Person Page - 620

     Harold Evans was born on 4 March 1939.^1,2 He died on 2 September 2004 at Meriden, New Haven Co., CT, at age 65.²

     Hannah Rogers was born on 16 November 1668 at Duxbury, Plymouth Co., MA.¹ She was the daughter of John Rogers Jr. and Elizabeth Pabodie. Hannah Rogers married Samuel Bradford, son of Major William Bradford and Alice Richards, on 31 July 1689 at Plymouth, Plymouth Co., MA.¹ Hannah Rogers died in September 1754 at Hingham, MA, at age 85.¹

     Donna Blakesley was born on 16 December 1951.^1,2 She married Charles Lafayette Shaw, son of Lafayette Webster Shaw and Grace Jeannette Holcombe.¹ Donna Blakesley died on 20 August 2001 at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Suffolk Co., MA, at age 49.^2,3

     Sarah Bly died in 1905. She was born in 1905. She was the daughter of Fred Bly and Blanche Safford.

     Hattie Heysham was born on 1 January 1891.¹ She was the daughter of Earnest Heysham and Blanche Safford. Hattie Heysham died in October 1975 at Shinglehouse, Potter Co., PA, at age 84.¹

     Jenny Maurine Rogers was born on 9 September 1907.¹ She was the daughter of Charles Anthony Rogers and Mabel Anna Yarnell.¹ Jenny Maurine Rogers married Ronald Wilbert Rowe, son of George D. Rowe and Catherine R. Gridley, on 29 June 1926.¹ Jenny Maurine Rogers died on 28 December 1981 at age 74.¹

     Jack Roy Holcombe was born on 1 July 1940 at Portland, Multnomah Co., OR.¹ He was the son of Horace Seiver Holcombe and Patricia Lee Hereford.¹ Jack Roy Holcombe was also known as Jack Roy Rowlands. He died on 10 April 2016 at San Diego, San Diego Co., CA, at age 75.

     David Rex Holcombe was born on 10 November 1945 at Portland, Multnomah Co., OR.¹ He was the son of Horace Seiver Holcombe and Patricia Lee Hereford.¹ David Rex Holcombe died on 8 November 2015 at Portland, Multnomah Co., OR, at age 69.

     Iva L. Heysham was born in August 1892. She was the daughter of Earnest Heysham and Blanche Safford.

     Senator John Lester Hubbard Chafee was born on 22 October 1922 at Providence, Providence Co., RI.¹ He was the son of John Sharpe Chafee and Janet Melissa Hunter. Senator John Lester Hubbard Chafee died on 24 October 1999 at National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, MD, at age 77.¹

WASHINGTON -- Senator John Hubbard Chafee of Rhode Island, the last of the Rockefeller Republicans and an increasingly isolated voice of internationalism and bipartisanship in his party, died on Sunday.
Senator Chafee died of heart failure at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., a Washington suburb, his office announced. He was 77.

His major domestic efforts involved the environment and health policy, and he was responsible for a vast expansion of Medicaid, the Federal health program for the poor, in the 1980's.

A Marine veteran of Guadalcanal and the Korean War, Chafee made his last major effort in the Senate this month in seeking to postpone a vote on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. When the Senate went ahead and voted on the pact that would have banned underground nuclear testing, he was one of four Republicans to support ratification.

In his final Senate speech, on Oct. 13, he said, "We signed this treaty recognizing that discouraging other nuclear powers and would-be nuclear powers from testing these weapons would lessen the unthinkable possibility that the nuclear option would ever be employed."

Far from threatening American security, he said, the treaty "locks in a status quo in which the United States has an enormous advantage."

In partisan terms, his death will not change the Senate's 55 to 45 Republican advantage. Lincoln C. Almond, Rhode Island's Republican Governor and a Chafee protégé, will appoint a successor to serve until Jan. 3, 2001. Among the early favorites is Lincoln Chafee, the Senator's son, who is the Mayor of Warwick. Lincoln Chafee was already a candidate for his father's seat after the elder Chafee announced on March 15 that he would retire when this term ended.

The most immediate impact in the Senate could be on environmental issues. Senator Chafee, as chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, has bottled up a number of pro-business changes in environmental laws that other Republicans want. Senator Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire, who announced this year that he was leaving the Republican Party but who still enjoys its seniority, is next in line for the chairmanship.

But a spokesman for Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader, said today that it was "premature for any kind of discussion" of the chairmanship.

In a larger sense, Chafee's death leaves the Senate with only two relatively moderate Republicans in positions of power. Senator John W. Warner of Virginia is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana heads the Agriculture Committee. But neither has been as eager as Chafee to work with Democrats or as ready to cross the Republican leadership.

In recent years the Senate has lost a significant group of Republicans who found it natural to seek bipartisan alliances, from Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon to Alan Simpson of Wyoming to John C. Danforth of Missouri to Nancy Kassebaum Baker of Kansas to Hank Brown of Colorado.

Today that talent, exemplified by Chafee, was cheered chiefly by Democrats. Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, a frequent collaborator on issues like health care and welfare reform, said: "We lost one who was part of our centrist coalition, and the country has lost someone who was always putting his country ahead of party politics. He was part of a group that should be growing in numbers, not diminishing, but we become more polarized each year.

"The Senate and this country have lost a leader who put his country's interests before partisan politics."

President Clinton, who had hoped in vain for Chafee's help on national health insurance in 1993 and 1994, said on Monday: "Rhode Island and America have lost a great leader and a fine human being, who in 23 years in the Senate and in his service as Secretary of the Navy, always put his concern for the American people above partisanship. When you think of the term 'bipartisan,' you immediately think of John Chafee."

And while some Republican conservatives have sniped at Chafee over the years, and even dumped him from the chairmanship of their party conference in 1990, their reactions today were warm.

Senators were visibly upset as they spoke and after they left the floor. One whose voice broke with emotion was Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, declined to speak to a reporter about a national security budget matter, saying he had just finished giving a Chafee tribute.

Chafee was descended from one of the "five families" of Rhode Island, Yankees who ran the state before immigrants changed its political complexion in the 30's.

He was at Yale when World War II began and he enlisted in the Marines, serving in battles at Guadalcanal and Okinawa, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He returned to Yale and then went to Harvard Law School before being recalled to active duty in Korea in 1951.

He practiced law and served six years in the Rhode Island Legislature, becoming minority leader of the State Assembly. In 1962 he became only the third Republican elected governor in 30 years, squeaking through by 398 votes.

He was an unabashedly liberal governor. He pushed for anti-discrimination laws in housing and employment before the Federal Government passed them. He advocated the construction of Interstate 95, developed parks throughout the small state and pushed through a state plan of health care for the elderly before Congress enacted Medicare.

In Presidential politics, Chafee had opposed Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 Republican nomination, and in 1968 he backed Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York against Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. While Rockefeller got all 14 of Rhode Island's delegate votes, it was not nearly enough.

Chafee himself was victim of a political upset that fall, losing a bid for a fourth term as governor to Frank Licht. Chafee had halted his campaigning after his 14-year-old daughter, Tribbie, had died a few weeks before the election after being kicked in the head by a horse.

But despite his support for Rockefeller, the Nixon Administration found a place for him, and he reveled in the post of Navy Secretary. His most striking decision was made on May 6, 1969, when he blocked any court martial of the commander and the intelligence officer of the U.S.S. Pueblo, which had been captured by North Korea in 1968.

They had been held prisoner for 11 months, and Secretary Chafee said, "They have suffered enough." Moreover, he concluded that the capture was the result of a failure shared by the entire Navy chain of command.

"The major factor which led to the Pueblo's only confrontation by unanticipated bold and hostile forces was the sudden collapse of a premise which had been assumed at every level of responsibility and upon which every other aspect of the mission had been based -- freedom of the high seas," he wrote. "The consequences must in fairness be borne by all, rather than by one or two individuals whom circumstances had placed closer to the actual event."

He resigned in 1972 and ran for the Senate against Claiborne Pell. But in a strongly Democratic state, he lost despite Nixon's landslide. After that Chafee returned to practicing law in Providence, until he ran again for the Senate in 1976 and won.

The Senate he joined in 1977 was a far less partisan institution than today's, and he could support President Carter and the Panama Canal treaty without repercussions from his Republican colleagues. And when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Chafee eagerly proclaimed it a Republican victory, not a conservative one, and promised moderate support on major issues like the economy.

But he also moved forward with his own priorities. Year after year in the 1980's, as Congress cut the budget for other social programs, he engineered expansions of Medicaid, extending coverage to millions of pregnant women and children.

Taken together, the changes altered a basic concept of Medicaid, breaking the link that for more than two decades had tied Medicaid eligibility to the receipt of cash welfare benefits. As a result of his efforts, Congress allowed and in some cases required states to help pay medical bills for certain low-income people who were not receiving welfare.

Chafee helped write a provision of the 1996 welfare law intended to guarantee continued Medicaid coverage for families losing cash assistance.

Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University, said: "Senator Chafee was involved in virtually every important change in the Medicaid program since the late 1970's. He led efforts to expand maternal and child health programs. He had an undying commitment to Medicaid recipients with disabilities. He made great efforts to preserve and strengthen the health care safety net, assuring adequate payments for community health centers that care for huge numbers of uninsured patients."

Despite fighting the Reagan Administration over military spending, he was elected to the Senate Republicans' third-ranking position, chairman of the Republican Conference, in 1984. He was ousted from that position in 1990 by the more conservative Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who in turn was pushed aside by more conservative rivals.

But that year he also played a central role in reauthorizing the Clean Air Act, one of the nation's landmark environmental laws. That was only one of the achievements hailed by environmentalists today. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, cited that bill and also said Chafee played an even greater role later as a "one-man front line" defending laws against the "Republican far-right wing."

"No one will ever know how many bad things did not happen in the last three years because John Chafee was there," Pope said. At least one of Pope's evils was easy to identify. When Republicans recaptured the Senate in 1995, Chafee became chairman of the Environment Committee. He showed a chairman's power when he simply refused to bring up a rewritten version of the landmark Clean Water Act of 1972. The House-passed measure would have weakened or revoked a number of pollution control requirements.

In the 1990's, despite the loss of his formal Republican Party leadership position, his friend Senator Bob Dole of Kansas put him in charge of a task force to define Republican policy on national health insurance. The Chafee group rejected the idea of requiring employers to buy coverage for their workers, which was central to the Democratic plan, but instead advocated requiring people to get insurance, with Federal subsidies for those who could not afford it.

As the issue heated up in 1993 and 1994, Dole backed away from it. When Chafee, Breaux and others struggled, in dozens of meetings in a Capitol hideaway, to compromise with the Clinton plan, they could get no more than a handful of Republicans who would vote to break the Dole filibuster. Their effort, like Clinton's, foundered.

Danforth, a central ally in that cause and a frequent dinner companion during late Senate nights, reflected on Monday that one of the best things about Chafee at that moment was that "when it fell apart, there was no bitterness." Danforth added: "He was a person who really wanted to make things better. He was the opposite of an 'aginner.'"

And while the big effort failed, elements of the Chafee-Breaux "Mainstream Coalition" plan reappeared in law in later years, and Chafee played a major role in getting a plan to insure more children -- though it was initiated by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah -- enacted in 1997.

But while Chafee clashed often with the increasingly conservative Republican Senate leadership, he was hardly predictable. Among his last votes was opposition to an effort to cut off debate on campaign finance legislation last week. He said the bill had been weakened too much.

He is survived by his wife, Virginia; four sons, John Chafee Jr. of Los Angeles, Lincoln Chafee of Warwick, Quentin Chafee of North Kingstown, R.I., and Zechariah Chafee of Providence, R.I; a daughter, Georgia Nassikas of McLean, Va; three sisters, Janet Cushman of Quebec, Susan Welch of Bethany, Conn., and Alexandra Reynolds of North Kingstown, and 12 grandchildren.

Chafee's sense of history was central to his final public appearance, last Thursday night. He spoke at the Washington National Cathedral to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

He said: "Naysayers may ask, What difference does saving one train station or post office truly make in the future of America? My response is this: Preservation is not just about preserving brick and mortar, lintel and beam. It is about the quality of life, and the possibility of a bright future. Carl Sandburg expressed the danger of losing touch with our past when he said, 'If America forgets where she came from, if people lose sight of what brought them along, then will begin the rot and dissolution.'"

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company.