R.I. Sen. John Chafee Dies

John Chafee, Rhode Island's longtime Republican senator and former governor who earned praise even from Democrats for his moderate stance on issues, has died. He was 77.

Chafee, who had represented the state in the Senate for nearly 23 years, died of heart failure Sunday night at Bethesda Naval Hospital, spokesman John Goodman said.

Chafee was chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. According to his Web site, he "was a leading voice in crafting the Clean Air Act of 1990" and was "a longtime advocate for wetlands conservation and open space preservation." The site further says he received "every major environmental award." Environmentalists often were among the biggest contributors to his campaigns.

Representing a state with a large Roman Catholic constituency, Chafee also was an adamant advocate of abortion rights and opposed the "gag rule," which prohibited doctors at federally funded clinics from discussing abortion with their patients.

He supported an end to the ban on gays in the military and angered conservatives when he pushed for a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns.

He was the Republican Party's point man on health care and drafted several proposals in the 1990s designed to provide coverage to all Americans.

"I think Sen. Chafee was the leading exponent of a dying breed in American politics, the liberal Republican," John Mullian, Washington bureau chief of The Providence Journal, told CBS Radio News. "He was really the last of his generation to try and have a moderating influence on what has become an increasingly conservative party."

Vice President Gore said he will remember Chafee as a brave man. "Despite the many pressures he faced over the two decades he served in the Senate, he was never a partisan, never an ideologue," the Democratic presidential hopeful said in a statement. "He was simply the gentleman from Rhode Island who was never afraid to speak his mind and allow the American people to judge his actions."

"John Chafee proved that politics can be an honorable profession," said President Clinton. "When you think of bipartisan, you think of John Chafee."

Chafee, in his fourth term in the Senate, was born in Providence, and graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. He served in the Marines in both World War II and the Korean War, seeing action with the original invasion forces at Guadalcanal and in Korea.

Chafee is survived by his wife, five children and 12 grandchildren. He had announced he would not run for a fifth term.

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