"He has kept us all honest because he told it as he thought," Willis said. "He has a high degree of personal integrity that drove him in what he did."

In 1987, Proctor became a deputy director of New York City's Office of Management and Budget. In city government, his honesty made him less than popular.

And conflict with New York mayors became a fact of life for Proctor when he took the executive director's job at the control board in 1990.

Bernard Rosen, first deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget, said Proctor's subsequent relationship with the office was sometimes marked with conflicts.

"He did his job, but there was some sort of tension at times," Rosen said. "The control board in its responsibilities can be critical of what you produce, and that can be adversarial."

In a 1991 Newsday column written in the midst of a city budget fight, reporter Dennis Duggan quoted an insider in then-New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins's administration as calling Proctor a "loose cannon."

"If we don't have a budget in place by Monday, [Proctor] will, in effect, become the first deputy mayor of the city," the insider told Newsday.

Colleagues said that despite the personal attacks, Proctor never let his criticism get personal. His reputation was so great that he was rumored to be a candidate for budget director in the Giuliani administration last November.

Joel Siegel, chief of the New York Daily News City Hall Bureau, said Proctor was unfailingly "fair and objective."

"He was bashed by Dinkins and Giuliani," Siegel said yesterday. "The mayors may not have found him very endearing, but that's his job, to provide sobering assessment."

He could be counted on to do that. Proctor routinely criticized efforts by the city council to circumvent its budget in order to give onetime bailouts to things like the City University of New York. He spoke out when budget numbers didn't add up.

And in October 1991, Proctor blasted the Dinkins administration after the mayor failed to get concessions from municipal unions.

"It isn't easy to negotiate when you don't know what your aim is," Proctor told Newsday.

Intellectual Bent

David Seifman, New York Post's city hall bureau chief, said Proctor lent an intellectual bent to the control board, as well as considerable "diplomacy and analytical skills."

"He knows his stuff," Seifman said. "He uses language that'll make you rush to the library sometimes."

Seifman said yesterday that the economic reports Proctor produced were those of the highest quality and expertise.

"They were really the finest examples of in-depth financial reports you can hope for," Seifman said. "From what I know, he'll do quite a good job at Harvard."

Joshua A. Kaufman contributed to the reporting of this story.