John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV, a scion of one of America’s most famous and richest families and who spent three decades in the U.S. Senate pushing for expanded health care for the poor and criticizing President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, died Friday at his home in Washington, The Washington Post reported. He was 89 years old.
The newspaper added that his family did not give a reason.
Mr. Rockefeller, a tall, soft-spoken Democrat with liberal views, was elected to the first of five six-year terms in the U.S. Senate representing West Virginia in 1984 after two terms as governor of an impoverished coal-mining state.
In 2002, Mr. Rockefeller voted in favor of Republican Bush’s bill authorizing the Iraq War, which began with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Mr. Rockefeller later expressed regret at that vote and, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused Bush of leading the country into war on “false premises.”
He was the great-grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and the scion of a political dynasty that included his uncle, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
New York-born newcomer Jay Rockefeller’s life changed direction after graduating from Harvard University and serving in a national service program in impoverished rural West Virginia from 1964 to 1966.
In public office, he worked to increase access to health care, fight poverty, provide health benefits to coal miners, and support veterans. As a senator, he played a role in developing a program created in 1997 to assist states in providing health insurance to millions of uninsured children.
Rockefeller supported Democratic President Bill Clinton’s failed proposal for near-universal health care coverage in the 1990s, and then fought for the success of Democratic President Barack Obama’s health care reform bill signed into law in 2010.
During the debate over Obama’s policies, Rockefeller unsuccessfully tried to force the federal government to provide a health insurance program for the general public, in addition to existing programs for the poor and elderly, as an alternative to expensive and potentially exclusive private insurance plans.
When Rockefeller announced in 2013 that he would not seek a sixth term in the Senate at age 75, he said, “It has been my life’s mission to help those most in need, and I will never stop fighting to make a difference for the people who are so important to me.”
Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration built the case for war by touting information indicating that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (which in fact did not exist) and by alleging ties between Iraqi leaders and the al-Qaeda network responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
“If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,” Rockefeller told the Charleston Gazette in 2004, referring to the 2002 war authorization measure.
“I think the intelligence was formed,” he continued. “And I think the intelligence community’s interpretation formed. We now know that we had a president who was determined to go to war.”
“Fundamentally misleading”
An Intelligence Committee report issued in 2008, when he was chairman, alleged that Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other key officials exaggerated intelligence findings and ignored disputes within the U.S. intelligence community over Iraqi weapons and hotly contested ties to al-Qaeda.
The report rejected prewar statements by Bush and Cheney that Iraq could provide al-Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction.
“Telling the American people that our two countries have an operational partnership and pose a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the United States into war on the wrong premise,” Rockefeller said in announcing the report.
During his tenure in the Senate, he also chaired the Commerce, Science, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs committees.
Rockefeller was born on June 18, 1937, a few weeks after the death of his great-grandfather, the richest man in America.
The Rockefeller name had great expectations. His father was a famous philanthropist. His uncle Nelson served as vice president of the United States and governor of New York. His uncle, David Rockefeller, was the president of Chase Manhattan Bank, and his uncle, Winthrop Rockefeller, was the governor of Arkansas.
He was elected to the West Virginia State Assembly in 1966 before he was 30 years old, and in 1968 he was elected West Virginia Secretary of State.
He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1972, then served as university president, and was elected governor in 1976. Rockefeller, who became one of the wealthiest members of the U.S. Congress, spent millions of his own money to fund a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1984.
Rockefeller was sometimes overshadowed by the state’s other senator, Robert Byrd, who died in 2010 at age 92, making him the longest-serving senator in U.S. history.
He typically supports the state’s coal and steel industries, but in 2012 he infuriated coal executives by fighting Republican efforts to block emissions regulations from coal-fired power plants.
He is married to public television executive Sharon Percy Rockefeller and they have four children.
