page_title: Leverett Saltonstall
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Leverett Saltonstall / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Miss Eleanor Brooks (Mrs. Richard Middlecott Saltonstall) John Singer Sargent -- American painter 1890 Private collection Oil on canvas 154.9 x 78.7 cm Signed upper right ‘John Singer Sargent/1890’ Inscribed on reverse ‘Miss Eleanor Brooks/painted by John Singer Sargent/August 1890’ Jpg: TEFAF.com, the Maastricht arts fair
context_page_description: Leverett A. Saltonstall was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts. He served three two-year terms as the 55th Governor of Massachusetts, and for more than twenty years as a United States Senator. Saltonstall was internationalist in foreign policy and moderate on domestic policy, serving as a well-liked mediating force in the Republican Party. He was the only member of the Republican Senate leadership to vote for the censure of Joseph McCarthy.
context_section_description: Leverett Saltonstall was born in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, to Richard Middlecott Saltonstall and Eleanor Brooks Saltonstall.  The Saltonstall family, a wealthy Boston Brahmin family, had deep colonial roots, as did that of his mother.  Saltonstall was able to trace his ancestral roots to the Mayflower; his grandfather and great-grandfather, both also named Leverett Saltonstall.  His father was a lawyer; his mother was the daughter of Peter C. Brooks III, a beneficiary of the large fortune of his same-named grandfather.
  He was educated at the private Noble and Greenough School, and then attended the Evans School for Boys in Mesa, Arizona, an upper-crust ranch school, along with Nicholas Roosevelt, nephew to family friend Theodore Roosevelt.  He then entered Harvard, graduating in 1914, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1917.  He was active in varsity sports at Harvard, notably serving as captain of the Junior Varsity crew team that won the prestigious Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta in 1914 – the first American crew ever to do so.  He also played football and hockey, scoring a dramatic overtime goal in a 1914 win over the legendary Hobey Baker's Princeton team.
  Saltonstall married Alice Wesselhoeft (1893–1981) of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1916, while still in law school. Together they had six children, including Emily (1920–2006), at one time the daughter-in-law of Richard Byrd and a former WAVE; Peter Brooks Saltonstall, killed in action  on Guam in 1944; William L. Saltonstall (1927–2009), a member of the Massachusetts Senate; and Susan (1930–1994), a horse breeder.
caption: Miss Eleanor Brooks (Mrs. Richard Middlecott Saltonstall), John Singer Sargent, 1890
exif: {}