[sticklist] - Sen. Warren Rudman, '48 TAPS

[Richard Forno]

(message not digitally signed as I am on travel for the holiday weekend and using a different computer. --rick)

November 20, 2012

Warren B. Rudman, Blunt Senator Who Led Budget Struggle, Dies at 82

By ADAM CLYMER

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/us/politics/warren-b-rudman-new-hampshire-senator-dies-at-82.html

Warren B. Rudman, the sometimes combative centrist Republican senator from New Hampshire who waged a frustrating fight to balance the federal budget and helped lead a federal panel that warned of a terrorist strike against the United States only months before the 9/11 attacks, died on Monday night in Washington. He was 82.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, his former communications director, Bob Stevenson, said.

Mr. Rudman, a Korean War veteran and former amateur boxer, prided himself on his blunt-speaking adherence to centrist principles and his belief in bipartisan compromise as the underpinning of good government. He served two terms in the Senate, and decided out of exasperation not to seek re-election in 1992, saying that the federal government was “not functioning” and that it was impossible to get anything done in a Senate rife with posturing and partisanship.

Before he left office he extended his fight against the budget deficit by joining with former Senator Paul E. Tsongas, Democrat of Massachusetts, and former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson in founding the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan advocacy group on fiscal issues.

As a private citizen he served as co-chairman of a federal commission on national security with former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. In a report released on Feb. 15, 2001, seven months before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, the panel warned that “attacks against American citizens on American soil, possibly causing heavy casualties, are likely over the next quarter-century.”

In a White House statement, President Obama praised Mr. Rudman as “an early advocate for fiscal responsibility.”       

“And as we work together to address the fiscal challenges of our time,” the statement said, “leaders on both sides of the aisle would be well served to follow Warren’s example of common-sense bipartisanship.”

Mr. Rudman was best known for two laws that sought to force the government to spend within its means: the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985 and the Gramm-Rudman Act of 1987. The measures, sponsored with Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, threatened automatic spending cuts if Congress and the president did not meet benchmarks on the road to a balanced budget.

But while the laws helped hold down deficits, Republicans balked at raising taxes and Democrats resisted limits on social programs, and the measures were ultimately amended and repealed before they could force huge spending cuts.

The failure of those efforts was one reason Mr. Rudman gave for retiring from the Senate. “I wasn’t sure the glory of being a senator meant much if we were bankrupting America,” he wrote in a 1996 memoir, “Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate.”

A signal moment in his Senate career came in 1987 when he served as vice chairman of the Senate contingent of the Congressional investigation into the Iran-contra affair. He worked closely with Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, the Democratic chairman, and broke with House Republicans when he joined in the majority report, which concluded that aides to President Ronald Reagan had knowingly violated the law by selling arms to Iran and using the money to aid the anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua.

In a confrontation with Lt. Col. Oliver North, the Marine officer who played a central role in the affair, Mr. Rudman said that he agreed with him that the United States should aid the rebels, known as contras, but that the American people and Congress had decided otherwise and had enacted a law prohibiting it.

“The American people have a right to be wrong,” he told Colonel North. “And what Ronald Reagan thinks or what Oliver North thinks or what anybody else thinks matters not a whit. There comes a point when the views of the American people have to be heard.”

For all his work on fiscal and national security issues, Mr. Rudman regarded his role in the selection of David H. Souter for the Supreme Court as his proudest achievement. Mr. Souter had served as his deputy when Mr. Rudman was attorney general of New Hampshire in the 1970s. In an interview in 2010, Mr. Rudman called Justice Souter an “extraordinary member of the court” whose views, though he was part of the court’s liberal minority on social issues, “will become majority opinions and will become the law of the land.”

Mr. Souter had just been confirmed as a judge on a federal Court of Appeals when Justice William J. Brennan Jr. announced his retirement in 1990. Mr. Rudman called a fellow New Hampshire Republican, former Gov. John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, to urge the Bush administration to nominate Judge Souter, predicting an easy confirmation by the Senate. He spoke to President George Bush and persuaded him as well, Mr. Rudman said.

Mr. Souter, who had virtually no record on hot-button issues and who was criticized by some as a “stealth candidate,” won a 90-to-9 confirmation vote. Though liberals were more worried about him at first, it was conservatives who came to attack him for his votes in favor of abortion rights and against the majority in the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, which made George W. Bush president. Justice Souter retired in 2010.

Senator Rudman was also chairman and then vice chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee. In 1991 the committee took action against the so-called Keating Five, senators who had questionable relationships with the savings-and-loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr. When one of the senators, Alan Cranston, a Democrat of California, defended himself by saying he had done only what others had done in aiding Mr. Keating, an angry Mr.  Rudman took the floor.

“What I have heard as a statement I can only describe as arrogant, unrepentant and a smear on this institution,” he said. “Everybody does not do it.”

Mr. Rudman was a sharp critic of the religious right. In his memoir he wrote: “The Republican Party is making a terrible mistake if it appears to ally itself with the Christian right. There are some fine, sincere people in its ranks, but there are also enough anti-abortion zealots, would-be censors, homophobes, bigots and latter-day Elmer Gantrys to discredit any party that is unwise enough to embrace such a group.”

The American Conservative Union rated Mr. Rudman’s voting record 67 percent conservative. His critics on the right were unhappy with his support for abortion rights; for the Legal Services Corporation, which provides lawyers for the poor; and for countenancing tax increases to help balance the budget.

“I thought my beliefs were classically conservative,” Mr. Rudman countered in his memoir. “On balance, they put me near the middle of the political spectrum, a little to the right of center.”

Warren Bruce Rudman was born in Boston on May 18, 1930, the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Poland and Russia. As a child he moved with his family to Nashua, N.H., where, he wrote, “thanks to schoolyard encounters with anti-Semitism, I was handy with my fists.”

After graduating from Syracuse University, where he boxed, he served as a company commander in the Korean War, winning a Bronze Star. In his memoir, Mr. Rudman described the impact of his time in the Army.

“As I wrote the book I saw an unexpected theme emerge: the importance of my Korean War experience and the bond I felt with other senators, such as Bob Dole, Dan Inouye and Bob Kerrey, who had also known combat. If you have that experience, not much is left in life that will intimidate you.”

After the war, he helped run his family’s furniture company in Nashua while attending law school at night at Boston College. He was in private practice from 1960 to 1968 and became counselor to the governor of New Hampshire in 1969, then attorney general from 1970 to 1976.

After returning to private practice, he ran for the Senate in 1980 and narrowly defeated John A. Durkin, the Democratic incumbent. He easily won re-election in 1986, a bad year for Republicans generally

After leaving the Senate he served on President Bill Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and was its chairman from 1995 to 2001. The role overlapped with his co-chairmanship of the national security commission that warned of a terrorist attack. Years later he remained frustrated that the warning had largely gone unheeded.

“No one seemed to take it seriously, and no one in the media seemed to care,” Mr. Rudman said at a New Hampshire appearance in 2007, as quoted by The Associated Press. “The report went into a dustbin in the White House.”

The report resurfaced after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the Bush administration adopted the panel’s proposal for a Homeland Security Department. But Mr. Rudman grew disappointed in the department’s performance and predicted another attack on the country.

“It is not a question, I’m sorry to tell you, of ‘if,’ ” he said. “It’s a question of ‘when.’ ”

Mr. Rudman also warned about the growing influence of moneyed interests on the electoral process, arguing for a Democratic-sponsored bill in Congress that would require corporations, unions, political action committees and other organizations to disclose their identities and the amounts they donate to campaigns.

“If campaigning for office continues to be so heavily affected by anonymous out-of-district influences running negative advertising,” Mr. Rudman and former Senator Chuck Hagel wrote in an opinion article on The New York Times Web site in July, “many of our most capable potential leaders will shy away from elective office.”

Mr. Rudman practiced law in Washington at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and served as chairman of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a business strategy company. He was also lead director on the board of Raytheon, the defense technology company. He lived in Washington and had a home in New Hampshire as well.

Mr. Rudman’s wife of 57 years, the former Shirley Wahl, died in 2010. A son, Alan, died in 2004.

He is survived by his second wife, Margaret Shean Rudman; two sisters, Carol A. Rudman and Jean Gale; two daughters, Laura Rudman Robie and Debra R. Gilmore; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Rudman feuded with his alma mater long after he had left its campus. In 1952, Syracuse withheld his bachelor’s diploma because he had refused to pay an $18 fee for the yearbook, saying he had not been told of the charge in advance. After he was elected to the Senate, Syracuse offered him the degree or, if he preferred, an honorary degree. It eventually mailed him the diploma, but he never opened the package, and he later blocked an earmark of several million dollars for the university.

Looking back, he attributed his long memory to the New Hampshire in him. His attitude, he said, “was a testament to what I guess you would call New England crotchety stubbornness.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012


An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the second Gramm-Rudman Act. It was 1987, not 1997.



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