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      Sherwood Boehlert, a G.O.P Moderate in the House, Dies at 84

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      A champion of environmentalism who chided climate-change skeptics, he was among the last of the relatively progressive Rockefeller Republicans.Sherwood L. Boehlert, a 12-term moderate Republican congressman from upstate New York who bucked his party’s right-wing shift by standing firm as an environmentalist, died on Tuesday in a hospice care center in New Hartford, N.Y. He was 84.The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Marianne Boehlert, said.As a member of the House from 1983 to 2007 and chairman of the Science Committee from 2001 to 2006, Mr. Boehlert (pronounced BOE-lert) successfully championed legislation that in one case imposed higher fuel economy standards for vehicles and in another, following the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, empowered the federal government to investigate structural failures the way it examines aircraft accidents.In 1990, he galvanized moderate Republicans in a bipartisan coalition that amended the Clean Air Act to reduce the pollution produced by coal-fueled power plants in the Midwest; the plants’ smoke contributed to acid rain that was fatal to fish in Adirondack lakes.He later chided global warming skeptics, inviting his fellow Republicans to “open their minds.”“Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong?” he wrote in an opinion essay for The Washington Post in 2010. “I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.”For someone whose closest exposure to formal training in science was a high school physics course (he received a C), Mr. Boehlert built a solid reputation in that discipline among congressional colleagues of both parties, as well as among scientists and environmentalists.National Journal called him the “Green Hornet” for his willingness to challenge fellow Republicans on the environment. Congressional Quarterly listed him among the 50 most effective members of Congress.After Republicans seized control of the House in 1994, he helped resist efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act; supported science education and a greater investment in research, including through the Department of Homeland Security; pushed to impose standards for voting machines in the wake of the disputed 2000 presidential election; and favored additional resources for volunteer firefighters.Representative Boehlert, center, with the North Carolina Democrat Tim Valentine, left, and the Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon, demonstrating their fire extinguisher skills to promote Fire Prevention Week in 1993.Chris Martin/CQ Roll Call via Associated PressSherwood Louis Boehlert, who was known as Sherry, was born on Sept. 28, 1936, in Utica, N.Y. His father was also named Sherwood. His mother was Elizabeth (Champoux) Boehlert.After serving in the Army, he graduated from Utica College in 1961 and managed public relations for the Wyandotte Chemical Company.Lured into politics as a supporter of relatively progressive New York Republicans like Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and Senator Jacob K. Javits, he went to work for Representative Alexander Pirnie, an upstate Republican, becoming his chief of staff. He later held the same job for Mr. Pirnie’s successor, Donald J. Mitchell, also a Republican.Mr. Boehlert ran successfully for Oneida County executive and, after serving a four-year term, was elected to Congress in 1982. His district, in Central New York, included Cornell University and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, which helped account for the Yankee regalia in his office. Unlike many of his colleagues, he returned home to his district every weekend.When he announced in 2006 that he would not seek re-election, he told The Syracuse Post-Standard that he regretted the widening partisan divisions in Washington.“I came to Capitol Hill 42 years ago, and I have never seen a higher level of partisanship and a lower level of tolerance for the other guy’s point of view,” he said.After Mr. Boehlert’s death, Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who is the Senate majority leader, praised him for his “rich legacy, his support of science, his commitment to combating climate change, and his deep love” for his district.Mr. Boehlert married Marianne Willey in 1976. Along with her, he is survived by two children, Tracy VanHook and Leslie Wetteland, and a stepson, Mark Brooks, from his marriage to Jean Bone, which ended in divorce; a stepdaughter, Brooke Phillips, from his wife’s first marriage; and six grandchildren. More

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      Jerry Lewis, Master of the Congressional Earmark, Dies at 86

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      A powerful legislator, he became chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in 2005 but faced scrutiny from the Justice Department for his ties to a lobbyist.Jerry Lewis, a powerful House Republican whose largess to his district in California established him as a master of the earmark but led to an investigation of his actions by the Justice Department, died on July 15 at his home in Redlands, Calif. He was 86.His son Dan confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.Mr. Lewis was elected in 1978 and served 17 terms in the House. A conservative who preferred working with Democrats to confrontational politics, he was a major fund-raiser for Republican candidates; his party’s third-ranking member, as conference chairman; and, briefly, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.“He represented a style of politics that no longer dominates the party,” John H. Pitney Jr., an aide of Mr. Lewis’s in the mid-1980s who is now a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, said by phone. “He was very much an ally of Bob Michel” — the former House minority leader from Maryland — “and never a favorite of the Gingrich faction, which took him down from the chairmanship of the House Republican Conference” in 1992. (Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip and later the speaker, supported the successful candidacy of Dick Armey of Texas over Mr. Lewis.)Mr. Lewis was best known for sending enormous sums of money back to his district through the use of earmarks, provisions in congressional spending bills that direct funds to a specific recipient. He sent tens of millions of dollars to educational, medical and research institutions, military installations, a dam on the Santa Ana River, extensive tree clearing in the San Bernardino National Forest and other projects in his Southern California district.In 2005, when he became chairman of the Appropriations Committee — after six years as chairman of its defense subcommittee — he told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside about his ambition for his district.“My goal as chairman is not just to create a huge funnel to San Bernardino and Riverside counties,” he said. “But I have a feeling we will in California manage to get our share.”But in 2006, the Justice Department began an investigation into whether Mr. Lewis had improperly steered millions of dollars in earmarks to clients of a lobbyist, Bill Lowery, a former Republican congressman from California and an old friend. Some of the clients donated to Mr. Lewis’s re-election campaign.Subpoenas were issued seeking details about how communities and businesses in Mr. Lewis’s district chose to hire Mr. Lowery’s firm, how much they paid, and the nature of communications between the firm and Mr. Lewis.Four years later, the Justice Department dropped the investigation.Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that had been critical of Mr. Lewis’s ties to Mr. Lowery, condemned the Justice Department’s decision.“Exactly what will a politician have to do for the Department of Justice to sit up and take notice?” Melanie Sloan, then the group’s executive director, said in an interview with The Associated Press.Looking back on the investigation in 2012, shortly before he retired from the House, Mr. Lewis told the Southern California public radio station KPCC, “It’ll always be there, and the reality is that we have attempted to be a positive impact in public service.”Charles Jeremy Lewis was born on Oct. 21, 1934, in Seattle and moved with his family to San Bernardino, Calif., as a child. His father, Edward, was a civil engineer who worked on the construction of New Deal projects. His mother, Ruth, was a homemaker.After studying veterinary science at the University of California, Berkeley, he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. After working in the insurance business, Mr. Lewis served on the San Bernardino Board of Education and then was elected to the California State Assembly. He served there for a decade. During his tenure, he pushed for voter approval to make a reporter shield law — to protect the confidentiality of sources — an amendment to the state constitution and wrote legislation that established an air pollution control agency in Southern California.Once elected to the House, he was named to the Appropriations Committee in his second term and became chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Four years later he took over the defense subcommittee. His two years as Appropriations Committee chairman ended in 2007, after Democrats won the House majority.In addition to his son Dan, Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Arlene (Willis) Lewis; a daughter, Jenifer Engler; two other sons, Jerry Jr., and Jeff; a stepdaughter, Julie Willis Leon; two stepsons, Jimmy and Marty Willis; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and two brothers, Ray and John. His marriage to Sally Lord ended in divorce.Having the same name as a famous comedian was something that trailed Mr. Lewis throughout his career. “He had a good sense of humor” about it, Dan Lewis said. He recalled his father campaigning at a parade in Apple Valley, Calif., where people were eager to see the funnyman, not the lawmaker. The crowd might have been disappointed, he said, but the congressman “wasn’t annoyed.” More

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      Edwin Edwards, Flamboyant Louisiana Governor, Is Dead at 93

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      He served four terms, charmed voters with his escapades and survived a score of investigations before going to prison in 2002 for racketeering.Mere months after being released from prison, former Gov. Edwin Edwards of Louisiana greeted an enthusiastic crowd as the Grand marshal of the 2011 International Rice Festival in Crowley, La.Jennifer Zdon for The New York TimesEdwin W. Edwards, the only four-term governor in Louisiana’s history, a swashbuckling rogue who charmed voters with his escapades and survived a score of grand jury investigations and two corruption trials before going to prison in 2002 for racketeering, died on Monday at his home in Gonzales, La. He was 93. His biographer, Leo Honeycutt, said the cause was respiratory failure. In January 2011, Mr. Edwards was released from a federal prison in Oakdale, La., after serving more than eight years of a 10-year sentence for bribery and extortion by rigging Louisiana’s riverboat casino licensing process during his last term in office.Six months later he married. And in the fall, he rode in an open convertible through cheering crowds waving Edwards-for-governor signs at an election-day barbecue. “As you know, they sent me to prison for life,” he told them. “But I came back with a wife.”Before Mr. Edwards, no one had ever been elected to more than two terms as governor of Louisiana. Indeed, the state constitution prohibits more than two consecutive terms. But from 1972 to 1996, with a couple of four-year furloughs to stoke up his improbable comebacks, Mr. Edwards was the undisputed king of Baton Rouge, a Scripture-quoting, nonsmoking teetotaler who once considered life as a preacher.In a state where it has always been good politics to wink at a little wickedness, Mr. Edwards, the silver-haired, bilingual son of French Creole sharecroppers and a relentless electoral and legislative infighter, was perhaps the most dominant political force since Huey Long, the radical populist known as the Kingfish, who was assassinated at the State Capitol in 1935.Courting votes in a bayou drawl with Cajun-inflected pledges to “laissez les bons temps rouler” (“let the good times roll”), Mr. Edwards — who avoided the prototypical political sins of self righteousness and talked the way plain folks did over gumbo and crawfish pie — rose from a local council to the State Senate to a seat in Congress and the governor’s mansion in 17 years.A complete obituary will be published shortly. More

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      Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91

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      He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign.Mike Gravel, a two-term Democratic senator from Alaska who played a central role in 1970s legislation to build the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline but who was perhaps better known as an unabashed attention-getter, in one case reading the Pentagon Papers aloud at a hearing at a time when newspapers were barred from publishing them and later mounting long-shot presidential runs, died on Saturday at his home in Seaside, Calif. He was 91.The cause was myeloma, his daughter, Lynne Mosier, said.Defeated in his bid for a third Senate term in 1980, Mr. Gravel remained out of the national spotlight for 25 years before returning to politics to seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates in 2007, calling for a constitutional amendment to allow citizens to enact laws by referendums. But when the voting began in 2008, he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.He nonetheless persisted, showing the same commitment to going it alone that he had displayed by nominating himself for vice president in 1972, staging one-man filibusters and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud — efforts that even senators who agreed with him regarded as grandstanding.But the pipeline was a lasting achievement, and one that forced him to develop allies. Senator Gravel (pronounced gruh-VELL), like most of his state’s leaders, favored construction of a pipeline to bring crude oil 800 miles from Alaska’s North Slope to the ice-free port of Valdez.But the project, formally proposed in 1969, was slowed or blocked in federal courts over environmental questions.Mr. Gravel seized the issue in 1973 by proposing legislation that would exempt the project from any further court intervention under the National Environmental Policy Act.Other pipeline supporters — including his Republican fellow Alaska senator, Ted Stevens — were wary because the environmental law was a proud accomplishment of Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, the chairman of the Interior Committee, which dealt with many Alaska issues.Senator Jackson favored the pipeline and said he believed that a thorough review would show that it could be built without damage to the environment. But he insisted that breaching the environmental act would be an “unfortunate precedent.”The Nixon administration backed Mr. Gravel and his call for swift action. His measure won, 50 to 49, with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew casting the deciding vote. The House quickly agreed, and the pipeline, which opened in 1977, made oil the center of Alaska’s prosperity.Senator Gravel in 1971, the year he drew national notice by reading aloud from the Pentagon Papers at a Senate subcommittee hearing. He was elected to the Senate from Alaska in 1968 and served two terms.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesMr. Gravel drew much more national notice on June 29, 1971. The New York Times and other newspapers were under court injunctions to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret, detailed government study of the war in Vietnam.He read aloud from the papers to a subcommittee hearing that he had quickly called after Republicans thwarted his effort to read them to the entire Senate. He read for about three hours, finally breaking down in tears and saying, “Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies — because of a public policy this government and all of its branches continue to support.” (In a major ruling on press freedom, the injunction against The Times was overturned by the Supreme Court the next day.)Mr. Gravel acknowledged many years later that his political ambition had led him to express support for the Vietnam War at the start of his political career, although he said he had personally opposed it.In his 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Senator Ernest Gruening, one of two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, Mr. Gravel said the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and not the United States was the aggressor. In 2007, while running for president, he told an NPR interviewer, “I said what I said back in 1968 because it was to advance my career.”He told Salon magazine the same year that Alaskans did not share Mr. Gruening’s opposition to the war at the time, and that “when I ran, being a realistic politician, all I had to do was stand up and not deal with the subject, and people would assume that I was to the right of Ernest Gruening, when in point of fact I was to the left of him.”Mr. Gravel won that primary, stressing his youth (he was 38 to Mr. Gruening’s 81) and campaigning in the smallest of villages, where he showed a half-hour movie about his campaign. He went on to defeat his Republican rival, Elmer E. Rasmuson, a banker and former mayor of Anchorage, in the general election.Senator Gravel in Miami Beach in July 1972, shortly before the Democratic National Convention there. He nominated himself for vice president.UPIHe won again in 1974, aided by the pipeline issue. But he lost the 1980 Democratic primary to Senator Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening. Mr. Gravel accused Mr. Gruening, who had announced that he would not take special interest money, of being “dishonest” because, he said, Jews who had made individual contributions amounted to a special interest group “that seeks to influence the foreign policy of the U.S.”Mr. Gravel had enjoyed little support from his party, depending instead on political action committees. His main issue was his all-out opposition to legislation designating more than 104 million acres in Alaska for new national parks, wildlife refuges and conservation areas.But when the Senate broke his filibuster against the bill and passed it just before the primary, it was a fatal blow to his campaign. He lost to Clark Gruening, who went on to lose the general election to Frank Murkowski.Senator Gravel had first sought national office by nominating himself for vice president at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Thirty-four years later, after returning to the real estate business and disappearing from the public eye, he announced his candidacy for the presidency.In the early primary debates for the 2008 election, he found much more public interest in the Iraq war than in his ideas about allowing citizens to enact laws, so he stressed his opposition to it, calling the Democratic senators who were seeking the nomination “gutless wonders” for not bringing the war to a halt.He was not invited to the later debates because of his low poll standings and fund-raising totals. He soldiered on, largely unnoticed during the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In New Hampshire, where he did the most campaigning, he got just 404 votes, or one-seventh of 1 percent, in the state’s primary.In March, he formally quit the Democratic contest and unsuccessfully sought the nomination of the Libertarian Party. His best showing came a few weeks later, when he got four-fifths of 1 percent in the North Carolina Democratic Primary.Maurice Robert Gravel was born in Springfield, Mass., on May 13, 1930, to Alphonse and Maria (Bourassa) Gravel. His father was a contractor. Both his parents were French Canadian immigrants from Quebec, and the future senator did not speak English until he was 7.Mr. Gravel attended American International College in Springfield, served in the Army in the Counterintelligence Corps and then drove a cab in New York City while studying economics at Columbia University.He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and set off for Alaska, which was not yet a state. He worked in real estate and as a brakeman on the snow-clearing trains of the Alaska Railroad before starting his political career.Alaska attained statehood in 1958, and Mr. Gravel was elected to the State House of Representative in 1962. He served as speaker in 1965 and 1966 before leaving for an unsuccessful primary challenge to a four-term Democratic congressman, Ralph Rivers. Mr. Rivers then lost to the Republican candidate, Howard Pollock.Two years later, Mr. Gravel was elected to the Senate.After his defeat in 1980, Mr. Gravel returned to the real estate business but did not do well. He went bankrupt, as did his company.Mr. Gravel at the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, at Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., in April 2007. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates, but when the voting began he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe is survived by his wife, Whitney (Stewart) Gravel; two children from his first marriage to Rita Martin, which ended in divorce, Martin Anthony Gravel and Lynne Denise Mosier; two sisters, Marie Lombardi and Sister Marguerite Gravel; four grandchildren and a great-grandson.In 2019, Mr. Gravel had one last political hurrah: He filed to run for president one more time, although he said he was running not to win but to qualify for the debates and “bring a critique of American imperialism to the Democratic debate stage.” He discouraged people from voting for him. His campaign was run by two teenagers, primarily on Twitter; Mr. Gravel himself had little involvement.After not qualifying for the first two debates, Mr. Gravel ended his campaign in August 2019 and announced that he would use some of his remaining campaign funds to establish a progressive think tank, the Gravel Institute.Into his later years Mr. Gravel held fast to his belief in direct democracy. He detailed his ideas for a fourth branch of the federal government, calling it the Legislature of the People, which would allow voters to pass new laws directly, circumventing in particular the Senate, which he saw as hopelessly corrupt.“What you need to have, and what I seem to have, is unreserved faith in the people,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2019. “There’s nothing else. And you can say: ‘Well, boy. That’s a stretch!’ You know what? The alternative is minority rule by the elites of society.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. William McDonald and Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      John Warner, Genteel Senator from Virginia, Dies at 94

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      In his 30 years in the Senate, the former Navy secretary was a leading Republican voice on military policy. He was once married to Elizabeth Taylor.WASHINGTON — Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the genteel former Navy secretary who shed the image of a dilettante to become a leading Republican voice on military policy during 30 years in the Senate, died on Tuesday night at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 94. Susan Magill, his former chief of staff, said the cause was heart failure.For a time Mr. Warner may have been best known nationally as the dashing sixth husband of the actress Elizabeth Taylor. Her celebrity was a draw on the campaign trail during his difficult first race for the Senate in 1978, an election he won narrowly to start his political career. The couple divorced in 1982.Mr. Warner in 1981 with Elizabeth Taylor, his wife at the time. They divorced the following year. Richard Drew/Associated PressIn the latter stages of his congressional service, Mr. Warner was recognized as a protector of the Senate’s traditions and credited with trying to forge bipartisan consensus on knotty issues like the Iraq war, judicial nominations and the treatment of terror detainees.Though a popular figure in his state, Mr. Warner was often at odds with Virginia conservatives. He became the Republican nominee in his first campaign only after the man who had defeated him at a state party convention was killed in a plane crash.He angered the National Rifle Association with his backing of an assault weapons ban. He infuriated some state Republicans in 1994 when he refused to support Oliver L. North, the former White House aide at the center of the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration, in Mr. North’s bid for the Senate. And he opposed Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork.In his retirement years, the rightward shift of the Republican Party further alienated Mr. Warner, prompting him to endorse select Democrats, including both his former Senate colleagues Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr. in their presidential runs against Donald J. Trump.But his support within the party mainstream during his Senate years, coupled with backing from independents who were attracted by his moderate views on social issues like abortion and gay rights, allowed him to fend off challenges from both the right and left. He won election to his fifth and final term in 2002 against only token opposition.Mr. Warner announced in August 2007 that he would not run in 2008, noting that he would be 88 if he finished his term and telling friends that he questioned whether he could continue to have the energy for the job. The peak of his power in the Senate began in 1999, when he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Though his chairmanship was interrupted briefly when Democrats took back control, he evolved into a Republican force on military issues, his credibility enhanced by his reputation for solid contacts in the Pentagon, his previous work there and his own service in both the Navy and Marines.Mr. Warner was ahead of others on the terrorism issue and created a subcommittee to focus on the threat. He was among Republicans who expressed reservations about the Iraq war, and he convened hearings on the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad when many of his fellow Republicans were hoping that the issue would disappear.Mr. Warner also was skeptical about President George W. Bush’s 2007 troop buildup in Iraq. But he never broke with the administration to back a fixed deadline for troop withdrawals. That position frustrated Democrats, who had hoped that Mr. Warner would lend his influence to their opposition to the war, and they accused him of not following through on strong talk against the conflict.Joining with Senator John McCain, who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Warner thwarted Bush administration efforts to reinterpret the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners in wartime, an approach that the senators said would open captured American military personnel to abuse.Mr. Warner was not averse to stepping into difficult political situations in the Senate. In 2002, he was among the first to come out against Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, after Mr. Lott had made a racially charged comment; Mr. Warner’s stand contributed to Mr. Lott’s decision to step aside as majority leader. He was also a leading member of the so-called Gang of 14, a bipartisan group of senators who struck an independent agreement on judicial nominations in 2005 and averted a fight over the future of the Senate filibuster.A debonair Virginian, Mr. Warner was sometimes called the senator from central casting; his ramrod military posture, distinguished gray hair and occasionally overblown speaking style fit the Hollywood model.John William Warner III was born on Feb. 18, 1927, in Washington to John Jr. and Martha (Budd) Warner and attended schools in Washington and Virginia. He left high school at age 17 to join the Navy and serve in the final months of World War II. He graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1949 and enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School before leaving to join the Marines during the Korean War. He returned to law school to obtain his degree in 1953.Mr. Warner was afterward a law clerk with the United States Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit and then an assistant U.S. attorney in the district from 1956 to 1960. After working in private law practice for most of the 1960s, he was appointed Navy under secretary by President Richard M. Nixon. He became secretary in 1972, serving for two years. In 1976, he was the federal coordinator of the national bicentennial celebration.Mr. Warner endured a reputation as something of a playboy after his first divorce from a member of the wealthy Mellon family, his marriage to Ms. Taylor and a public relationship with the newscaster Barbara Walters. But his long service in the Senate and a record marked by an independent streak ultimately overshadowed much of that image.He had three children from his first marriage, to Catherine Mellon. His survivors include his wife, Jeanne (Vander Myde) Warner. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Both of Virginia’s current Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, praised Mr. Warner on Wednesday as a friend, ally and informal adviser and described him as a model of what a politician should be. Mark Warner, who is no relation, had once tried to unseat him.“John Warner and I ran against each other back in 1996,” Mr. Warner said in a statement. “I’ve often said since that the right Warner won that race.” More

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      Jim Klobuchar Dies at 93; Minnesota Newspaperman and Amy’s Father

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      He rose to folk hero status with his derring-do as a journalist and came to national attention when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, spoke openly about his struggles with alcoholism.Jim Klobuchar was a renowned sportswriter and general interest columnist in Minnesota for decades.Straight out of central casting, he was celebrated for his derring-do: He once held a piece of chalk between his lips while a sharpshooter took aim at it. He was a finalist for NASA’s initiative to send a journalist into space, until the Challenger explosion in 1986 ended the program. He scaled the Matterhorn eight times and Kilimanjaro five.And he could make readers weep, as when he wrote about a 5-year-old girl with a brain tumor who loved to ride the rails: “She was cradled in her mother’s lap on the observation car of the Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha, a tidy young lady. A dying little girl, taking her last train ride.”But he did not come to national attention until 2018, when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, mentioned him during the contentious televised hearings on Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.During her questioning of the nominee, Ms. Klobuchar noted that her father, then 90, was a recovering alcoholic who still attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. She asked Judge Kavanaugh whether he had ever drunk so much that he could not recollect events. He turned the question back on her, a breach of decorum for which he later apologized. She accepted the apology, adding, “When you have a parent that’s an alcoholic, you’re pretty careful about drinking.”By then her father had been sober for more than 25 years. When she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Senator Klobuchar spoke often of his successful treatment and proposed spending billions of dollars to treat substance abuse.Mr. Klobuchar in 1974 at his desk at The Minneapolis Star, where we wrote a long-running column about whatever he wanted.Star Tribune, via Getty ImagesMr. Klobuchar died on Wednesday at a care facility in Burnsville, a suburb of the Twin Cities. He was 93. Senator Klobuchar, who announced his death on Twitter, did not specify a cause but said he had had Alzheimer’s disease. He survived a bout with Covid-19 last year.Mr. Klobuchar was long popular in Minnesota, even a folk hero. In addition to his newspaper columns — 8,400 of them by the time he retired from The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1995 — he wrote 23 books, held a football clinic for women, hosted talk shows and for almost four decades led annual “Jaunt with Jim” bicycling trips around the state, stopping at pay phones along the road to call in and dictate his column. After he and his first wife, Rose (Heuberger) Klobuchar, divorced in 1976, he and Amy began taking long-distance biking trips to bond with each other.As a young journalist for The Associated Press, he experienced an especially heady moment the day after the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were still neck and neck, with three states yet to report results. Mr. Klobuchar wrote the nationwide bulletin announcing that Mr. Kennedy had won Minnesota, giving him enough electoral votes to clinch the presidency. The scoop appeared in papers across the country.James John Klobuchar was born on April 9, 1928, in Ely, a small city on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, where he grew up. His father, Michael Klobuchar, worked in the iron ore mines. His mother, Mary (Pucel) Klobuchar, was a homemaker.From an early age, Jim read The Duluth Herald, and his mother encouraged him to pursue a career in journalism, Senator Klobuchar wrote in her 2015 memoir, “The Senator Next Door.”He graduated from Ely Junior College (now Vermilion Community College) in 1948, then enrolled at the University of Minnesota, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1950.He landed a job as wire editor at The Bismarck Daily Tribune. But six months later he was drafted into the Army and assigned to a new psychological warfare unit in Stuttgart, Germany, where he wrote anti-communist material.He returned briefly to the Bismarck paper, then was recruited by The Associated Press in Minneapolis, where he scored his election scoop. He joined The Minneapolis Tribune in 1961 as a sports reporter, focusing on the Minnesota Vikings.He left The Tribune in 1965 for the competing St. Paul Pioneer Press, but it wasn’t long before The Minneapolis Star lured him away by giving him a column to write about whatever he wanted.Mr. Klobuchar in 2015. He came to national attention when Senator Klobuchar spoke publicly of his overcoming alcohol addiction.Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune, via Associated PressThis was the heyday of print journalism, when newspapers sent their star writers all over the world. During the height of the Cold War, Mr. Klobuchar reported from Moscow. He covered the murder and funeral of Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister, in 1978. He challenged the pool hustler Minnesota Fats to a game. He wrote about an air service that employed topless flight attendants. He played a reporter in the 1974 movie “The Wrestler,” with Ed Asner.But it was not all smooth sailing. He was suspended twice, once for writing a speech for a politician, and once for making up a quote in a story that he thought was an obvious satire.He also took his drinking too far, his daughter said in her book. For a time, heavy drinking was part of his colorful public persona. When he was charged with a couple of alcohol-related driving offenses in the mid-1970s, nothing much happened.But the public’s attitude toward drinking and driving underwent a sea change, and when he was arrested in 1993 for driving under the influence, he lost his license and was threatened with jail. He wrote a front-page apology to his readers. And in an accompanying note, the paper’s editor, Tim McGuire, said that Mr. Klobuchar had “endangered lives” and that the paper was insisting that he seek treatment.He complied. He entered an inpatient rehabilitation center, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and found God. Ms. Klobuchar wrote that his readers forgave him.“It was his very flaws that made my dad so appealing to them,” she said. “His rough-and-tumble life growing up and his personal struggles had a huge influence on his writing. That’s why he was at his best when he wrote about what he called ‘the heroes among us’ — ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”In addition to Senator Klobuchar, he is survived by another daughter, Meagan; his wife, Susan Wilkes; his brother, Dick; and a granddaughter.When he decided to retire from The Star Tribune in 1995, Mr. Klobuchar told his office mates that he wanted no fuss, just to leave quietly. After he had packed up his things and was headed for the door, an editor got on the public-address system and announced: “This is Jim Klobuchar’s last day. That’s 43 years of journalism going out the door.”Everyone stood and applauded. More

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      Walter Mondale, Ex-Vice President Under Jimmy Carter, Dies

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      Under Jimmy Carter, he was the first V.P. to serve as a genuine partner of a president. His own run for the top position ended in a crushing defeat.Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and champion of liberal politics, activist government and civil rights who ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1984, losing to President Ronald Reagan in a landslide, died on Monday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 93.Kathy Tunheim, a spokeswoman for the family, announced the death. She did not specify a cause.A son of a minister of modest means, Fritz Mondale, as he was widely known, led a rich public life that began in Minnesota under the tutelage of his state’s progressive pathfinder, Hubert H. Humphrey. He achieved his own historic firsts, especially with his selection of Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York as his running mate in 1984, the first woman to seek the vice presidency on a major national ticket.Under President Jimmy Carter, from 1977 to 1981, Mr. Mondale was the first vice president to serve as a genuine partner of a president, with full access to intelligence briefings, a weekly lunch with Mr. Carter, his own office near the president’s and his own staff integrated with Mr. Carter’s.In a statement released on Monday night, Mr. Carter wrote: “Today I mourn the passing of my dear friend Walter Mondale, who I consider the best vice president in our country’s history. During our administration, Fritz used his political skill and personal integrity to transform the vice presidency into a dynamic, policy-driving force that had never been seen before and still exists today.”Throughout his career, Mr. Mondale advocated an assertive and interventionist role for the federal government, especially on behalf of the poor, minority groups and women.“I’m a liberal or a progressive,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2010. “I didn’t use the ‘liberal’ word much, because I thought it carried too much baggage. But my whole life, I worked on the idea that government can be an instrument for social progress. We need that progress. Fairness requires it.”He furthered that cause during his 12 years representing Minnesota in the United States Senate, where he was a strong supporter of civil rights, school aid, expansion of health care and child care, consumer protection, and many other liberal programs. In 1974, he briefly explored running for president.Mr. Mondale represented Minnesota for 12 years in the Senate. Mr. Mondale, second from right, was on hand when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an open housing bill in 1968.Associated PressTwo years later, Mr. Carter, a former Georgia governor, wanted someone experienced in Washington when he chose Mr. Mondale as his running mate. Before joining the ticket, Mr. Mondale got a promise that he would have a close working relationship with Mr. Carter, with influence on policy, noting that he had seen Mr. Humphrey marginalized in that post by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the turbulent 1960s. Mr. Humphrey, a political mentor and fellow Minnesotan, urged him to accept the offer.At the White House, Mr. Mondale was a leader of the administration’s liberal wing, frequently clashing with Southern conservatives as he argued for affirmative action and more help for the unemployed and other spending programs as the economy soured.He was sharply at odds with the president in 1979 as energy prices spiked and lines at gasoline stations stretched around the block. Mr. Carter had decided to address the turmoil in a televised speech to the nation from the Oval Office about what he perceived to be a “crisis of confidence” in the American spirit. Mr. Mondale not only advised against the speech; he was “distraught” when he heard the plans for it, Mr. Carter later wrote.In his memoir, “The Good Fight,” published in 2010, Mr. Mondale called the episode “the only serious falling out that Carter and I had in four years.” The address — known as the “malaise” speech, though that word was never used — was followed by the firing of several cabinet members and a plunge in Mr. Carter’s approval ratings, from which the president never recovered.The Carter administration used Mr. Mondale for foreign assignments and for building domestic support for its foreign policy initiatives. His rapport with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel helped bring about the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel negotiated by Mr. Carter at Camp David in 1978. Mr. Mondale then helped sell the treaty to the American Jewish community.He also generated support in Congress for the Panama Canal Treaty and for nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.“You can divide every vice president in American history into two categories: pre-Walter Mondale and post-Walter Mondale,” former Vice President Al Gore said.Mr. Carter chose Mr. Mondale as his running mate in 1976. He was the first vice president to serve as a genuine partner of a president.James Garrett/New York Daily News Archive, via Getty ImagesHaving lost some internal arguments on domestic matters, Mr. Mondale remained loyal and stumped the country for Mr. Carter against a liberal challenge for the party’s nomination in 1980 by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.Mr. Kennedy assailed the administration’s budget cuts and deregulation of energy prices, but Mr. Mondale argued that liberals and conservatives alike needed to face up to the dangers of mounting deficits, which many economists said were stoking inflation.He hammered the same theme running against Mr. Reagan in 1984, warning that deficits resulting from the Reagan tax cuts in 1981 also had to be reduced, in part by tax increases that he said were inevitable no matter who won.“Let’s tell the truth,” he declared in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, referring to the need to tackle deficits. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”The convention applauded his candor, but the Reagan camp pounced, gleefully portraying Mr. Mondale as favoring tax increases while the economy was surging. The Reagan campaign countered with an ad proclaiming that a new “morning in America” had dawned, and Mr. Reagan was swept back into office easily.Mr. Mondale got less than 41 percent of the popular vote and lost every state except his native Minnesota, adding only the District of Columbia to his win column. (After his re-election, Mr. Reagan did end up raising some taxes.)A rangy, square-built former college football player, roughly six feet tall, Mr. Mondale could appear formal and stiff in public. “I’m not good on TV,” he once said. “It’s just not a natural medium for me.”After Ronald Reagan defeated the Carter-Mondale ticket, Mr. Mondale turned to practicing law and preparing for a presidential run. Mr. Mondale and his wife, Joan, in 1984 at an election rally in Washington, D.C.Ira Schwarz/Associated PressBut in speeches he could lift his flat, nasal Minnesota voice to soaring tenor cadences. He was jocular and self-deprecating in private, even a bit off-color when making fun of himself, but he also showed a zest for combat and a love of political stories, which he told with relish while enjoying a cigar (though he never allowed himself to be photographed with one). He was a fan of the subversively zany comedy of Monty Python and the darkly satirical movies of Joel and Ethan Coen, Minnesota natives themselves.As vice president, Mr. Mondale and his wife, Joan Mondale, set an informal tone at the official residence. Trained in art history, Ms. Mondale, who died in 2014 at 83, was active in fund-raising for the arts, wrote a book on art for children and worked as a docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The couple’s marriage was considered one of the strongest in Washington.While savoring the life of a public man, Mr. Mondale loved to retreat by himself or with a friend to fish for trout or walleyed pike in Minnesota lakes reachable only by seaplane. In the winter, he would go off and chop holes in the ice and fish for days on end.His humor was dry. “I was once asked why I fished, and I said it was cheaper than a psychiatrist,” he said. In 1974, when he dropped his nascent presidential campaign, he said he did not wish to spend the next two years staying at Holiday Inns. Running for vice president two years later, he said he was amazed at how Holiday Inns had improved.No Lying, No BraggingWalter Frederick Mondale was born on Jan. 5, 1928, in the hamlet of Ceylon, in southern Minnesota, in a lake region less than five miles from the Iowa border. He was the second son of Claribel (Cowan) Mondale, a musician and piano teacher, and the Rev. Theodore S. Mondale, a farmer and Methodist minister.The family name was originally Mundal, after the small town in Norway from which Mr. Mondale’s paternal great-grandfather, Frederick, came to southern Minnesota in 1856. (Walter not only got his middle name in honor of his great-grandfather, but also inherited Frederick’s nickname, Fritz.)Mr. Mondale’s father lost a series of farms in the 1920s and moved from town to town, subsisting on meager earnings while Mr. Mondale’s mother gave music lessons and led the choir in each of Theodore’s parishes. His parents believed in helping the less fortunate and never making a show of it.Once asked whether he would be a good president, Mr. Mondale said: “I have trouble answering that. If my father had ever heard me tell him that I would make a good president, I would have been taken directly to the woodshed. In my family, the two things you were sure to get spanked for were lying or bragging about yourself.”Fritz Mondale was an average student but an enthusiastic football player; he broke his nose as a high school varsity halfback. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul before transferring to the University of Minnesota and graduating cum laude in 1951 with a degree in political science.Mr. Mondale, accompanied by his wife, Joan, was sworn in as Minnesota attorney general by Chief Justice Roger Dell of the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1960.Gene Herrick/Associated PressSteeped in the progressive political views of his father, Mr. Mondale joined the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and became involved in its internal battle to oust Communists and their sympathizers. Mr. Humphrey, at the time the outspoken mayor of Minneapolis, led that fight, and in 1948 Mr. Mondale signed up for Mr. Humphrey’s first Senate campaign. Mr. Humphrey became a friend who would influence Mr. Mondale’s rise.Mr. Mondale worked at odd jobs during his college years, including inspecting peas for lice at a local cannery. (After becoming vice president he liked to say that he was “the only pea-lice inspector” to have risen to such high office.) He took a year off to run the student arm of Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal advocacy group.After graduation came two years in the Army, a return to the University of Minnesota for law school and marriage to Joan Adams, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. They had two sons and a daughter. Their daughter, Eleanor Mondale Poling, a television and radio personality, died of brain cancer in 2011 at age 51.Mr. Mondale’s survivors include his sons, Theodore, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Minnesota in 1998, and William, a lawyer; four grandchildren; and two step-granddaughters.Mr. Mondale practiced law in Minneapolis until 1960, when the state attorney general resigned and Gov. Orville L. Freeman, who had been a partner in Mr. Mondale’s law firm, appointed him, at 32, to fill the post. As a young law associate, Mr. Mondale had managed campaigns for Mr. Freeman, who was later secretary of agriculture under President John F. Kennedy.Mr. Mondale went on to win election twice in his own right. He joined 21 other attorneys general in signing a brief that helped persuade the United States Supreme Court to uphold the right of counsel for indigent defendants in the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.The following year he was thrust into national politics at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City as head of the party’s credentials committee. In that post he helped Senator Humphrey broker a deal, at President Johnson’s behest, between segregated and integrated factions of delegates from Mississippi. The agreement produced rules banning segregated delegations in the future.Mr. Mondale was joined by his friend and mentor, Hubert H. Humphrey, at a parade in Minnesota in 1976.Associated PressA twist of fate — a vacancy, and then an appointment to fill it — had propelled Mr. Mondale into state politics. Now came another that would send him to Washington. When Johnson selected Mr. Humphrey as his running mate, Mr. Mondale was chosen to fill Mr. Humphrey’s Senate seat. He was sworn in by Mr. Humphrey at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, where Mr. Mondale had had an emergency appendectomy. He was later elected twice to the Senate with no difficulty.In the Senate, Mr. Mondale lined up in favor of Johnson’s Great Society legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and worked to enact fair housing laws against powerful opposition. He pressed for programs in education, child care, health care, jobs, desegregation and consumer protection.One of his proudest legislative achievements, he said, was his leadership role in making it easier for the Senate to cut off a filibuster with 60 votes, under a rule change, rather than a two-thirds vote, as was previously required. One of his biggest regrets, he said, was his delay, until 1969, in turning against the Vietnam War.By the 1970s Mr. Mondale’s name was on lists of possible candidates for national office. Dutifully, he wrote a campaign book, “The Accountability of Power: Toward a Responsible Presidency” (1975), in which he criticized the “imperial presidency” of Richard M. Nixon, and then joined the race for the 1976 presidential nomination.The campaign went nowhere. “I remember that after a year I was running six points behind ‘Don’t Know,’” Mr. Mondale said in the 2010 interview. He ended the bid early, in 1974. In withdrawing, he said he lacked an “overwhelming desire to be president.” The comment would come to haunt him.No. 2 With a SayThe Democratic victor, Mr. Carter, a conservative Southerner, was looking for a liberal running mate from the North who could help him pick up support in the industrial states. Mr. Mondale was at the top of everybody’s list, but he had mixed feelings until he got an agreement from the nominee that he would have a full-fledged policy role, expanded from the largely ceremonial functions assigned to most vice presidents.Mr. Mondale’s chief of staff, Richard Moe, said Mr. Humphrey had been equally persuasive. “‘Fritz,’ he said, ‘if you have a chance to be vice president, you should take it,’” Mr. Moe recalled.In office, Mr. Carter was true to his word in giving him major responsibilities in the White House, Mr. Mondale said in 2010. “Carter did listen to me a lot, I think,” he said. “I tried to avoid giving a win-loss record. But he was marvelous to me and to Joan. They never insulted our independence or integrity or position.”Some in the president’s circle, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, later belittled Mr. Mondale’s input as consisting largely of political advice. In one instance, Mr. Mondale argued unsuccessfully against imposing a grain embargo on the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979.“Mr. President, we need to be strong and firm, but that doesn’t mean you have to commit political suicide,” he said, according to the memoirs of Hamilton Jordan, Mr. Carter’s chief of staff.Besides the Middle East peace negotiations and the Panama Canal treaty ratification, Mr. Mondale was involved in efforts to save the “boat people” refugees from the Vietnam War, some of whom resettled in Minnesota.He remained a favorite of Democratic core groups, including unions and teachers, and senior and Black communities. In support of affirmative action, he clashed with Attorney General Griffin B. Bell and other more conservative members of the Carter team.The Carter administration used Mr. Mondale for foreign assignments, and his rapport with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel helped bring about the historic 1978 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.Max Nash/Associated PressMr. Mondale’s liberal advocacy became more problematic as Mr. Carter cut spending and favored tighter monetary policy to control inflation after 1979. A breach with the president erupted that summer, when unemployment, double-digit inflation rates, soaring energy prices and lines at gas stations led to the biggest internal crisis of Mr. Carter’s presidency.To address the economic disorder, the president scheduled a speech, then canceled it, deciding abruptly instead to hold a “domestic summit” at Camp David with a parade of public figures and intellectuals. The White House’s 29-year-old pollster, Patrick Caddell, had counseled Mr. Carter to address what the pollster called a spiritual “malaise” enveloping the country, caused by the legacy of Vietnam and Watergate as well as the energy and economic situations.After the summit, Mr. Carter took Mr. Caddell’s advice over the objection of Mr. Mondale and others, emerging to proclaim in a nationally televised speech that a “crisis of confidence” was paralyzing the country and preventing action on energy.Mr. Mondale was “enraged and even vituperative” in arguing against the speech, according to a 2018 memoir by Stuart Eizenstat, Mr. Carter’s domestic policy adviser. The vice president argued that the president had succumbed to psychobabble from an inexperienced aide.“He was visibly upset, and his face became so red with anger that I feared for his health,” Mr. Eizenstat wrote.In his own presidential memoirs, Mr. Carter recalled that Mr. Mondale had been so “distraught” over plans for the speech that he adjourned a meeting at Camp David so that he could settle down his vice president as the two walked around the compound’s grounds.“You’re very tired and this is affecting your thinking,” Mr. Mondale told the president, according to Mr. Eizenstat. As Mr. Mondale later put it, “my position was that an administration that came in pledging to be as good as the American people should not change into one urging the people to be as good as the government.”Mr. Mondale with Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping of China at a welcoming dinner at the Great Hall of the People in 1979. Bob Daugherty/Associated PressThe speech boosted Mr. Carter’s approval ratings, but only temporarily. Within days, Mr. Carter had dismissed several cabinet members, an action intended to signal to Americans that he was in charge. The ousters backfired, however, as the public perceived that the president had, in fact, lost control of his government. Mr. Mondale, who was close to some of those fired, later acknowledged that he had contemplated resigning or at least refusing to run for re-election with Mr. Carter.Later in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages by Iranian revolutionaries at the United States Embassy in Tehran only deepened Mr. Carter’s troubles.Senator Kennedy’s challenge to Mr. Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination divided Democrats, but it also evidently stirred Mr. Mondale’s competitive instincts to protect the president. Though hailing from his party’s liberal wing, Mr. Mondale stood by the president, helping him turn back the Kennedy challenge. But the split in the party weakened the Carter presidency irreparably.On election night, as the magnitude of the Carter-Mondale defeat at the hands of Mr. Reagan sank in, some of the vice president’s staff began sporting new campaign buttons: “Mondale in ’84.” Mr. Mondale almost immediately started preparing for a run.Fighting ‘The Good Fight’Mr. Mondale also began making money for the first time, at the law firm of Winston and Strawn based in Chicago, helping clients with business opportunities in countries where he knew the leadership. Some said he had become another influence peddler.At first Mr. Mondale was an obvious front-runner in a field of Democratic candidates in which Senator Gary Hart of Colorado and the Rev. Jesse Jackson also looked strong. Mindful of his history as a dropout in 1974, he declared: “I know myself. I am ready. I am ready to be president of the United States.”As expected, Mr. Mondale initially raised more money, won more straw votes, did better in all the polls and received more endorsements than his opponents. Yet after an early victory in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign went into a tailspin, losing in the New Hampshire primary to the media-savvy Mr. Hart, who connected with voters by offering “new ideas” compared with he called the “established past” and special interests of Mr. Mondale.“Fritz, you cannot lead this country if you have promised everybody everything,” Mr. Hart said in a debate.“Correct, and I have not,” the former vice president replied, adding that his only promises were to workers, the poor and disaffected groups. “America is nothing if it isn’t promises,” he said. “That’s what America is about.”Mr. Mondale reignited his campaign by accusing Mr. Hart of lacking substance, memorably quoting a popular fast-food hamburger advertisement of the day when he asked in a debate, “Where’s the beef?”After securing the nomination in the summer, Mr. Mondale stunned the political establishment by selecting Representative Ferraro as his running mate. Women’s groups were elated, and the ticket got a burst of support. Mr. Mondale said it was one of his proudest achievements.Mr. Mondale and his running mate, Geraldine A. Ferraro, in Portland, Ore., in September 1984. Ms. Ferraro was the first woman to seek the vice presidency on a major national ticket.Jack Smith/Associated PressBut in the fall, Ms. Ferraro’s campaign foundered amid damaging disclosures about her family’s finances, and the overwhelming disadvantage of running against a popular president as the economy was rebounding became painfully evident.A momentary change in Mr. Mondale’s fortunes came at the first presidential debate, when a rambling summation by Mr. Reagan raised doubts about whether he was too old for the job. (He was 73 at the time.) At the next debate, however, Mr. Reagan defused the “age issue” by declaring: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”The audience burst into laughter, and so did Mr. Mondale (who was 56). “I think the campaign ended right there,” he said later.After his humbling defeat, Mr. Mondale went back to Minnesota to practice law, involve himself in public affairs and teach and write as a fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Then the election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 opened a new chapter: The president sent Mr. Mondale to Japan as ambassador.His tenure in Tokyo, lasting until December 1996, was highlighted by his negotiation of an agreement to shrink and move American military bases in Okinawa, where the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen in 1995 had provoked outrage.In 1998, Mr. Clinton named Mr. Mondale as a special envoy to economically troubled Indonesia.In 2002, Mr. Mondale was drafted to run for his old Senate seat after the incumbent Democrat, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash. He lost to Norman Coleman, a Republican.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesBack in Minnesota, Mr. Mondale joined the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis, but his political career was still not finished. In 2002, at the age of 74, he was drafted to run for his old Senate seat after the incumbent Democrat, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash 11 days before the election.Mr. Mondale’s impromptu candidacy was undone, however, by a raucous and emotional memorial service for Mr. Wellstone featuring partisan speeches by his supporters. It turned voters off, and they elected Norman Coleman, a Republican.The race was Mr. Mondale’s last hurrah, though he continued to speak out and serve as a party elder statesmen. Associates said the Senate race defeat had actually energized him.“It allowed me to be the kind of liberal that I wanted to be,” Mr. Mondale said in the 2010 interview for this obituary. He said that in theory, running for the seat was “a really dumb thing to do,” but that he had no regrets.In 2018, Mr. Carter and leading political figures of the last half-century joined Mr. Mondale at the University of Minnesota to celebrate his 90th birthday, four years after he had recovered from triple bypass heart surgery. Indeed, the combined longevity of Mr. Mondale and Mr. Carter brought them a certain distinction worthy of a footnote in American history: In 2006, they surpassed John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as the president and vice president from the same administration who had lived the longest since leaving office. Mr. Carter is 96.“I once told the president, one thing I didn’t want to happen is I didn’t want to be embarrassed,” Mr. Mondale said. “In four years, I never was embarrassed, and I don’t think any other V.P. can make that statement.”Mr. Mondale at his home in Minneapolis in 2016. “You can divide every vice president in American history into two categories: pre-Walter Mondale and post-Walter Mondale,” Vice President Al Gore said of his predecessor.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesIn recent years, Mr. Mondale continued his active engagement in politics. He supported Senator Amy Klobuchar, a protégée who had interned for him in college and later worked with him in his law firm, frequently reaching out to check in and to offer advice in her unsuccessful campaign for president last year.“He never stopped believing in our country and in preparing a new generation of leaders to deal with the next set of problems,” she said in a phone interview on Sunday.In his 2010 memoir, Mr. Mondale acknowledged that in his later years “the nation was no longer listening” to the call for expanded government and social progress, but he still believed in liberal policies and the inspiration of the Apostle Paul.“I have fought the good fight,” he said in closing that book. “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”It was a sentiment he echoed on Saturday in a last email sent to his many former staff members, beginning with “Dear team.” “Well, my time has come,” he wrote. “I am eager to rejoin Joan and Eleanor. Before I go I wanted to let you know how much you mean to me. Never has a public servant had a better group of people working at their side! Together we have accomplished so much, and I know you will keep up the good fight.” More

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      in Elections

      Alcee Hastings, Longtime Florida Congressman, Dies at 84

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      As a federal judge, he was impeached and removed from the bench. He was then elected to the House, where he became known as a strong liberal voice.Representative Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who, despite being impeached and removed from the bench, was elected to Congress, where he championed civil rights and rose to become dean of the Florida delegation, died on Tuesday. He was 84.Lale Morrison, his chief of staff, confirmed the death. He provided no other details.Mr. Hastings, a Democrat, had announced in early 2019 that he had pancreatic cancer. He continued to make public appearances for a time but was unable to travel to Washington in January to take the oath of office.His death reduces his party’s already slim majority in the House of Representatives, which is now 218 to 211, until a special election can be held to fill his seat. His district, which includes Black communities around Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach as well as a huge, less populated area around Lake Okeechobee, is reliably Democratic.A strong liberal voice, Mr. Hastings was a pioneering civil rights lawyer in the 1960s and ’70s in Fort Lauderdale, which at the time was deeply inhospitable to Black people. Throughout his career he crusaded against racial injustice and spoke up for gay people, immigrants, women and the elderly, as well as advocating for better access to health care and higher wages. He was also a champion of Israel.He achieved many firsts. He was Florida’s first Black federal judge and one of three Black Floridians who went to Congress in 1992, the first time Florida had elected African-American candidates to that body since Reconstruction. He served 15 terms in the House, longer than any other current member, making him dean of the delegation.He had earlier in his career been the first Black candidate to run for the Senate from Florida.In 1979, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. In 1981, he became the first sitting federal judge to be tried on criminal charges, stemming from the alleged solicitation of a bribe. The case ended up before the House, which impeached him in 1988. The Senate convicted him in 1989 and removed him from the bench.But it did not bar him from seeking public office again, and he went on to win his seat in Congress three years later. He took the oath of office before the same body that had impeached him.If his wings were clipped in Washington, Mr. Hastings was adored at home, where his early fights for civil rights and his outspokenness helped him easily win re-election for nearly three decades.In a 2019 review of his career, The Palm Beach Post described him as “a man with immense gifts — boldness, intellect, wit — who repeatedly and brazenly strides close to the cliff’s edge of ethics, unconcerned that scandal could shake his hold on a congressional district tailor-made for him.”Mr. Hastings in 1987, when he was a federal judge. A year later, after a judicial panel concluded that he had committed perjury, tampered with evidence and conspired to gain financially by accepting bribes, the House impeached him; the year after that, the Senate removed him from the bench.Susan Greenwood for The New York TimesAlcee Lamar Hastings was born on Sept. 5, 1936, in Altamonte Springs, a largely Black suburb of Orlando. His father, Julius Hastings, was a butler, and his mother, Mildred (Merritt) Hastings, was a maid.His parents eventually left Florida to take jobs to earn money for his education. Alcee stayed with his maternal grandmother while he attended Crooms Academy in Sanford, Fla., which was founded for African-American students and is now known as Crooms Academy of Information Technology. He graduated in 1953.He attended Fisk University in Nashville, graduating in 1958 with majors in zoology and botany, and started law school at Howard University before transferring to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee. He received his law degree there in 1963.As a student, he was involved in early civil rights struggles. Recalling a drugstore sit-in in North Carolina in 1959, he later said: “Those were the early days of the civil rights movement, and the people in Walgreens were breaking eggs on our heads and throwing mustard and ketchup and salt at us. We sat there taking all of that.”He went into private practice as a civil rights lawyer in Fort Lauderdale. When he arrived, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a motel wouldn’t rent him a room; throughout much of the 1960s and ’70s, parts of the county were dangerous for Black people.At a luncheon honoring Mr. Hastings in 2019, the newspaper said, Howard Finkelstein, a former Broward County public defender, called him a “howling voice” trying to change Broward from a “little cracker town that was racist and mean and vicious.”Mr. Hastings filed lawsuits to desegregate Broward County schools. He also sued the Cat’s Meow, a restaurant that was popular with white lawyers and judges but would not serve Black people. The owner soon settled the lawsuit and opened the restaurant’s doors to all.Mr. Hastings ran unsuccessfully for public office several times, including for the 1970 Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. He wanted to show that a Black man could run, but he received death threats in the process.Representative Charlie Crist, who was a Republican when he was governor of Florida but who later became a Democrat, said in a statement on Tuesday that he had “long admired Congressman Hastings’s advocacy for Florida’s Black communities during a time when such advocacy was ignored at best and actively suppressed or punished at worst.”Gov. Reuben Askew appointed Mr. Hastings to the circuit court of Broward County in 1977; the swearing-in ceremony was held at a high school he had helped desegregate. Two years later, President Carter named him to the federal bench.But in 1981, Mr. Hastings was indicted on charges of soliciting a $150,000 bribe in return for reducing the sentences of two mob-connected felons convicted in his court.A jury acquitted him in a criminal trial in 1983 after his alleged co-conspirator refused to testify, and Mr. Hastings returned to the bench.Later, suspicions arose that he had lied and falsified evidence during the trial to obtain an acquittal. A three-year investigation by a judicial panel concluded that Mr. Hastings did in fact commit perjury, tamper with evidence and conspire to gain financially by accepting bribes.As a result, Congress took up the case in 1988. The House impeached him by a vote of 413 to 3. The next year, the Senate convicted him on eight of 11 articles and removed him from the bench.Despite his tainted record, Mr. Hastings was elected three years later to represent a heavily minority district.Mr. Hastings at the Capitol in 1998. He was elected to the House in 1992 and served 15 terms.Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesHis impeachment was never far from the surface in the House. This was evident after the Democrats took back control in 2006. Mr. Hastings was in line to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Republicans started using his history against the Democrats, prompting Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, to give the chairmanship to someone else.Mr. Hastings’ survivors include his wife, Patricia Williams; three adult children from previous marriages, Alcee Hastings II, Chelsea Hastings and Leigh Hastings; and a stepdaughter, Maisha.Mr. Hastings never sponsored major legislation, but he could be counted on to express himself freely. He had a particular loathing for President Donald J. Trump, whom he once called a “sentient pile of excrement.”Saying what was on his mind was long a habit of his. It started getting him in trouble as soon as he was appointed to the bench, when he veered from judicial norms, criticizing President Ronald Reagan and appearing at a rally in 1984 for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination.But Mr. Hastings saw nothing wrong with giving his views; just because he was a judge, he said, that did not mean he was “neutered.” As Mr. Crist said, Mr. Hastings “was never afraid to give voice to the voiceless and speak truth to power.”Nor was his self-confidence ever checked.“I’ve enjoyed some of the fights, and even the process of being indicted and removed from the bench,” he told The Associated Press in 2013. “All of those are extraordinary types of circumstances that would cause lesser people to buckle. I did not and I have not.”Maggie Astor contributed reporting. More