[citation needed] Rogers entered the Navy in 1942, serving on the USS Intrepid, including her action in the Battle of Okinawa.

Clark wrote, "It is difficult to say how much damage the efforts to arrive at a sound basis for prosecution in the espionage case has been done by the open hearings."

As Deputy Attorney General, Rogers had some role in or insight into the process that led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage.

In that capacity, he worked with Osro Cobb, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, to implement federal orders and to maintain peace in the capital city.

Rogers became attorney general upon the resignation of his superior, Herbert Brownell Jr., who had worked to implement the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School.

"[8] In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. hailed Rogers for advocating the integration of an elementary school in Alabama that had excluded the children of black military personnel.

From 1962 to 1963, Rogers was head of the Federal City Council, a group of business, civic, education, and other leaders for the economic development in Washington, DC.

Nixon had long distrusted the State Department, whom he had accused under the Truman administration of being staffed with liberal diplomats who were insufficiently anti-communist and who were responsible for the "loss of China" in 1949.

[16] On March 16, 1969, Rogers attended a meeting at the White House where Nixon discussed Operation Menu, the plans to bomb Cambodia in secret.

Throughout his tenure, however, his influence was curtailed by Nixon's determination to handle critical foreign policy strategy and execution directly from the White House through his national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

Ronald Reagan asked Rogers to play the US president in IVY LEAGUE 82 (March 1982), a command post exercise of American nuclear forces under SIOP.

The Rogers Commission was the first investigation to criticize NASA management for its role in negligence of safety in the Space Shuttle program.

Among the more famous members of Rogers's panel were astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, Air Force general Donald Kutyna, and physicist Richard Feynman.

[citation needed] Rogers married Adele Langston (August 15, 1911 – May 27, 2001), a fellow law student whom he had met at Cornell.

[1] William P. Rogers died of congestive heart failure, at the Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on January 2, 2001, at the age of 87.