Morse was born in
Lowell, Massachusetts on August 7, 1921, and graduated from
Boston University in 1948 and from
Boston University School of Law in 1949. He served in World War II in the
Army from 1942 to 1946 and was discharged as a second lieutenant. After the war, he served as a private practice lawyer, business executive, law clerk to the Chief Justice of the
Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and professor at Boston University School of Law, 1949–1953. He was elected to the
Lowell City Council in 1952 and served there until 1953 when he was employed as a staff member for
United States Senate Armed Services Committee, a position he held until 1955. From 1955 until 1958 he served as an executive secretary and chief assistant to United States Senator
Leverett Saltonstall, and later as a deputy administrator of
Veterans Administration from 1958 to 1960. During his time in the House, Morse supported the
24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, the
Medicare program for the elderly, the
Civil Rights Act of 1968, and alongside fellow House Republicans
Seymour Halpern,
Charles Adams Mosher and
Ogden Reid, co-sponsored the Health Security Act, a bipartisan health care bill that would have established a government-run health insurance program to cover every person in America. After the death of
Edith Nourse Rogers in September 1960, he was selected by the
Republican Party to take her place on the ballot and was elected as a Republican to the
Eighty-seventh Congress in November 1960. He was then re-elected to the five succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1961- May 1, 1972. In 1966, along with three Republican Senators and four other Republican Representatives, Morse signed a telegram sent to Georgia Governor
Carl E. Sanders regarding the Georgia legislature's refusal to seat the recently elected
Julian Bond in their state House of Representatives. This refusal, said the telegram, was "a dangerous attack on representative government. None of us agree with Mr. Bond's views on the Vietnam War; in fact, we strongly repudiate these views. But unless otherwise determined by a court of law, which the Georgia Legislature is not, he is entitled to express them." He became Under Secretary General for Political and General Assembly Affairs at the
United Nations from 1972 to 1976. He was then promoted to be the third Administrator of the
United Nations Development Programme from 1976 to 1986. From 1986 to 1991, he served as the seventh president of the
Salzburg Global Seminar, a
non-profit organization based in
Salzburg, Austria whose mission is to challenge current and future leaders to develop creative ideas for solving global problems. He died at his home in
Naples, Florida on December 18, 1994, and was cremated and placed in
Arlington National Cemetery in
Arlington, Virginia. ==References==