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List of Deerfield Academy alumni

Wikimedia list article

Cross-disciplinary reference desk with index cards, atlas, dictionary and catalogue
General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ6568668 ↗
Source-derived summary

The List of Deerfield Academy alumni is a dynamic list of notable Deerfield Academy alumni, sorted chronologically.

Pre-1900

George Grennell Jr. (1786–1877), U.S. congressman from Massachusetts

Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), president of Amherst College

John Williams (1817–1899), presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church

George Sheldon (1818–1916), politician and historian

Mary Tenney Castle (1819–1907), missionary and philanthropist in Hawaii

Rufus Saxton (1824–1908), Union Army brigadier general awarded Medal of Honor

William Lincoln Higgins (1867–1957), U.S. congressman from Connecticut

Classes of the 1920s

Paul Langdon Ward (1911–2005), president of Sarah Lawrence College

J. B. Jackson (1909–1996), writer, publisher, instructor, and sketch artist in landscape design

Classes of the 1930s

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009), screenwriter and novelist

Hastings Keith (1915–2005), U.S. representative from Massachusetts

Douglas Kennedy (1915–1973), actor

Lyman Kirkpatrick (1916–1995), inspector general and executive director of the Central Intelligence Agency

H. Stuart Hughes (1916–1999), academic and activist

Edwin W. Martin (1917–1991), U.S. ambassador to Burma

John Edward Sawyer (1917–1995), president of Williams College

Robert Morgenthau (1919–2019), Manhattan district attorney

James Colgate Cleveland (1920–1995), U.S. congressman from New Hampshire

Thomas Hedley Reynolds (1920–2009), president of Bates College

William Zinsser (1922–2015), writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher

Gordon MacRae (1921–1986), singer and actor

Ian Barbour (1923–2013), Templeton Prize winner

Charles Merrill Jr. (1920-2017), writer, teacher and philanthropist

John Mecklin (1918–1971), writer and journalist

Classes of the 1940s

Talcott Williams Seelye (1922–2006), U.S. ambassador to Syria and Libya

John Chafee (1922–1999), U.S. senator from and governor of Rhode Island; secretary of the Navy under President Richard Nixon

David S. Dodge (1922–2009), vice-president for administration (1979–83), acting president (1981–82) and president (1996–97) of the American University in Beirut

Thomas Keating (1923–2018), monk

Arthur Nims (1923–2019), chief judge of United States Tax Court

Charles Clapp (1923–2004), judge of United States Tax Court

Dickinson R. Debevoise (1924–2015), district judge on the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey

John Weinberg (1925–2006), chairman of Goldman Sachs

Ogden R. Reid (1925–2019), U.S. congressman from New York, U.S. ambassador to Israel

Henry W. Kendall (1926–1999), physicist, 1990 Nobel Prize recipient

Daniel C. Searle (1926–2007), heir, CEO of G. D. Searle & Company, conservative philanthropist

John Ashbery (1927–2017), poet

James Wadsworth Symington (born 1927), U.S. congressman from Missouri

Carl Richard Woese (1928–2012), biologist, discovered archeabacteria

Allen Stack (1928–1999), gold medalist, U.S. swimmer at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London

George Quincey Lumsden Jr. (1930–2026), U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates

Gilbert Melville Grosvenor (born 1931), president of the National Geographic Society, 2004 Presidential Medal of Freedom

Malcolm H. Kerr (1931–1984), president of the American University of Beirut

John McPhee (born 1931), nonfiction writer, wrote The Headmaster, regular contributor to The New Yorker

Hoddy Hildreth (1931–2019), member of the Maine House of Representatives and conservationist; son of Governor of Maine Horace Hildreth

Classes of the 1950s

Rodman Rockefeller (1932–2000), philanthropist

Edward Hoagland (1932–2026), writer

Richard Mellon Scaife (1932–2014), billionaire Mellon family heir, and philanthropist

Nelson Doubleday Jr. (1933–2015), former owner of the publishing house Doubleday and the New York Mets

Thomas C. Reed (1934–2024), secretary of the Air Force

Warren Zimmermann (1934–2004), final U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia

Robert Hazard Edwards (1935–2025), president of Carleton College; president of Bowdoin College

James M. Banner Jr. (born 1935), historian

Steven C. Rockefeller (born 1936), philanthropist

Frederick Louis "Fritz" Maytag III (born 1937), former owner of Anchor Brewing Company

Kit Bond (born 1939), U.S. senator from and governor of Missouri

Eric Widmer (1940–2025), headmaster of Deerfield Academy; headmaster of King's Academy

David H. Koch (1940–2019), billionaire, Libertarian vice-presidential candidate in 1984

David Childs (1941–2025), architect

Classes of the 1960s

Don Abbey, real estate businessman

Bruce Faulkner Caputo (born 1943), U.S. congressman from New York

Robert Beavers (born 1949), experimental filmmaker

Pete Varney (born 1949), Major League Baseball player

Stephen G. Smith (born 1949), journalist

Steven Brill (born 1950), journalist and publisher

Edwin S. Grosvenor (born 1951), editor and publisher

Peter Gabel (1947–2022), law academic and associate editor of Tikkun, son of actors Arlene Francis and Martin Gabel

Howie Carr (born 1952), journalist and radio host

Winthrop H. Smith Jr. (born 1949), former executive vice president of Merrill; chairman of Merrill Lynch International, Inc.

Classes of the 1970s

Stephen Hannock (born 1951), painter

Jeffrey Bewkes (born 1953), CEO of Time Warner

Nigel Newton (born 1955), publisher, founder of Bloomsbury Publishing

Kerry Emanuel (born 1955), scholar

Buddy Teevens (1956–2023), head football coach at Dartmouth College

Ken Bentsen Jr. (born 1959), U.S. congressman from Texas

Prince Alexander-Georg von Auersperg (born 1959), son of Sunny von Bulow; member of the aristocratic principality of Auersperg

Haun Saussy (born 1960), scholar

Classes of the 1980s

King Abdullah II al-Hussein of Jordan (born 1962)

Robert M. McDowell (born 1963), commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission 2006–2013

Adam S. Weinberg (born 1965), president of Denison University

Matthew Fox (born 1966), actor

Mark Rockefeller (born 1967), philanthropist

Mike Trombley (born 1967), Major League Baseball player

Nestor Carbonell (born 1967), actor

Craig Janney (born 1967), NHL player

Chris Waddell (born 1968), gold medalist Paralympic skier

Ted Ullyot, former Facebook general counsel, partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Milton Sands III (born c.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “List of Deerfield Academy alumni” as wikimedia list article. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1900, 1786, 1877, 1793—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, Deerfield and Academy can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as wikimedia list article. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6568668. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1900, 1786, 1877 and 1793.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “List of Deerfield Academy alumni”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow List of Deerfield Academy alumni primary sources, List of Deerfield Academy alumni archive and List research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “List of Deerfield Academy alumni”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of Deerfield Academy alumni” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.