John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV, a scion of one of America’s most famous and wealthiest families, passed away on Friday (November 6) at the age of 89 at his home in Washington, D.C., according to the Washington Post.
During his 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate, he fought to expand health care for the poor and sharply criticized President George W. Bush for his handling of the Iraq War.
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His family did not disclose the cause of death, the newspaper added.
Jay Rockefeller’s Biography
He was born on June 18, 1937, a few weeks after the death of his great-grandfather, who had been the richest man in America.
The name Rockefeller came with high expectations. His father was a renowned philanthropist. His uncle, Nelson, served as Vice President of the United States and as Governor of New York. His uncle, David Rockefeller, headed Chase Manhattan Bank, while his uncle, Winthrop Rockefeller, served as governor of Arkansas. In 1966, at the age of less than 30, he was elected to the West Virginia Legislature, and in 1968 he became Secretary of State for the same state.
In 1972, he failed in his bid to be elected governor. He then served as a college president before finally being elected governor in 1976. Rockefeller, who became one of the wealthiest members of the U.S. Congress, spent millions of dollars from his personal fortune to finance his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1984.
Rockefeller was sometimes overshadowed by his state’s other senator, Robert Byrd, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 92, holding the record for the longest tenure in Congress in U.S. history.
He typically supported his state’s coal and steel industries, but in 2012 he provoked the ire of coal industry executives, as he opposed Republican efforts to block the adoption of regulations on emissions from coal-fired power plants.
He was married to Sharon Percy Rockefeller, a public television executive, with whom he had four children.
Political Career
A low-key Democrat with liberal views, he was elected to the Senate in 1984—the first of his five six-year terms representing West Virginia— following two terms as governor of that impoverished state, where coal mining dominates the economy.
In 2002, Rockefeller voted in favor of the measure proposed by Republican Bush, which authorized the war in Iraq — a war that began with a U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He later expressed regret for that vote and, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he accused Bush of leading the nation into war based on “false premises.”
He was the great-grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and a scion of a family that constituted a political dynasty, which included his uncle, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.The life of Jay Rockefeller—who was born in New York City—took a new direction after he graduated from Harvard, when he participated in a national service program in rural, rural West Virginia from 1964 to 1966.
Once he entered public office, he worked to expand access to health care, combating poverty, providing health coverage for coal miners, and supporting military veterans. As a senator, he helped shape the program established in 1997, through which the U.S. federal government provides funding to states to offer health coverage to millions of uninsured children.
Rockefeller supported Democratic President Bill Clinton’s proposal—which ultimately failed—for essentially universal health insurance in the 1990s, and subsequently campaigned for the successful passage of health care reform under Democratic President Barack Obama, a law signed in 2010.
During the debate over Obama’s measure (Obamacare), Rockefeller attempted—unsuccessfully—to secure the creation of a federal health insurance program for the entire population (in addition to existing programs for the economically disadvantaged and the elderly), as an alternative to private insurance plans, which can be costly and exclude certain groups of citizens.
“Advocating for those most in need has been my life’s purpose, and I will never stop fighting to bring about positive change for the people who mean so much to me,”, Rockefeller said in 2013, when he announced—at the age of 75—that he would not seek a sixth term in the Senate.
Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration laid the groundwork for the war by publicizing intelligence reports according to which Iraq possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction—which, in reality, did not exist— as well as by claiming that there were ties between Iraqi leaders and the al-Qaeda network, which was responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.
“If I had known then what I know today, I would have voted against it,” Rockefeller told the Charleston Gazette in 2004, referring to the 2002 resolution authorizing the war.
“I believe the intelligence reports had been tailored,” he continued. “And I believe that the interpretation of that intelligence was shaped accordingly. We had a president who, as we now know, was determined to lead the country into war.”
The Controversy Over Iraq’s Weapons and Links to Al-Qaeda
A report by the Intelligence Committee, published in 2008—when he himself served as its chairman—stated that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other high-ranking officials had exaggerated the findings of the intelligence agencies and ignored the disagreements within U.S. intelligence circlesregarding Iraq’s weapons, as well as the highly disputed ties to al-Qaeda.
The report rejected the claims made by Bush and Cheney before the war, according to which Iraq might have supplied weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda.
“Presenting the American people with the image that the two sides maintained operational cooperation and constituted a single, indivisible threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation into war based on false assumptions,” Rockefeller stated upon the report’s release.
During his tenure in the Senate, he also chaired the Committees on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, as well as the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
Source: CNN.gr
