(Bloomington) Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who was a leading foreign affairs figure during three decades in Congress and oversaw investigations into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, died Tuesday. He was 94 years old.
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Mr. Hamilton, who also led a congressional investigation into the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair while representing a rural district in southern Indiana, died peacefully at his home in Bloomington, Ind., said his son Doug Hamilton, who did not specify the cause of death.
Mr Hamilton was at the forefront of Congressional opposition to President George HW Bush’s 1991 Persian Gulf War and advocated maintaining economic sanctions against Iraq before any military action following the invasion of Kuwait.
He decided not to run for re-election in 1998. After leaving Congress, he asserted that the United States should be seen around the world as more than just a leader of military coalitions.
“The United States must be – and must be seen as – an optimistic and benevolent power,” he said in 2003.
“We must speak and act as a source of optimism, a beacon of freedom, a benevolent power forging a consensual approach towards a world of peace, growth and freedom. And American power must be matched by American generosity. »
Barack Obama presented Lee Hamilton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, saying during the ceremony that he was a man “widely admired” on both sides of the political spectrum “for his honesty, his wisdom and his steadfast commitment to bipartisanship.”
Mr. Hamilton was a small-town lawyer when he first won his congressional seat in southern Indiana in 1964, at age 33.
He became chairman of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees and Democratic leader on international relations before retiring from Congress in 1999.
Moderate and impartial man
His reputation as a moderate and even-handed man prompted leaders on Capitol Hill to turn to him for some of the most tumultuous issues facing Washington.
But he has also been criticized for not being aggressive enough in pursuing allegations of wrongdoing by Republican administrations.
Mr. Hamilton was appointed in 2002 as vice chairman of the Commission on the September 11 Terrorist Attacks. The group spent 20 months investigating the 2001 attacks, which left nearly 3,000 people dead when 19 hijackers slammed into New York’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
He presented a united front with the panel’s Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, during clashes with the George W. Bush White House and efforts to change the U.S. intelligence system.
The commission concluded that the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to grasp the seriousness of terrorist threats and took steps so timid that they did not even slow down al-Qaeda plotters.
“The fact is that we simply have not understood the situation in this country. We couldn’t understand that people wanted to kill us, that they wanted to hijack planes and crash them into tall buildings,” Mr. Hamilton said when the commission released its report in 2004.
Previously, he came to national prominence in the mid-1980s when he was named co-chairman of the Congressional Iran-Contra Commission, charged with investigating the Reagan administration’s diversion of profits from arms sales to Iran to aid Nicaragua’s Contra rebels.
The report found that President Reagan created a climate in the White House in which his subordinates felt free to circumvent the law and the Constitution.
“There were too many secrets and deceptions. Information was withheld from Congress, other officials, friends and allies, and the American people,” Mr. Hamilton said at the time.
After serving in Congress, Mr. Hamilton continued his interest in foreign affairs and congressional reform as director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center.
He also taught at Indiana University, which in 2018 named its school of global and international studies after Hamilton and longtime Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who died in 2019.
