Longtime GOP Senate moderate Arlen Specter dies

In this photo from June 2010, Sen­ate Judi­ciary Com­mit­tee Chair­man Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., left, talks with com­mit­tee mem­ber Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., on Capi­tol Hill in Wash­ing­ton, dur­ing a break in Supreme Court nom­i­nee Elena Kagan’s con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing before the com­mit­tee. For­mer U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, long­time Sen­ate mod­er­ate and archi­tect of one-bullet the­ory in JFK death, died Sun­day at age 82. (Asso­ci­ated Press file | Susan Walsh)

PETER JACKSON

Asso­ci­ated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa. — For most of his 30 years as Pennsylvania’s longest-serving U.S. sen­a­tor and promi­nent mod­er­ate in Con­gress, Arlen Specter was a Repub­li­can, though often at odds with the GOP leadership.

He helped end the Supreme Court hopes of for­mer fed­eral appeals Judge Robert H. Bork, who was nom­i­nated by Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan. Decades later, he was one of only three Repub­li­cans in Con­gress to vote for Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s eco­nomic stimulus.

His breaks with his party were hardly a sur­prise: He had begun his polit­i­cal career as a Demo­c­rat and ended it as one, too.

In between, he was at the heart of sev­eral major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal events. He rose to promi­nence in the 1960s as an assis­tant coun­sel to the War­ren Com­mis­sion, devel­op­ing the single-bullet the­ory in Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. He came to the Sen­ate in the Rea­gan land­slide of 1980 and was a key voice in the Supreme Court con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings of both Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Specter died Sun­day died at his home in Philadel­phia from com­pli­ca­tions of non-Hodgkin lym­phoma, said his son Shanin. He was 82. Over the years, Specter had fought two pre­vi­ous bouts with Hodgkin lym­phoma, over­come a brain tumor and sur­vived car­diac arrest fol­low­ing bypass surgery.

Intel­lec­tual and stub­born, Specter took the lead on a wide spec­trum of issues and was no stranger to controversy.

In one of his last major polit­i­cal acts, Specter star­tled fel­low sen­a­tors in April 2009 when he announced he was join­ing the Democ­rats. He said he was “increas­ingly at odds with the Repub­li­can phi­los­o­phy,” though he said the Democ­rats could not count on him to be “an auto­matic 60th vote” that would give them a filibuster-proof majority.

He had also con­cluded that he was unlikely to win a sixth term as a Repub­li­can, and his frank­ness about why he returned to the Demo­c­ra­tic Party was pack­aged in a pow­er­ful TV ad by his pri­mary oppo­nent, then-U.S. Rep. Joe Ses­tak, who ham­mered away at the incum­bent as a polit­i­cal opportunist.

“My change in party will enable me to be re-elected,” Specter says in TV news footage used in the ad.

The announcer ends the ad say­ing, “Arlen Specter changed par­ties to save one job — his, not yours.”

Democ­rats picked Ses­tak, a retired Navy vice admi­ral, over Specter in the 2010 pri­mary, end­ing his decades of ser­vice. Ses­tak lost Specter’s seat to con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can Rep. Pat Toomey in the gen­eral elec­tion by 2 per­cent­age points.

Specter rose to promi­nence in the 1960s as an aggres­sive Philadel­phia pros­e­cu­tor and dur­ing his time on the War­ren Commission.

In 1987, Specter helped thwart Bork’s nom­i­na­tion to the Supreme Court, earn­ing him con­ser­v­a­tive ene­mies who still bit­terly refer to such denials as being “borked.” But four years later, Specter was crit­i­cized by lib­er­als for his tough ques­tion­ing of Anita Hill at Thomas’ Supreme Court nom­i­na­tion hear­ings and for accus­ing her of com­mit­ting “flat-out per­jury.” The inter­ro­ga­tion, tele­vised nation­ally, incensed women’s groups and nearly cost him his seat in 1992.

Specter took credit for help­ing to defeat Pres­i­dent Bill Clinton’s national health care plan — the com­plex­i­ties of which he high­lighted in a gigan­tic chart that hung on his office wall for years after­ward — and helped lead the inves­ti­ga­tion into Gulf War syn­drome, the name given to a col­lec­tion of symp­toms expe­ri­enced by vet­er­ans of the war that include fatigue, mem­ory loss, pain and dif­fi­culty sleep­ing. And fol­low­ing the Iran-Contra scan­dal, Specter pushed leg­is­la­tion that cre­ated the inspec­tors gen­eral of the CIA, which later exposed Aldrich Ames as a Soviet spy.

But he was not afraid to buck his fel­low Republicans.

As a senior mem­ber of the pow­er­ful Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee, Specter pushed for increased fund­ing for stem-cell research, breast can­cer and Alzheimer’s dis­ease, and sup­ported sev­eral labor-backed ini­tia­tives in a GOP-led Con­gress. He also doggedly sought fed­eral funds for local projects in his home state.

In 1995, he launched a pres­i­den­tial bid, denounc­ing reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives as the “fringe” that plays too large a role in set­ting the party’s agenda. Specter, who was Jew­ish, bowed out before the first pri­mary because of lack­lus­ter fundraising.

Specter’s iras­ci­ble inde­pen­dence caught up with him in 2004. He barely sur­vived a GOP pri­mary chal­lenge from Toomey by 17,000 votes of more than 1.4 mil­lion cast. He went on to eas­ily win the gen­eral elec­tion with the help of orga­nized labor, a tra­di­tion­ally Demo­c­ra­tic constituency.

Specter was diag­nosed in 2005 with stage IV Hodgkin lym­phoma, a can­cer of the lym­phatic sys­tem. Announc­ing the diag­no­sis with his trade­mark dogged­ness, Specter said: “I have beaten a brain tumor, bypass heart surgery and many tough polit­i­cal oppo­nents and I’m going to beat this, too.”

“Arlen Specter was always a fighter,” Obama said in a state­ment Sun­day. “From his days stamp­ing out cor­rup­tion as a pros­e­cu­tor in Philadel­phia to his three decades of ser­vice in the Sen­ate, Arlen was fiercely inde­pen­dent — never putting party or ide­ol­ogy ahead of the peo­ple he was cho­sen to serve. He brought that same tough­ness and deter­mi­na­tion to his per­sonal struggles.”

Specter wrote of his ill­ness in a 2008 book, “Never Give In: Bat­tling Can­cer in the Sen­ate,” say­ing he wanted to let oth­ers fac­ing sim­i­lar crises “ought to know they are not alone.”

Can­cer handed him “a stark look at mor­tal­ity” and an “added sense of humil­ity,” Specter told The Asso­ci­ated Press.

Born in Wichita, Kan., on Feb. 12, 1930, Specter spent sum­mers toil­ing in his father’s junk­yard in Rus­sell, Kan., where he knew another future sen­a­tor — Bob Dole. The junk­yard thrived dur­ing World War II, allow­ing Specter’s father to send his four chil­dren to college.

Specter left Kansas for col­lege in 1947 because the Uni­ver­sity of Kansas, where his best friends were headed, did not have Jew­ish fra­ter­ni­ties. He grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia in 1951 and Yale law school in 1956. He served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1953.

Friends say his child­hood cir­cum­stances made him deter­mined, tough and independent-minded. Specter con­sid­ered his father’s tri­umphs the embod­i­ment of the Amer­i­can dream, a ful­fill­ment that friends say drove him to a career in pub­lic life.

He entered pol­i­tics as a Demo­c­rat in Philadel­phia in the early 1960s, when he was an assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney who sent six Team­sters offi­cials to jail for union corruption.

Work­ing on the War­ren Com­mis­sion in 1964, Specter was the chief author of the the­ory that a sin­gle bul­let had hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Con­nally, an assump­tion crit­i­cal to the con­clu­sion that pres­i­den­tial assas­sin Lee Har­vey Oswald acted alone. The the­ory remains con­tro­ver­sial and was the sub­ject of ridicule in Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK.”

After work­ing on the War­ren Com­mis­sion, he returned to Philadel­phia and chal­lenged his boss, James Crum­lish, for dis­trict attor­ney in 1965. Specter ran as a Repub­li­can and was derided by Crum­lish as “Bene­dict Arlen.” But Crum­lish lost to his pro­tege by 36,000 votes.

Specter lost re-election as dis­trict attor­ney in 1973 and went into pri­vate prac­tice. Among his most noto­ri­ous clients as a pri­vate attor­ney was Ira Ein­horn, a Philadel­phia coun­ter­cul­ture celebrity who killed his girl­friend in 1977.

Finally, in 1980, Specter won the Sen­ate seat vacated by retir­ing Repub­li­can Richard Schweiker, defeat­ing for­mer Pitts­burgh Mayor Pete Flaherty.

After leav­ing the Sen­ate in Jan­u­ary 2011, the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia Law School said Specter would teach a course about Con­gress’ rela­tion­ship with the Supreme Court, and Mary­land Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion launched a political-affairs show hosted by the for­mer senator.

He also occa­sion­ally per­formed standup com­edy at clubs in Philadel­phia and New York. He played squash nearly every day into his mid-70s and liked to unwind with a mar­tini or two at night.

A funeral was sched­uled for Tues­day in Penn Val­ley, Pa., and will be open to the pub­lic, fol­lowed by bur­ial in Hunt­ing­don Val­ley, Pa.

Specter is sur­vived by his wife, Joan, and two sons, Shanin and Steve, and four granddaughters.

Posted by AP News on Oct 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.