June Bingham, who died August 21 at 88, was a writer and the wife of a congressman who late in life melded her interests and experiences by becoming a playwright of off-Broadway productions about presidents and their women.

Originally a newspaper writer who had an early job editing letters to the editor of the Washington Post, Bingham went on to write biographies of a U.N. secretary-general, U Thant, and a Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.

Living in Washington at a time when a politician’s wife was expected to be little more than a well-made-up appurtenance to her husband’s career, Bingham chafed at the endless rounds of cocktail parties and fund-raisers. In 1983, when Rep. Jonathan Bingham retired, she delivered to the capital in the pages of the Post a farewell blast. “I no longer need to pretend approval when I do not feel it. I also can rejoice that the word ‘friend’ can now be returned to its original — and previous — meaning,” she wrote.

She went on to decry a long list of indignities and annoyances, including name tags, fund-raising, and midnight phone calls from drunken constituents. “For a loving Congressional couple,” she grumbled, “coitus interruptus refers to the ringing of the telephone rather than the planning of a family.” Among the few advantages she found was “the opportunity not to write my congressman, but … to whisper in his ear.”

Bingham was born into an old New York family whose members, as documented in the recent book “Lots of Lehmans,” included a governor and a head of the judiciary, the founders of a great financial house, and the current Manhattan district attorney, among others.

Bingham attended Vassar College and graduated from Barnard College in 1941. After working as a writer at the Treasury Department during World War II, she and her husband moved back to New York, where Jonathan Bingham practiced law and became increasingly involved in Democratic politics. He later worked at the State Department, was secretary to Governor Averell Harriman, and after a failed run for state Senate served as ambassador to various branches of the United Nations.

While starting a family, Bingham worked as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. In 1949, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy article by Bingham about opposition to belief in Santa Claus. (She was a Santa supporter, but later in life sanctioned what she called a “nonaggression pact,” limiting the number of presents her growing brood exchanged to a maximum of one apiece.)

In the late 1940s, Bingham began producing self-illustrated psychological self-help pamphlets with titles like “Do Cows Have Neuroses?”She eventually teamed up with the chairman of Yale University’s psychiatry department, Fritz Redlich, to write “The Inside Story: Psychiatry and Everyday Life” (1953), a book for general readers that was illustrated with 100 New Yorker cartoons.

Thereafter, Bingham’s writing career became increasingly “braided,” as she called it, with her husband’s career. He introduced her to Niebuhr, perhaps America’s most political theologian, in the late 1950s, and she spent seven years writing Niebuhr’s biography, “Courage to Change” (1961). She called the book “the hardest work I have ever done”; it is still well regarded and often cited, though it is now out of print.

After her husband went to the United Nations, Bingham embarked on the biography of U Thant; he accompanied her to Burma to do research and ended up garnering a vote — the American deputy chief of mission in Rangoon voted in the Bronx.

Jonathan Bingham spent nine terms in Congress starting in 1965, “the longest 18 years of my life,” his wife once wrote. He died in 1986 after 47 years of marriage, and June Bingham was remarried within a year to Robert Birge, a Yale classmate of her husband’s whom she met at his funeral. She told her (rather surprised) family that she had merely turned the page in the Yale yearbook. As if to emphasize how thoroughly braided her life was, Mr. Birge had studied theology with Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary. She helped him produce a newsletter of sermon ideas for ministers.

As a playwright, Bingham mined her own life for inspiration. Plots about President Franklin Roosevelt’s love life in “Triangles” and “Eleanor and Alice” were inspired in part by an acquaintance with Alice Longworth, a senator’s wife and daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who was famous for having a pillow in her sitting room that was embroidered, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, sit right here by me.”

A later effort was “Asylum: The Strange Case of Mary Todd Lincoln,” a musical. It was while preparing for the opening of an early version of “Asylum” in 2001 that she was diagnosed with cancer; she put off (successful) surgery until after the production opened, but not before threatening to title her next opus “No Nodes Nanette.”

Her journalistic production continued unabated in recent years. She embraced aging as an opportunity to play the elder, scolding the world for the decline of mothers-in-law, counseling calm after September 11, 2001, and contemplating the hippocampus’s role in her own vivid dream life.

June Rossbach Bingham Birge

Born June 20, 1919, in White Plains; died at her home in Riverdale on August 21; married in 1939 to Jonathan Bingham, who died in 1986; remarried in 1986 to Robert Birge, who survives her, as do three children, Sherry Downes, Timothy Bingham, and Claudia Meyers, 12 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren; another daughter, June Mitchell Esselstyn, predeceased her.