John C. Stennis; Longtime Senator : Lawmaker from Mississippi chaired Armed Services Committee for 12 years and strongly influenced military policy.

Former Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), a deeply religious defense hawk who served four decades in the Senate and exercised a major influence on U.S. military policy, died of pneumonia Sunday afternoon at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, Miss. He was 93.

Nicknamed the “Conscience of the Senate” for his personal rectitude and his efforts to shape the upper house’s code of ethics, Stennis retired in 1988. He had undergone cardiovascular surgery in 1983 and a year later had his left leg amputated because of a malignant tumor in his upper thigh.

As chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee for 12 years, beginning in 1969, Stennis played a key role in fighting off deep cuts in the defense budget. He opposed judicial efforts to desegregate public schools in 1954, but three decades later he supported extending the Voting Rights Act.

Close to eight presidents, Stennis was the last of the classic Southern gentlemen who so forcefully shaped the character of the mid-century Senate. He was crusty yet courtly, a stern moralist with an almost mystical devotion to the Senate.

“He was a great senator in every way,” Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss) said Sunday. “He was effective, respected and deeply appreciated by the people in Mississippi. He was truly a man of great stature.”

Stennis himself was more modest about his place in history. “How would I like to be remembered?” he mused in a 1985 interview. “I haven’t thought about that a whole lot. You couldn’t give me a finer compliment than just to say, ‘He did his best.’ ”

Despite his genteel manners, Stennis could be tough. Early in 1973, when the senator was 71, he was held up by two young hoodlums in front of his home in northwest Washington. They robbed him and then shot him twice. One bullet pierced his stomach, pancreas and colon.

Surgeons at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital at first doubted he would survive. But then-President Richard Nixon, emerging from Stennis’ hospital room, predicted that the senator would make it because “he’s got the will to live in spades.” Within eight months, Stennis was back on the Senate floor.

Stennis attributed his remarkable recovery to prayer and to his excellent physical condition, achieved from years of exercising in the Senate gym.

“I just prayed that I could be useful again,” he said, reflecting on his ordeal. “That’s what the consuming thought was, the consuming question--could I survive and be useful? I decided that I could.”

Stennis displayed a different kind of toughness in 1954 when he served on the select committee that probed charges against the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) and became the first Senate Democrat to call for censure of the free-swinging Wisconsin lawmaker. Although Stennis was a dedicated conservative and an outspoken foe of communism, he was offended by McCarthy’s tactics.

During the censure debate, Stennis rallied support from many colleagues who had been afraid to attack McCarthy. In a vigorous speech, he accused McCarthy of besmirching the Senate’s good name with “slush and slime.”

That same year, Stennis was one of the first members of Congress to caution against U.S. involvement in Indochina.

In a Senate speech delivered when the Eisenhower Administration was considering intervention to prevent a French disaster in Vietnam, Stennis presciently warned that committing U.S. ground forces could lead to “a long, costly and indecisive war.”

Yet 11 years later, when President Lyndon B. Johnson made a large-scale commitment to fight in Vietnam, Stennis loyally backed his commander in chief. “Once the die is cast and once our flag is committed and our boys are sent out to the field, you will find solid support for the war from the South,” he said.

He also firmly backed defense spending throughout his career, supporting the Pentagon even when the Vietnam War made weapons procurement unpopular. “If there is one thing I’m unyielding and unbending on, it is that we must have the very best weapons,” he once said.

As the Vietnam War wound down, however, Stennis co-sponsored the War Powers Act of 1973, which limits the President’s power to send troops into combat without congressional consent.

Senate liberals clashed frequently with Stennis on subjects ranging from defense spending to civil rights, but they invariably praised him for his fairness and courtesy.

And those were the qualities he prized.

From the time he entered politics in 1928 as a member of the Mississippi Legislature, he tried to base his life on this motto: “I will plow a straight furrow right down to the end of my row.”

That slogan reflected his rural background. John Cornelius Stennis was born Aug. 3, 1901, in De Kalb, Miss., and grew up on a cotton and cattle farm in what he described as the “poor end of the poor end” of his state. He graduated from Mississippi State University and the University of Virginia Law School, and served as a district attorney and circuit judge before entering politics.

His Scots Presbyterian parents taught him to appreciate the value of a dollar. “I was raised to believe waste was a sin,” he once said. Stennis practiced that belief with a vengeance: He carefully saved all the string from packages that arrived at his home.

As a courtly Southern gentleman, Stennis was known to interrupt a Senate committee hearing to find a seat for a woman spectator. But he had little tolerance for miniskirts and other modern feminine trends.

When a female Senate aide once sat on a sofa wearing a skirt that exposed a good deal of her thigh, Stennis averted his eyes and grumbled to a colleague: “I’m going to get a bolt of cloth so that lady can finish her dress.”

After his retirement, Stennis served as executive-in-residence at the Mississippi State University campus in Starkville. The university houses the John C. Stennis Institute of Government and the Stennis Center for Public Service, created by Congress.

“I do believe the most important thing I can do now is to help young people understand the past and prepare for the future,” Stennis said in 1990. “As long as I have energy left, I want to use it to the benefit of students.”

Stennis is survived by two children. His wife, Coy Hines Stennis, whom he always called “Miss Coy,” died in 1983.