Congressman led effort to impeach Clinton

Henry J. Hyde, the veteran Republican from the suburbs of Chicago who presided over impeachment proceedings against President Clinton and wrote a controversial law ending federal financing for abortion, died Thursday at a hospital in Chicago. He was 83.

Hyde, who retired from Congress at the end of the 2006 session, died at Rush University Medical Center. A hospital spokeswoman told the Associated Press that he was admitted for persistent renal failure after open-heart surgery in July and suffered a fatal arrhythmia.

On Capitol Hill, Hyde was known as an eloquent speaker and a passionate conservative who managed to practice civility toward colleagues even as he pursued policies adverse to many of them.

“No one looks forward to this traumatic journey that we’re about to enter,” said Hyde, then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as the panel began to weigh the facts of the case against Clinton for lying to a grand jury about his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.

After the House approved articles of impeachment, Hyde was one of 13 handlers who presented the case to the Senate, which ultimately voted the resolutions down in February 1999. “All a congressman ever gets to take with him when he leaves is the esteem of his colleagues and constituents,” Hyde summed up. “And we have risked that for a principle, for our duty as we have seen it.”

A Catholic who was elected to Congress in 1974 just about a year after the Supreme Court decided the Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion, Hyde spent much of his political capital on overturning the decision -- winning passage of the Hyde Amendment that banned federal funding for abortion as well as forcing a ban on “partial-birth” abortion and stem cell research dependent on embryonic stem cells. As chairman of the GOP Platform Committee, Hyde also made sure the 1996 platform backed a constitutional amendment banning abortion, to the reported dismay of presidential candidate Bob Dole, the former senator from Kansas.

“The nation has lost one of its most enduring pro-life leaders,” said a statement from the Concerned Women for America, a leading antiabortion advocacy group whose founder, Beverly LaHaye, called Hyde “a giant in the pro-life movement.”

President Bush, who awarded Hyde the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this month, said Thursday that Hyde represented his constituents “with character and dignity” and “used his talents to . . . promote a culture of life.”

Condolences poured in Thursday from both sides of the aisle in Congress. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame), who served with Hyde on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called him “a giant” and said their “deep personal friendship always transcended partisan political considerations and was reminiscent of an era of congressional collegiality.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called Hyde “a credit to public service,” who “practiced ‘old school’ values like civility . . . and knew how to defuse a difficult situation with humor.”

A white-haired, cigar-smoking orator, Hyde also was remembered for his eloquence. House GOP Leader John Boehner of Ohio, calling Hyde a hero, recalled that “when Henry spoke in committee or on the House floor, members on both sides of [the] aisle listened intently -- and they learned.” Vice President Dick Cheney made the same point last year during a tribute to Hyde as he left Congress, calling him “the rare member who can bring the House to silence merely by stepping to the well,” where congressional speeches begin.

Hyde was born April 18, 1924, in Chicago, the son of working-class Democrats. His father was an agent for the phone company; his mother worked at a local department store. Hyde’s mother raised him in the Catholic schools and instilled in him the love of books. In his early life, he had aspirations of becoming a writer. One mentor told him to read Russian and French novelists, and develop a strong vocabulary and facility of expression. “He told me there was a great need for literate people who had something to say and knew how to say it,” Hyde told the Chicago Tribune in a 1992 interview.

Hyde was a lanky 6-foot-3 center on Catholic League teams in Chicago, once facing basketball great George Mikan. His basketball skills won him a full scholarship to Georgetown University, where he played on the Hoya team that was runner-up in the 1943 NCAA tournament.

With World War II beckoning, Hyde trained as a naval officer and attended Duke University and Notre Dame while at different bases. Made skipper of a landing craft, he was nearly killed during a typhoon while attempting to rescue a ship grounded off the Philippines.

After the war, he finished his undergraduate degree at Georgetown and met Jean Simpson. They married and moved to Chicago, where he earned a law degree at Loyola University in 1949 and began working as a trial lawyer. They were married for 45 years, until his wife died of cancer in 1992. They had four children.

Concerned about the threat of communism and eager to vote for Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hyde switched to the Republican Party in 1952, deciding that the Democrats were too accommodating in their foreign policy views.

“It was a woman who made a Republican of me, and that was Eleanor Roosevelt,” he quipped years later. “I never properly thanked her for it.”

Elected to the Illinois House in 1966, he served as majority leader from 1971-72 before winning his congressional seat in 1974. His suburban congressional district elected him with 53% of the vote despite a huge Democratic sweep after the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency and tainted the Republican Party.

Hyde was the subject of scrutiny at the height of the impeachment proceedings against Clinton, when the online magazine salon.com reported that he had had an extramarital affair before coming to Congress. As liberals hurled charges of hypocrisy, Hyde told associates he was deeply hurt by the disclosure of what he called “a youthful indiscretion.”

Years earlier, he was among more than a dozen former directors and officers of the North Riverside, Ill.-based Clyde Federal Savings and Loan sued by U.S. regulators for gross negligence after the institution failed in 1990, costing taxpayers $68 million.

Hyde maintained he had done nothing wrong and had left the institution in 1984. He was the only implicated official to refuse to contribute to a settlement that ended the lawsuit in 1997.

Throughout his years in Congress, Hyde was a reliable vote for conservative causes. He strongly defended the Reagan White House during the Iran-Contra scandal, after it was disclosed that the administration had sold arms to Iran in hopes of freeing American hostages and then had sent the proceeds to anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in violation of U.S. law. And he gave an impassioned speech on a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, saying that “what is at work here is something larger than the flag itself; it is a protest against the vulgarization, the trashing of our society.”

But he also was known to vote on principle in ways that deviated from the party line. He supported the Brady Bill requiring a waiting period on gun registration, and a ban on assault weapon possession. He was one of the few Republicans to support the Family and Medical Leave Act that guaranteed 12 weeks of leave for new parents.

He also bucked the majority of his own party in 1994, when Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and the “Contract With America” rallied Republicans to accept term limits on service in Congress as protection against corrupt incumbents.

Hyde, then having served in Congress for two decades, gave a 15-minute speech on the House floor that colleagues called a classic. Asking not to be interrupted by questions or comments, he talked about “the dumbing down of democracy” and reminded his colleagues that “ignorance is salvageable, but stupid is forever.”

Warning that with term limits “the job will become a sabbatical for the well-to-do elite and bored retirees,” Hyde called the idea a “radical distrust of democracy.” He added that with myriad challenges, “America needs leaders. It needs statesmen. It needs giants. And you do not get them out of the phone book.”

Hyde is survived by his second wife, Judy Wolverton, three children and four grandchildren, according to the Associated Press. His oldest son, Henry “Hank” Hyde Jr., died nearly two years ago of liver cancer.

johanna.neuman@latimes.com