As a Navy officer in the Pacific during World War II, Mark Hatfield was among the first U.S. troops to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. What he later described as “inhuman, shock-ridden” scenes of “utter devastation in every direction” created within him an aversion to war that came to define his career as a five-term Republican senator.
Hatfield was born in Oregon’s Willamette Valley to a railroad blacksmith and his wife, both of them “deeply religious Baptists,” said the Salem, Ore., Statesman Journal. He grew up in Salem and graduated from Willamette University before being sent off to fight at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where he commanded amphibious landing craft.
With his “matinee-idol good looks and engaging manner,” Hatfield was destined for a life in politics after the war, said the Los Angeles Times. He quickly rose through the ranks of state politics to become Oregon’s governor in 1958, the same year he married Antoinette Kuzmanich. Local newspapers dubbed him “Oregon’s Golden Boy.”
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Hatfield’s opposition to the Vietnam War is what made him into a “true national figure,” said the Portland Oregonian. As governor, he denounced the 1965 bombing campaigns, and won a seat in the U.S. Senate the following year on an anti-war platform. He remained a vocal opponent of the war, branding it a “sin that scarred the national soul.”
Throughout his career, Hatfield was “one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate,” said The New York Times. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee during the 1980s and 1990s, he steadfastly resisted federal defense spending requests, and in 1995 became embroiled in a feud with the conservative wing of the party over a proposed balanced budget amendment. Hatfield’s “nay” turned out to be the deciding vote against the measure, infuriating Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole.
Hatfield retired from the Senate in 1996 and returned to Oregon. In one of his final interviews, he castigated the modern political process, saying lawmakers were now required to govern in “campaign mode.” Political solutions, he said, “are found not on the left wing or the right wing, but in the center.”
