GUILDERLAND — Joseph Persico was a historian, biographer, speechwriter, and a veteran. He penned 11 books and chose the words that appear, carved in granite, on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

He died on Saturday, Aug. 30, 2014, at St. Peter’s Hospital, after a long illness. His family was with him. He was 84.

Mr. Persico was born in Gloversville on July 19, 1930. His parents, Thomas and Blanche Persico, worked in the local glove industry.

Mr. Persico, the eldest of his siblings, was 17 when his father died in 1948.

After his father’s death, he intended to leave school and start working, giving up his dreams of writing, but that his mother would not allow it, he told The Enterprise in a 1990 interview.

“Both of my parents had an obsession with education,” Mr. Persico tsaid then. They were both forced to leave school early to work, he said, which they “believed had slammed the door of opportunity in their faces permanently.”

His mother, Mr. Persico said, told him that she had already lost her husband, and didn’t want to lose “all her hopes, too” by having her son quit school.

Mr. Persico’s family said he claimed he was “infected with the writing virus after winning a ninth-grade essay contest — prize, $10 in 1944 War Savings Stamps — and I never recovered.”

He continued on with his education, and graduated from Albany State College in 1952, with a double major in English and political science.

After graduation, he joined the United States Navy, where he served as a lieutenant junior aboard a minesweeper during the Korean War, and later with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Naples, Italy.

After returning from the Navy, Mr. Persico entered the state’s Public Administration Internship Program, and served under Governor Averell Harriman, from 1956 to 1959, as a consumer advocate.

After Harriman was defeated by Nelson Rockefeller in 1959, Mr. Persico began working for the United States Information Agency, and was posted to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Washington, D.C.

In 1964, Mr. Persico returned to the Albany area, and worked as a speechwriter for Hollis Ingraham, the state health commissioner.

In 1965, Hugh Morrow, a member of Rockefeller’s staff, called Mr. Persico and asked for help on a speech about the environment. Rockefeller liked the speech so much that he decided to hire him to be his speechwriter.

Mr. Persico told The Enterprise, in 1990, that meeting Morrow changed his life.

“I went from being a mid-grade bureaucrat to Nelson Rockefeller’s speechwriter,” he said.

Mr. Persico wrote speeches for Rockefeller for more than 10 years, when Rockefeller was governor and vice president.

It was during his tenure as a speechwriter that Mr. Persico began doing his own writing.

John Rowen, who interviewed Mr. Persico in his home office in the suburbs, described the man as having “presence.”

“He has lively eyes,” Mr. Rowen wrote, in 1990. “His manner is approachable, but correct; he is a responsive conversationalist, but not outgoing in an artificial way.”

Mr. Rowen also noted that, throughout six encounters over the course of two years, he never heard Persico repeat himself.

“He always loved to look at things from the historic perspective,” said his wife, Sylvia LaVista Persico, this week. “He liked the investigative work involved in being a historian.”

Mr. Persico’s first book, My Enemy, My Brother, about the Battle of Gettysburg, was written “while moonlighting from my speechwriting job, out of desperation at having to write in somebody else’s shadow,” he once said, according to a tribute from his family.

He told The Enterprise that he had gotten bored and worn out from the “long days and nearly insatiable demands of the job,” and that he would go home and write about history to get some “psychological relief.”

In 1977, Mr. Persico left politics and government and began writing books full time.

He wrote several acclaimed biographies and histories, including Edward R. Murrow: An American Original, a biography about the broadcast pioneer; The Imperial Rockefeller, part memoir, part biography; Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which was adapted by Turner Network Television for a miniseries, winning two Emmy awards; and, My American Journey, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s autobiography, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks.

His other books include Casey: From the OSS to the CIA; Piercing the Reich; The Spiderweb; Roosevelt’s Secret War; Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day 1918; Franklin and Lucy; and, most recently, Roosevelt’s Centurion’s: FDR and the Commanders He Led to Victory in World War II.

Persico also served as a consultant, writer, and on-camera commentator on several television documentaries for the Public Broadcasting Service, A&E, and the History channel.

In 1996, Mr. Persico’s alma mater awarded him an honorary degree as Doctor of Letters for his “outstanding contributions as a writer in illuminating the human actor on the public stage.”

Mrs. Persico said her husband prided himself on writing from a firsthand perspective and not simply repeating what was written in the history books.

“He liked to interview people,” she said. “He was a conversationalist.”

Mr. Persico, though, considered the most satisfying words he ever wrote to be the ones engraved on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Persico was a member of the American Battle Monuments Commission — he was nominated to the commission by then Secretary of State Colin Powell — and, as a writer, the members looked to him to come up with the wording to memorialize the veterans of World War II.

He described the words he used, in 2004, when veterans gathered to meet him at the Home Front Café, in Altamont, as “a kind of poetry in granite.”

Mr. Persico was a devotee of the Home Front Café, said his wife, and even donated some war memorabilia to its collection.

Seven of his words, “Here we mark the price of freedom,” are inscribed underneath the monument’s gold stars — 4,000 stars, each one standing for 100 Americans killed in the war.

The second inscription, carved in a horizontal granite slab facing the pillars surrounding the plaza states: “Here in the presence of Washington and Lincoln, one the eighteenth century father and the other the nineteenth century preserver of our nation, we honor those twentieth century Americans who took up the struggle during the second World War and made the sacrifices to perpetuate the gift our forefathers entrusted to us: a nation conceived in liberty and justice.”

These words of his, he said, would last the longest.

“When all of my other books are forgotten, I expect these words will be remembered,” he said, in 2004. “Some day, long after I’m gone, and my children and grandchildren are gone, those words will be there.”

“He lived a historian’s life, which could be a solitary one,” said Mrs. Persico. “But he loved it. He did everything he wanted to do and that will be his legacy.”

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Joseph Persico is survived by his wife, Sylvia LaVista Persico; his daughters, Vanya Perez and Andrea Holder; five grandchildren, Amanda and Joshua Perez, and Georgia, Daniela, and Sofia Holder; a brother, Richard Persico; and a sister, Annabelle Townson.

Calling hours will be held today, Sept. 4, from 5 to 7 p.m., at the DeMarco-Stone Funeral Home, 5216 Western Turnpike, Guilderland. A private burial will be held at the Saratoga National Cemetery.

Memorial contributions may be made to the University Library at Albany, care of the University at Albany Foundation, at University Library, LI-123, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, New York 12222. The University Library houses Persico’s archival papers.

Contributions may also be made to his beloved hometown library, the Gloversville Public Library, at 58 East Fulton St., Gloversville, New York 12078.