Born in
Boston,
Massachusetts, the son of the wealthy publisher of the
Boston Herald, Choate attended the
Phillips Exeter Academy in
New Hampshire for his high school education. After
World War II, during which he served in the
United States Navy, he received his
bachelor's degree in
civil engineering from the
University of California, Berkeley in 1949. Subsequently, he relocated to
Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked as a
construction engineer and became wealthy in his own right through
real estate investments. In the late 1950s, during a trip abroad, he contracted a strain of
hepatitis. While recuperating, he read the
memoirs of
Walter Francis White, the former leader of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Choate, a lifelong
Republican, became inspired to use his wealth to battle what he saw as the greatest social ills afflicting America: poverty, hunger, and a lack of
civil and political rights for
African Americans and other
minority groups. Among the ventures he undertook to that end over the next several decades were the publishing of a
magazine dedicated to
social justice, called
Reveille; founding a number of
social welfare programs and charities in the Phoenix area; organizing a
Southwest conference on poverty, which included such speakers as
Vice President Hubert Humphrey and
Peace Corps director
Sargent Shriver; working in
Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist for groups such as the
Citizens Crusade Against Poverty; and serving as a
consultant to the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where he was credited with initiating a national study on
malnutrition. His efforts were later credited with the formation of the
United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which operated from 1968 to 1977, and the creation of the
White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health, which met in 1969. In September 1970, Choate became famous when he testified before the Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs on the nutritional content (specifically,
vitamins,
dietary minerals, and
protein) of the 60 bestselling
brands of dry
breakfast cereal in the United States. He was survived by four children from two of his three
marriages, each of which ended in
divorce, and three grandchildren. ==References==