INDIANAPOLIS — Former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, a crewcut-wearing Indiana Democrat from southern Indiana who was a leading foreign affairs voice during three decades in Congress and helped oversee investigations of the Sept. 11 attacks, died Tuesday. He was 94.
Hamilton, a moderate lawmaker respected by Democrats and Republicans alike who also led a congressional probe of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair, died Tuesday peacefully in his Bloomington, Indiana, home, said his son Doug Hamilton, who did not cite a cause.
The elder Hamilton was at the forefront of congressional opposition to the 1991 Persian Gulf War waged by President George H.W. Bush and advocated continued economic sanctions against Iraq before military action over its invasion of Kuwait.
He decided against seeking reelection in 1998 and said after leaving Congress that he believed the U.S. needed to be regarded around the world as more than a leader of military coalitions.
“The United States must be — and must be seen as — an optimistic and benign power,” Hamilton said in 2003. “We must speak and act as a source of optimism, a beacon of freedom, a benign power forging a consensus approach toward a world of peace and growth and freedom. And American power must be accompanied by American generosity.”
President Barack Obama presented Hamilton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, saying during the ceremony that Hamilton was a man “widely admired” on both sides of the aisle, “for his honesty, his wisdom, and consistent commitment to bipartisanship.”
“Indiana mourns the passing of Lee Hamilton, a man whose life embodied integrity, civility, and public service,” Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, said in a statement Wednesday.
9/11 investigations
Hamilton was a small-town lawyer known for his exploits as a high school basketball star when he first won election to his southern Indiana congressional seat in 1964 at the age of 33.
With his thick glasses and calm, deliberate manner, Hamilton rose to become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees and a Democratic leader on international relations before retiring from Congress in 1999.
His reputation as an evenhanded moderate had Capitol Hill leaders turn to him for some of the most tumultuous matters facing Washington. But he also faced criticism that he was not aggressive enough in pursuing allegations of wrongdoing by Republican administrations.
Hamilton was tapped in 2002 as vice chairman of the Sept. 11 attacks commission. That group spent 20 months investigating the 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people when 19 hijackers flew airliners into New York’s World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.
He presented a united front with the panel’s Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, through clashes with the George W. Bush White House and its lobbying efforts for changes to the U.S. intelligence system.
The commission found that both the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to grasp the gravity of terrorist threats and took actions so feeble that they never even slowed the al-Qaida plotters.
“The fact of the matter is, we just didn’t get it in this country,” Hamilton said when the commission released its report in 2004. “We could not comprehend that people wanted to kill us; they wanted to hijack airplanes and fly them into big buildings.”
Iran-Contra committee
Hamilton gained national prominence in the mid-1980s with his selection as a co-chairman of the congressional Iran-Contra committee, which investigated the Reagan administration’s diversion of profits from Iran arms sales to help Nicaragua’s Contra rebels. The panel’s report found that President Ronald Reagan created an atmosphere at the White House in which subordinates felt free to skirt the law and Constitution.
“There was too much secrecy and deception,” Hamilton said at the time. “Information was withheld from the Congress, other officials, friends and allies and the American people.”
Hamilton, however, gained little Republican support for the committee’s work. Then-Rep. Dick Cheney, a top Republican on the Iran-Contra committee, called the report a political document that selected only the most damaging evidence against the Reagan administration.
Hamilton was considered as a possible vice presidential running mate both for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992, but they decided against picking the nontelegenic congressman from a Republican-leaning state.
Born April 20, 1931, in Daytona Beach, Florida, Hamilton was the son of a Methodist minister and moved with his family to Evansville, Indiana, as a child.
He went on to college at DePauw University and attended Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, before graduating from Indiana University’s law school in 1956.
Former Indiana governor and former vice president Mike Pence, a Republican, said in a statement that while their politics differed, his respect for Hamilton was “boundless.”
After Congress
After serving in Congress, Hamilton continued with his interests in foreign affairs and congressional reform as director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center. He also spent time as a faculty member at Indiana University, which in 2018 named its School of Global and International Studies after Hamilton and longtime Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who died in 2019.
Hamilton’s son said he took his father into his office on Monday, the day before he died.
“He believed in doing as much good as he could for as long as he could,” Doug Hamilton said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Hamilton and his wife were married for 58 years after meeting while students at DePauw. Nancy Hamilton died in 2012. He is survived by three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
