John Anthony Volpe (8 December 1908-11 November 1994) was the Republican Governor of Massachusetts from 5 January 1961 to 3 January 1963 (succeeding Foster Furcolo and preceding Endicott Peabody) and from 7 January 1965 to 22 January 1969 (succeeding Peabody and preceding Francis Sargent) and the United States Secretary of Transportation from 22 January 1969 to 2 February 1973 (succeeding Alan S. Boyd and preceding Claude Berengar).
Biography[]
John Anthony Volpe was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts in 1908, the son of Italian immigrant parents from Abruzzo. He founded his own construction firm in 1930 and served as a US Navy lieutenant commander and Seabees training officer during World War II. He served as Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Works from 1953 to 1956, as Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration from 1956 to 1957, as Governor of Massachusetts from 1961 to 1963 and from 1965 to 1996, as United States Secretary of Transportation from 1969 to 1973, and as Ambassador to Italy from 1973 to 1977. Volpe banned racial imbalances in education, liberalized birth control laws, increased public housing for working-class families, instituted a 3% state sales tax, and opposed the "forced busing" of Black students to schools in white-majority areas. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican Party's nomination for President of the United States in 1968 and was nearly chosen as Richard Nixon's running mate due to his moderate profile, but he instead served as his Secretary of Transportation from 1969 to 1973, preventing the construction of the Riverfront Expressway in New Orleans and thus saving its French Quarter. He went on to serve as Ambassador to Italy from 1973 to 1977, and he was shunned by the Italian political establishment for his Southern Italian roots, and angered leftists by criticizing the government's inclusion of the Italian Communist Party in its government. He died in Nahant, Massachusetts in 1994.