Jay Rockefeller died Friday at his home in Washington at age 89, the Washington Post reported. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV had served five six-year terms in the US Senate and two terms as governor of West Virginia before his long run in Washington ended in 2013.
West Virginia and the US Senate
Rockefeller was elected to the US Senate in 1984 and became one of the state’s longest-serving figures in federal office. He was a Democrat with liberal views, and he spent much of his career pushing for broader health care, aid for children, support for coal miners and help for military veterans.
He had a role in shaping the 1997 program under which the US government helps states provide medical coverage for millions of uninsured children. He also backed Bill Clinton’s failed proposal for near-universal health insurance coverage in the 1990s and later fought for Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul law, signed in 2010.
Iraq war vote
Rockefeller also carried a record that was more complicated than his health care work. He voted in 2002 for the measure authorizing the Iraq war, then told the Charleston Gazette in 2004, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it.”
He added, “I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped. You had a president who we now know was determined to go to war.” As head of the Senate intelligence committee, he later accused George W. Bush of taking the nation to war on false premises, and a 2008 intelligence committee report said George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other leading officials exaggerated intelligence findings and ignored disputes within US intelligence circles about Iraq’s weapons and ties to al Qaeda.
2013 decision
In 2013, at age 75, Rockefeller said championing those most in need had been his life’s calling and announced that he would not seek a sixth Senate term. That decision closed a career that had begun with his service in a national service program in impoverished rural West Virginia from 1964 to 1966 and stretched from state government into the center of Senate fights over health care and Iraq.
The family did not provide a cause of death. For those who followed his career, the remaining question is less about his place in public life than the end of it: what brought that long Senate and state career to a close on Friday in Washington.
