«Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania powerhouse for 36 years in Congress and an early ally for Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her rise to the top of the House, died Monday afternoon due to complications from recent surgery.
An announcement from his office said Murtha died at 1:18 p.m. at the Virginia Hospital Center, where he had been admitted last week after having his gallbladder removed at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
A Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, the 77-year-old Democrat won national fame for standing up against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. But in Congress itself, he also symbolized an old school generation going back to Tip O’Neill and the Democratic heyday of the '70s, when the House was less divided by partisan ideology than by often regional interests.
With his military credentials and conservative western Pennsylvania district, Murtha moved easily in this world. It was his house within the House, and he was forever “Captain Jack” and the mayor of “Murtha’s Corner.” But behind the rough talk, vote-swapping and pork barrel politics was a restless intellect, a shrewd man who read history and went home early to monitor BBC broadcasts when he wanted a different slant on American wars overseas.
He loved birdhouses, fretted about his roses and bet early on Pelosi to become the first woman speaker in the history of the House. And when the time came, he stepped out of the back room as no one else could to forcefully challenge the war on Iraq in 2005 and become a folk hero to anti-war liberals who had previously dismissed him as déclassé. ?
In going public, Murtha paid a heavy political price. Republicans, who had all but ignored his district before, poured millions into campaigns to unseat him after he came out against the war. Internet sites were devoted to attacks on Murtha. Direct mail specialists with ties to Karl Rove at the Bush White House targeted the Democrat. ??
Murtha was unprepared for the exposure. He had rarely been on television, and his blunt backroom style invited ridicule. Reporters began looking for scandal behind the millions of dollars in home-state projects in his annual defense bill.
Rather than lie low, Murtha made himself a target further with public comments in the spring of 2006 pressuring the Marine command to investigate allegations of civilian casualties at Haditha. This infuriated many Marines, and critics argued that the congressman had become more partisan himself out of loyalty to Pelosi.
In fact, Murtha, a regular visitor to the wounded at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals, personally feared the strain on the military. He had been deeply affected in 2004 by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which involved units from western Pennsylvania. And his relations with the younger President Bush were in stark contrast with what he experienced with Bush’s father during the first Persian Gulf War, when Murtha worked closely with the White House and then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.
Over time, he and Cheney became more alienated, and one of the most telling stories of this period was Murtha’s 2005 behind-the-scenes role in saving an anti-torture amendment, bitterly opposed by the vice president and sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
McCain had publicly proclaimed that the amendment, attached to the annual defense appropriations bill, would be killed by House-Senate negotiators because of their anger against him, a frequent critic of pork barrel spending. In fact, just the opposite happened, and Murtha — together with Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) — kept the language intact over the objections of Republican House members and Cheney.
Staff would laugh that each time the subject came up in the closed-door meetings in late 2005, Murtha and others would have to vent first on how irritating they found McCain. But his bottom line was that he believed in the amendment and that it was staying.
Elected in a special election in February 1974, Murtha was the first of the "Watergate babies" of that year — but a very different breed than the younger reformers. ??He established himself early on the House Appropriations Committee, befriending old bulls like the late Chairman Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.).
But Murtha paid a heavy price when he was drawn into the 1980 Abscam FBI sting operation — for which he was never prosecuted but severely embarrassed when a videotape surfaced of his exchange with a purported sheik. ??
He could be immensely useful to O’Neill but also a rambunctious irritant. “Mr. Murtha is very good at solving problems, some of his own making,” an O’Neill aide once commented. And presidents took notice. Murtha worked closely with Ronald Reagan and later with the first President Bush. He was a golfing partner for Bill Clinton, who came back to his district last year to help save him with a major rally in Johnstown.
He was very respectful of President Barack Obama but never had the same relationship with this White House as with the Clintons. He had supported Hillary Rodham Clinton in the highly contested Pennsylvania Democratic primary in 2008, and though personally close to the president’s National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones, Murtha and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief-of-staff, viewed one another warily.
One relationship that spanned much of this was with now Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who first knew Murtha while in the CIA in the '80ss.
“I've known Jack and worked with him for more than two decades,” Gates said in a statement from Paris, where he was traveling Monday. “In our dealings over the years, Jack and I did not always agree, but I always respected his candor.”
Murtha was strict about decorum. Military officers coming from the Pentagon were expected to be in dress uniforms; a long-time aide remembers wearing a tie the first time they met on the way to playing golf. At the same time, he preferred to meet with Gates alone, one on one. And he saw all the humor in the pretensions of Congress such as when a science coalition, grateful for his funding, put his picture on a faux box of Wheaties.
He was very much a soldier’s soldier, checking boots when he visited base camps. And his biggest legacy on the Appropriations Committee may be the huge investments he oversaw in military health programs and the attention he demanded for brain and post traumatic stress injuries.
Murtha kept in his office a dark-blue wool Union Army cap worn by his mother’s grandfather Abraham, who lost an arm in the Civil War. But the greater influence was Abraham’s widow, Mary, who lived into her 90s next door and famously told the future congressman, “You are on this earth to make a difference.”
McCain had publicly proclaimed that the amendment, attached to the annual defense appropriations bill, would be killed by House-Senate negotiators because of their anger against him, a frequent critic of pork barrel spending. In fact, just the opposite happened, and Murtha — together with Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) — kept the language intact over the objections of Republican House members and Cheney.
Staff would laugh that each time the subject came up in the closed-door meetings in late 2005, Murtha and others would have to vent first on how irritating they found McCain. But his bottom line was that he believed in the amendment and that it was staying.
Elected in a special election in February 1974, Murtha was the first of the "Watergate babies" of that year — but a very different breed than the younger reformers. ??He established himself early on the House Appropriations Committee, befriending old bulls like the late Chairman Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.).
But Murtha paid a heavy price when he was drawn into the 1980 Abscam FBI sting operation — for which he was never prosecuted but severely embarrassed when a videotape surfaced of his exchange with a purported sheik. ??
He could be immensely useful to O’Neill but also a rambunctious irritant. “Mr. Murtha is very good at solving problems, some of his own making,” an O’Neill aide once commented. And presidents took notice. Murtha worked closely with Ronald Reagan and later with the first President Bush. He was a golfing partner for Bill Clinton, who came back to his district last year to help save him with a major rally in Johnstown.
He was very respectful of President Barack Obama but never had the same relationship with this White House as with the Clintons. He had supported Hillary Rodham Clinton in the highly contested Pennsylvania Democratic primary in 2008, and though personally close to the president’s National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones, Murtha and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief-of-staff, viewed one another warily.
One relationship that spanned much of this was with now Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who first knew Murtha while in the CIA in the '80ss.
“I've known Jack and worked with him for more than two decades,” Gates said in a statement from Paris, where he was traveling Monday. “In our dealings over the years, Jack and I did not always agree, but I always respected his candor.”
Murtha was strict about decorum. Military officers coming from the Pentagon were expected to be in dress uniforms; a long-time aide remembers wearing a tie the first time they met on the way to playing golf. At the same time, he preferred to meet with Gates alone, one on one. And he saw all the humor in the pretensions of Congress such as when a science coalition, grateful for his funding, put his picture on a faux box of Wheaties.
He was very much a soldier’s soldier, checking boots when he visited base camps. And his biggest legacy on the Appropriations Committee may be the huge investments he oversaw in military health programs and the attention he demanded for brain and post traumatic stress injuries.
Murtha kept in his office a dark-blue wool Union Army cap worn by his mother’s grandfather Abraham, who lost an arm in the Civil War. But the greater influence was Abraham’s widow, Mary, who lived into her 90s next door and famously told the future congressman, “You are on this earth to make a difference.”»
in POLITICO.com
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