Obituary: Robert J Lipshutz, White House counsel

Robert J Lipshutz, who as White House counsel to US president Jimmy Carter played an important behind-the-scenes role in negotiations leading to the Camp David peace accords, died this month at a hospice near his home in Atlanta. He was 88.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said his wife, Betty.

Lipshutz was a strong supporter of Israel in the White House. During the 12 days of negotiations at Camp David in September 1978 between president Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and prime minister Menachem Begin of Israel, he was a conduit between Carter and American Jewish leaders. The talks led to the peace treaty signed by Egypt and Israel in 1979.

"His insights played a key role in many White House initiatives and decisions, including the success of the Camp David peace accords," Carter said of Lipshutz in a written statement.

While working in the White House, Lipshutz also played a significant role in the creation of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Lipshutz was a prominent Atlanta lawyer when he met Carter in 1966. At the time, Carter was a state senator seeking to unseat Georgia governor Lester Maddox, a segregationist. Carter lost the Democratic primary, but four years later, Lipshutz supported him in his successful run for governor. Carter appointed him to the Georgia board of human resources and its commission on compensation.

When Carter defeated president Gerald Ford for the presidency in 1976, Lipshutz was his campaign treasurer. The new president then named him White House counsel, a post he held for three years.

Shortly after his appointment, Lipshutz's advocacy helped prompt the president to commute to eight years the 20-year sentence of Gordon Liddy, allowing the last of the original Watergate conspirators still in prison to be paroled. The White House said it was acting "in the interest of equity and fairness, based on a comparison of Liddy's sentence with those of all others convicted in Watergate-related prosecutions".

Lipshutz also had a key role in reversing the justice department's original decision to support a challenge to affirmative action in the case of Allan Bakke, a white applicant to a University of California medical school who contended that such racial preferences were unconstitutional.

Lipshutz helped draft a revised policy that was essentially accepted by the US Supreme Court. On 28 June, 1978, the court ruled five to four that affirmative action was constitutional but that it could not be based on racial quotas.

Lipshutz also pushed for appointing more African-Americans and women to positions in the administration and to judgeships.And in April 1978, with Stuart Eizenstat, the president's chief domestic policy adviser, Lipshutz wrote a memorandum to Carter calling for a presidential commission on the Holocaust, with the mission to memorialize the six million Jews and millions of other victims of the Nazis. He later wrote the presidential executive order creating the commission, headed by Elie Wiesel, that led to the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993.

Robert Jerome Lipshutz was born in Atlanta on 27 December, 1921, to Alan and Edith Gavronski Lipshutz. He graduated from the University of Georgia school of law in 1943 and served in the army in the Second World War.

Lipshutz's first wife, the former Barbara Levin, died in 1970. Three years later, he married Betty Beck. Besides his wife, he is survived by four children from his first marriage, a son, Randal, and three daughters, Judy, Wendy and Debbie Lipshutz; two stepchildren, Robert and Nancy Rosenberg; and nine grandchildren.