lifetime of debilitating clinical depression. He could no longer extract himself from it and overdosed on sleeping pills. External events had much to do with the last stages of this depression. His beloved Cornell was convulsed with racial conflict, including the infamous armed seizure of the student union building in April 1969. Rossiter became prominent as