Elisha Freedman, who served as Hartford’s city manager during the tumultuous 1960s and was Connecticut’s commissioner of administrative services two decades later, died Thursday, said his daughter-in-law, Emily Kahn-Freedman. He was 93 and had pancreatic cancer, she said.
Freedman rose in Hartford government to city manager in 1963. He held the post until 1971, the second-longest tenure.
Edward Lehan, who worked with Freedman in Hartford, Rochester, N.Y., and at the National Science Foundation, called him an “absolute craftsman in government.” He said Freedman “understood the nature of the Civil Rights Movement,” urging police restraint that Lehan said helped keep a lid on urban tensions and violence in Hartford in the late 1960s.