Washington ? Retired Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, appointed by Democratic President Kennedy but remembered as a law-and-order conservative who opposed much of the court’s liberal 1960s agenda, died Monday at 84.

A football star as a young man, White served 31 years on the court before retiring in 1993. In the court’s history, only eight justices served longer.

White

White died Monday morning in Denver, of complications from pneumonia, the court announced. He was the last living former justice.

White’s story evokes a movie script, a narrative of a uniquely American 20th-century life.

He grew up in a tiny Colorado town, graduated first in his class and was an All-America football player at the University of Colorado, then went to England as a Rhodes scholar.

He received high honors at Yale law school, served in World War II and was known to a generation of sports fans as “Whizzer” White, once the best-paid player in the National Football League. White bristled at the nickname.

In making Byron Raymond White his first Supreme Court pick in 1962, Kennedy said White had “excelled in everything he had attempted.”

White soon marked his independence from Kennedy’s brand of liberalism, supporting civil rights laws but dissenting as the court moved to expand other rights and protections that White sometimes found troubling.

He voted to give federal courts broad powers to order racial desegregation of the nation’s public schools, but he later opposed broad use of affirmative action to remedy past discrimination in employment.

White dissented from the court’s 1966 Miranda v. Arizona ruling that requires police to recite constitutional rights to those they arrest and again in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White is shown here posed in action in Detroit Lions uniform in 1944. White, whose reputation for clear-headed legal thinking was honed through three decades on the nation's highest court, died Monday. To a generation of American sports fans he was better known as Whizzer'' White, the football player who won All-America honors and National Football League stardom. He was 84.

Although his own views changed little, change around him on the court made White a consistent, if independent, member of an increasingly conservative majority. A hard-liner on law-and-order, White often spoke for the court in decisions enhancing police authority.

He generally opposed expansive freedom-of-expression rights and favored greater governmental accommodation of religion in ways more liberal justices considered violations of the constitutionally required separation of church and state.

White also wrote for the court when it struck down capital punishment for rapists, declared nude dancing a constitutionally protected form of expression, exempted child pornography from free-speech protections. He also stripped presidential Cabinet members of the absolute immunity from civil lawsuits.

“He came as close as anyone I have known to meriting Matthew Arnold’s description of Sophocles: ‘He saw life steadily and saw it whole,”‘ Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said Monday.