Owen Lassiter
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Owen Lassiter is a fictional character on the television serial drama The West Wing.
Lassiter is a former President of the United States who served as the catalyst for the fifth season episode, "The Stormy Present", which first aired January 7, 2004. A Republican from California, Lassiter served two terms in the White House.
Early in the episode, Lassiter dies of post-operative complications from a hip replacement, a procedure which worsened his existing infirmity. While his frail hands are observed at the start of the episode writing a letter to President Josiah Bartlet, the camera never focuses in on the actor's face. Indeed, the only image of the former president appears to have been an artist's rendering of the man displayed on decorative banners outside his presidential library in southern California.
White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler, unhappily saddled with writing a Lassiter eulogy for Bartlet, privately derides those left from Lassiter's former administration as the "GOP Geriatric Brigade," lamenting: "These great and terrible old men ... spent the better part of the late 20th century trying to play God in other countries. And the regimes they anointed are the ones that haunt us today".
Libby Lassiter, the former president's widow, tells Bartlet that her husband spent his last years making pilgrimages to battlefields all over the world, wherever Americans spilled blood. Almost obsessively, Lassiter collected soil from those sites, which he in turn placed in glass jars and displayed on the shelves of an Oval Office replica at his presidential library. Lassiter had made the museum his home and a hospital bed was eventually moved into the complex.
In his final months, Lassiter placed rambling telephone calls to Bartlet. When Bartlet stopped taking the calls, Lassiter turned to paper and pen. In what is presumably one of his final acts, Lassiter writes a letter to his successor entitled: The Need for an American Empire.
[edit] Death and funeral
Lassiter apparently planned a low key funeral before his death, opting for a modest service at his presidential library rather than a pomp and ceremonious event at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.. Although he has a state funeral, Lassiter does not lie in state. In addition to his former cabinet officers and aides, Lassiter's funeral is attended by President Bartlet, former President D. Wire Newman and former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Acting President of the United States Glen Allen Walken.
Walken, who apparently regarded Lassiter as something of a mentor or personal hero, reminisces during the episode about how he and Lassiter were forced to improvise when they couldn't find a bathroom while on a trip to the People's Republic of China. It is not clear whether Lassiter was president at the time.
The scenes at the Lassiter Presidential Library and Museum were filmed at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
