More Doubts, Opposition To Sale Of Unique, Hartford Collection Of Political History

A major donor to the University of Hartford's DeWitt collection of political memorabilia said he'll sue to block the school's plan to sell the collection, even as a former senior U.S. Senate aide expressed new doubt Thursday about whether such a sale would be legal.

Hartford lawyer Bruce Rubenstein said that, in the early 1990s, a variety of senior officials at the school pressed him to donate his $1 million collection of left-leaning political materials so that they could be displayed as an addendum to an extraordinary collection of U.S. presidential items donated previously by J. Doyle DeWitt, former chairman of The Travelers Cos.

Rubenstein said Thursday that he agreed to make the gift only after obtaining assurances from then-university President Humphrey Tonkin and others that his collection would remain intact and on display with the DeWitt materials in an on-campus museum, which would be part of a library funded in part by Congress to house the DeWitt collection.