George J. Mitchell

In the waning days of the Clinton administration, Mr. Mitchell was appointed to lead an international commission to investigate the causes of violence in the Middle East. He released a report in the spring of 2001 that called for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and a Palestinian crackdown on terrorism.

He was born on Aug. 20, 1933, in Waterville, Me., where his father was a janitor at Colby College and his mother worked nights in a textile mill to support their five children. His mother was an immigrant from Lebanon, and his father, an orphan of Irish ancestry, was raised by a Lebanese family.

In his youth,  Mr. Mitchell served as an altar boy in the Arabic-language Maronite Catholic church in Waterville, and in later years said he still retained a few words of Arabic.

He started political life as an aide to former Senator Edmund S. Muskie, and after Mr. Mitchell lost a race for the governorship of Maine in 1974, Mr. Muskie's influence won him appointments as a United States attorney in 1977 and as a federal district judge in 1979. A year later, Mr. Muskie left the Senate to become secretary of state, and Mr. Mitchell was appointed to his seat. Republicans considered him a pushover when he ran for election in 1982, but the new senator had tirelessly tramped the state, building up his political base, and he retained his seat by winning 61 percent of the vote.

In July 1987, Mr. Mitchell seized the nation's attention during the Iran-contra hearings, when he lectured Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North of the Marine Corps on patriotism, saying, ''Recognize that it is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the contras and still love this country just as much as you do.''

In 1994, President Clinton made it clear to Mr. Mitchell that he would be the president's first choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, but Mr. Mitchell, who had already announced his retirement, said he felt a duty to remain in the Senate to shepherd through Mr. Clinton's health care plan, which in the end failed to pass. (The seat went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)

Mr. Mitchell became Mr. Clinton's special envoy to Northern Ireland, and played a major role in the peace agreement reached in 1998 -- and in getting the process back on track when it collapsed the next year. At one point, Mr. Mitchell took the Catholic and Protestant leaders out to dinner and ordered that they talk about anything but politics; eventually, the talk turned to opera.

''You know why I love opera?'' Mr. Mitchell asked. ''When I go home and put on 'La Boheme,' I know Rodolfo's going to sing the same words every time, and it gets me prepared to come back to Belfast because the one thing I know is that I'm going to have to sit here and listen to you guys saying the same thing over and over again every time.''

His listeners were men with no history of enjoying being made fun of. But they laughed.

When baseball wanted a high-profile figure to lead an investigation into the use of steroids and other banned substances in March 2006, it turned to Mr. Mitchell. His report, released in December 2007, linked roughly 90 players to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It also sharply criticized owners and the players union for “a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged.”

In addition, Mr. Mitchell gave baseball 20 recommendations, with the clear expectation that the sport would act on many of them. Four months later, Commissioner Bud Selig and the players union agreed to amend their drug-testing policy for the third time in four years. As part of that agreement, Mr. Selig decided not to discipline any of the players named in the report, abiding by a request made by Mr. Mitchell, and said the active players would instead be asked to perform community service. In addition, the number of random tests were increased and the powers of the administrator who oversees the testing program were enhanced.

In January 2009, Kirk Radomski, an admitted seller of steroids who was a key witness in the investigation, wrote in a book that Mr. Mitchell had asked him "specific questions'' about "some of baseball's biggest stars'' in an attempt to confirm "good information'' from another source. Mr. Radomski said the names of the players he was asked about did not appear in the report. Mr. Mitchell denied Mr. Radomski's account.

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