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A life of serviceR.I.'s senior senator dies from heart failure
By JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Sen. John H. Chafee, a war hero, governor, Navy secretary and senator, who personified a temperate Republicanism of the old New England school, died Sunday night at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
The four-term senator, who announced last March that he would not run for reelection in 2000, had confided in only a few intimates that he had been diagnosed with an incipient heart ailment last year.
But Chafee's sudden illness and death from congestive heart failure still shocked family and friends. It came after a happy week of work that featured a standing ovation for a major speech at the National Cathedral, a hard-fought victory on a $15-billion health-care bill and, on Friday, a carrot cake from his staff for his 77th birthday.
On Saturday, however, Chafee felt poorly enough to cancel a trip to Boston to accept the ``New Englander of the Year'' award from a business group yesterday. Chafee's wife, Virginia, drove him to Bethesda Naval Hospital at about 2 p.m. Sunday. She was at his side when he died at about 7 Sunday night.
Tributes to Chafee began to flow before the business day began in Washington yesterday and continued until both houses of Congress closed last night with salutes from colleagues. Even by Senate standards, the outpouring was extraordinary, from elected officials across the political spectrum, and groups of teachers, veterans, gays and lesbians, medical professionals and environmentalists and more.
President Clinton called Mrs. Chafee at home in McLean, Va., to extend his condolences. Later in the morning he spoke extemporaneously about Chafee before his first public appearance.
``When you think of the term bipartisan, you immediately think of John Chafee,'' Mr. Clinton said in part, expressing gratitude for Chafee's work in the health-care arena.
``John Chafee proved that politics can be an honorable profession. For him, civility was not simply a matter of personal manners. He believed it was essential to the preservation of our democratic system and the progress of our nation. He embodied the decent center which has carried America from triumph to triumph for over 200 years. How we will miss him.''
``The big picture is that this was a hell of a public servant,'' said Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
``Here is somebody who fit a model that is now outmoded, but sadly so. He was somebody who spent his life in public service and who did it for all the right reasons. He was viewed with respect and appreciation by virtually everybody because of his fundamental decency.''
GOVERNOR ALMOND, his voice cracking, said at an afternoon news conference in the State House: ``Last night, the world lost a true statesman, our nation lost an inspiring leader and the State of Rhode Island lost a native son who brought great honor to the place he called home for 77 years.''
Flags flew at half-staff over official buildings from the Rhode Island State House to the U.S. Capitol. Dignitaries from around the nation made plans to attend Chafee's funeral Saturday at Grace Episcopal Chuch in Providence.
Speculation turned immediately to the question of succession -- a development that would have tickled Chafee, an ardent student of history who loved to talk about campaigns and politics.
In Rhode Island, the name at the top of every list was that of Warwick Mayor Lincoln Chafee, one of the senator's sons, who announced his Republican candidacy for the seat shortly after his father's retirement announcement in March.
Mayor Chafee and Governor Almond both said yesterday that they had not discussed the issue of the senator's replacement. Almond told reporters that he would observe a week of mourning before undertaking his task of appointing someone to complete Chafee's term, which runs through next year.
In Washington, environmentalists' expressions of grief over Chafee's death were mixed with practical concern: Chafee's replacement as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee is almost certain to be less friendly to their cause than Chafee. The next Republican in seniority who might take the seat is Sen. James M. Inhofe, a conservative from Oklahoma.
One of Chafee's closest friends in the Senate, the now retired Republican John Danforth, of Missouri, said the Rhode Islander was ``a totally positive person -- energetic, upbeat, ebullient -- who never pouted, who said, `Life is a good thing and being in government is a good thing to do with it. Okay, Let's go!' ''
In reminiscences over the years, Chafee always focused on the importance of work in forming his character. He was born to a privileged old Rhode Island family and educated at elite schools. But he sought out heavy factory labor in his summer jobs, reasoning that they would harden his muscles for wrestling and expose him to a wide variety of people.
As a Yale undergraduate whose friends included the future president, George Bush, Chafee enlisted in the Marines shortly after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor.
He was, at age 19, part of the American force that invaded Guadalcanal in a key battle. Chafee was so reluctant afterward to discuss his wartime exploits that even his eventual subordinate in the Navy Department, Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., could not say yesterday how the Rhode Islander won a Purple Heart.
After the war and graduation from Yale, Chafee took his law degree at Harvard. He had begun a career and a family in Providence when he was called to duty -- as commander of a Marine rifle company -- in Korea. His law office was ``not very exciting, so I didn't mind,'' Chafee said a few years ago, playing down his second combat stint.
But James Brady, a young officer in Chafee's Korea command in 1951, wrote a wartime memoir several years ago that portrays Chafee as a hero: brave, terse, cheerful, beloved by his men on the front.
CHAFEE WENT directly into politics after the war, winning election to the state House of Representatives, where he was minority leader by the time he began the first of his three terms as governor in 1963.
That was a coup for a Republican in one of the nation's most loyally Democratic states. It also set the pattern of his career, which he once described as an insistence on tough partisan competition, a refusal ``to stand around waiting for the crumbs to fall off the table'' of the majority Democrats.
Chafee made a name as a Republican governor intent on making government the principal agent of land conservation -- ``long before there was an Earth Day or an environmental movement,'' as one of his Senate colleagues put it yesterday.
His prickly insistence of government solvency undid him as a governor but contributed mightily to the making of the Chafee legend. He lost a reelection bid to Democrat Frank Licht in 1968, largely on the basis of his call for a state income tax.
But that was not the hardest blow to Chafee and his family in 1968. He and his wife lost a baby, their seventh, in June of that year, and during the heat of the general election, their daughter, Tribbie, 14, was killed in a horseback riding accident.
After he lost the election, Chafee agonized over whether to accept President Richard M. Nixon's offer of the job of Navy secretary. He accepted, after his father, John S. Chafee, counseled him that the work and the change would help the family to heal.
The Vietnam War was still raging in 1972 when Chafee stepped down as Navy secretary to launch a celebrated and hard-fought Rhode Island Senate campaign against Claiborne Pell. Chafee sought to link the incumbent Democrat to antiwar policies that would cost Rhode Island thousands of Navy jobs.
Pell carried Rhode Island that year. So did President Nixon, who closed the naval air station at Quonset Point anyway.
Four years later, Chafee came back a candidate for the seat of retiring Sen. John O. Pastore. The winner of a divisive, Democratic primary -- a wealthy Cadillac dealer named Richard Lorber -- was no match for Chafee in the general election.
The senator said shortly after arriving in Washington that ``you can become sort of a J.V. wheel around here'' by working hard at a selected few areas of expertise. From the start, Chafee chose the environment and health care, securing positions on key committees for those fields.
He also made friends quickly because of his chipper demeanor, according to Danforth, and rose within a few years to the chairmanship of the Senate Republican Conference, a junior leadership post.
DURING THE DEFENSE buildup of President Ronald Reagan, Chafee specialized in smoothing the ways for Electric Boat, the Groton, Conn.-based submarine-maker, with a plant at Quonset Point, to land its share of the weapons budget.
But he also reached across the Senate aisle for alliances and occasionally bucked the party line. Chafee reaped rewards for many of these efforts. In 1990 under President Bush, he teamed up with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, to forge a compromise extension of the Clean Air Act behind closed doors. The proceedings angered environmentalists until they saw the results signed into law by Bush.
``There might not have been a Clean Air Act -- at least not as good a one -- if it hadn't been for John Chafee,'' analyst Ornstein said yesterday. But he said that this kind of ``bridge-building'' cost Chafee within the increasingly conservative constituency of his fellow Senate Republicans. They turned him out of the leadership ranks in 1990.
His work on President Clinton's plan to overhaul the health-care system in 1993 and 1994 cost him even more trips to ``the hot box,'' said Danforth, as GOP leaders grew increasingly intent on handing Mr. Clinton a big defeat.
One summer afternoon in 1994, as Mr. Clinton's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system shuddered toward collapse, Senate Republicans gathered in the Capitol office of their leader, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas. The actual words of the speeches could not be heard from outside the closed doors to the magnificent office overlooking the national Mall. But the topic was John Chafee's work to salvage a modest, bipartisan compromise from the grandiose Clinton bill and senators were hollering about it.
So, Chafee was asked as the meeting broke up, what were the other Republicans saying in there?
``Well,'' he said with a jaunty shrug and a shake of his head, ``they weren't applauding.''
But through the long summer of 1994, Chafee pressed his band of middle-of-the-road Republicans and Democrats to keep seeking the elusive health-care compromise. They met in ``S-201,'' Chafee's unmarked office in a corridor around the corner from the Great Rotunda.
Those efforts with Sen. John B. Breaux, a conservative Louisiana Democrat, fell short. But in the years since, the Capitol office became something of a clubhouse for Chafee's irregulars, bipartisan groups that ranged in size from three or four to a couple of dozen, depending on the hopelessness of the cause.
CHAFEE'S HIDEAWAY office was the scene early this year of deliberations among a handful of Northeastern Republican moderates that led to one of Chafee's most delicate and most pressure-packed performances.
Shortly before Mr. Clinton's impeachment began, Chafee insisted on a national television news show that there be a full Senate trial of the charges related to Mr. Clinton's lies about his White House sex scandal. There should be witnesses, if necessary, Chafee insisted, angering many Democrats and making a prolonged trial a certainty.
But several weeks later, just as dramatically, Chafee was in the lead as the same handful of liberal Republicans voted against the articles of impeachment, making it certain that none would attain a majority vote of the Senate. Through it all, Chafee managed a tone of surprised displeasure that the president had had an affair with ``a young subordinate,'' as he always referred to Monica Lewinsky. All the while, Chafee had political Rhode Island at the edge of its seat on the question of his plans for 2000. Would he run for the fifth term that he seemed certain to win, popular and apparently healthy as he was.
No, Chafee answered in a dramatic press conference at the State House early in March. ``I want to come home.''
But the work habits -- learned from his father's examples and homely slogans in the years between the world wars -- would not die. Chafee walked with a cane in recent weeks, slowly recovering from back surgery.
That didn't keep him away from the office. He labored for days over a speech he had to make Thursday for the 50th anniversary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In the Gothic nave of Washington's National Cathedral, his words spurred a standing ovation by the 1,500 in attendance.
Then Chafee rushed to a tense meeting of the Senate Finance Comittee on a bill to restore $15 billion in Medicare budget cuts to hard-pressed health-care facilities.
Last-minute details and some testy exchanges threatened to deadlock the meeting until Chafee asked to speak. He made a brief, quietly hilarious speech about how it was the anniversary of the great British naval battle of Trafalgar, how Lord Nelson -- and rum -- figured therein, and how somehow this might inspire the committee to proceed with its bailout of long-term health care facilities and other embattled medical outfits.
Everybody laughed, Republican and Democrat. The mood lightened, and the Finance Committee adjourned to a collegial public session that took all of 20 minutes to send to certain full Senate passage the $15-billion health-care bill -- with a generous slice for Rhode Island health-care groups.
The ability to undertake great responsibility with laughter and lightness was his father's great gift, Lincoln Chafee said yesterday, recalling the days when the governor of Rhode Island had six young children back home in the Potowomut section of Warwick.
``We'd be out there in the ballfield by the house, an old cow field, playing baseball and it would be great fun,'' Mayor Chafee recalled.
``Then the big limousine would come with the state trooper, and our pitcher would have to retire,'' he said. ``He loved the game and he loved the work.''
Chafee is survived by his wife, 5 children and 12 grandchildren.
-- With reports from Jonathan Saltzman, Elizabeth Schaefer and Linda Henderson, of The Journal staff
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