Oregon Gov. Mark Hatfield delivered the keynote address at the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater for president. Intransigents subsequently would vilify Hatfield for being not only a moderate but a RINO.
Hatfield served in the Senate for many years and looked the part. A man of intense religious faith, he lent an evangelical perspective to politics. His opposition to capital punishment and to abortion suggested his seamless approach to issues relating to human life. Christianity Today saluted him. The religious right did not.
During World War II, he participated in the battle of Iwo Jima and belonged to one of the first groups of Americans to enter Hiroshima after an atomic bomb leveled the city. His pacifism approached the absolute. He sponsored, with George McGovern, legislation to end the Vietnam War.
Hatfield earned the enmity of mainstream conservatives when he cast the deciding vote against a balanced-budget amendment. He considered many of those backing the proposal to be surly hypocrites who came to him during his chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee with demands to spend money in their home states.
Ethics questions dogged his later years. His alleged sins did not rise to the level even of the venal, yet they left stains.
Mark Hatfield died Monday at 89.
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