Copyright The Boston Globe
Mr. Warren, a two-term Newton mayor who stepped from Democratic politics into academic roles where he relentlessly encouraged those who vehemently disagree to speak with one another anyway, was 55 when he died Sunday in his Newton home. He was sitting watching sports on TV late at night, a favorite way to relax, said his wife, Tassy Warren. Tests are pending to determine the cause of death. Even in liberal Massachusetts, Mr. Warren brought notably polished Democratic credentials to roles in which he insisted that conservative voices should also be heard in discussions at the institute. “Nonpartisan dialogues,” he wrote, “are critical to moving our country forward.” Along with twice being elected mayor of one of the bluest cities in Massachusetts — and doing so as the state’s first popularly elected Black mayor — Mr. Warren had worked on Bill Clinton’s and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, and he formerly held White House jobs in Clinton’s second term. Mr. Warren’s nonpartisanship efforts at the institute included making room for a new conservative student initiative to launch a year ago. Also on his watch, the institute invited high-profile conservatives including former vice president Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway, a former senior counselor in the Trump White House, to speak at forums. “The fact that they came is a testament to him,” said Tassy, who is co-executive director and chief strategy officer at Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. To attract conservatives, it may have helped that Mr. Warren was also a veteran who enlisted in the Navy Reserve after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and served a tour of duty in Iraq. “He could talk with and connect with literally anybody,” Tassy said. “He ran as a Democrat, but you could not put Setti in in a box ideologically or in any other way.” As a citizen and a public servant, “Setti had qualities as a human being that everybody should want,” said Kerry, a former US senator from Massachusetts and former US secretary of state. Mr. Warren had been trip director during Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and had been a deputy state director for the senator. “He was just a gentle, wonderful soul who loved human beings and made friends wherever he went,” added Kerry, who was a groomsman when Mr. Warren married Tassy. “He was really solid in his value system and in his knowledge of what was important in life.” Setti David Warren and his twin sister, Makeda, were born in Boston on Aug. 25, 1970. “I was born a minute before him, and he always used to tease me about it. He called me his older sister,” said Makeda Warren Keegan, who added that he encouraged her to run for public office when she was elected to Ashland’s selectboard. “He was always curious and intelligent, and there was something deeply empathic about him,” she said. “He cared about people.” Their younger sister, Kara, died at 27 in 2005 of complications from severe asthma. Their mother, Elpidia Lopez Warren of Newton, is a retired social worker. Joseph D. Warren, their father, was a civil rights activist, former state assistant secretary of education, and former Northeastern University professor. Joseph, who died in 2010, also was a presidential campaign adviser when his friend Michael S. Dukakis was the 1988 Democratic nominee. Dukakis became Setti’s “first mentor,” Tassy said. “He talked about Duke all the time as the model of the kind of leader he wanted to be.” “I knew Setti when he was 3 years old,” Dukakis said by phone Thursday. “I watched him grow up and I was so impressed. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy.” At Newton North High School, Mr. Warren was class president all four years. When a 1987 altercation between white and Black students at the school roiled racial tensions, he was among the student leaders who appeared at a news conference with then-mayor Theodore Mann as officials moved moved to defuse the situation. Mr. Warren also was undergraduate student government president at Boston College, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He went on to graduate from Suffolk University Law School but did not practice. After college, he worked with his family’s consulting business before joining Clinton’s 1996 campaign. In the late 1990s, he was a special assistant in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs for Clinton. And as White House events director, he worked closely with Hillary Clinton. Mr. Warren, whose first marriage ended in divorce, subsequently was the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s New England director before working in fundraising at BC. He then joined Kerry’s 2004 campaign, where he met Elizabeth Tasker Plummer, who is known as Tassy. Bonding over both having grown up in Newton, they dated a while until Mr. Warren said one day that he was in love with her and thought they should only see each other. “It was so refreshing,” she said, recalling how different he was from most men. “I was like, ‘Oh my God – he actually tells you what he thinks.’” They married in 2006 and had two children — Abigail, who is 17, and John, who is 14. Mr. Warren “was the best dad in the world,” she said. “He thought those kids literally walked on water.” As the son of a Black father and a Latina mother, and someone who had seen racism firsthand, Mr. Warren also wanted their children “to know and to understand what racism looks like — that it is a problem the other person has, it is not you,” she said. Because he knew their children would experience their own challenges, she said, Mr. Warren stressed that “what they were going to need from us was unconditional love, and us telling them over and over again that they were the best to counteract what they would face in the world.” Mr. Warren was first elected Newton mayor in 2009 and re-elected four years later. He took office amid financial woes associated with building an expensive new Newton North High School, and he governed through longstanding disagreements over how to address affordable housing in the prosperous suburb. As with his student presidency at BC, when he recalled knocking “on virtually every dorm room door I could,” he made the rounds as a Newton candidate, estimating that he knocked on 11,000 doors. While mayor, Mr. Warren entered the US Senate race in 2011 and, amid funding challenges, ended his candidacy the following year in a contest Elizabeth Warren ultimately won. Near the end of his mayoral tenure, Mr. Warren announced he would run for governor but later ended his campaign citing the “insurmountable” hurdles of taking on Charlie Baker, the popular Republican incumbent. After leaving office, he became executive director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy in 2018. When the leader of the Institute of Politics left in 2022, Mr. Warren became interim director until being named to the post permanently the following year. As mayor, Mr. Warren “was a total policy wonk and he loved governing,” his wife said, though he was less fond of the fundraising part of campaigning. “He wanted to make a difference and believed government could do that,” Tassy said. “He believed it in his core.” A celebration of life was held Friday for Mr. Warren, who in addition to his wife, children, mother, and sister leaves his stepmother, Martha Warren of Newton; a stepbrother, Keir Walker of Newton; and a stepsister, Lea Walker of Los Angeles. Aside from his family — “the only thing he ever wanted to do was to be at home with us and the dog,” Tassy said — Mr. Warren rode in the Pan-Mass Challenge for 15 years. That charity ride, like public service, hearkened to his parents’ civil rights activism and his Jesuit education at BC — “this belief that you take care of other people and that is your mission on earth,” Tassy said. “We live in the house that he grew up in, that his dad was able to buy because of his GI benefits,” Tassy said. “He’d say, ‘We have this house, we have all these advantages — we have to make this worth it.’ ”
