Former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, D-Ind., was showered with accolades right after he died on Feb. 3, but they were no more laudatory than the praise he received during his lifetime.
He has long appeared to many, even while he was serving in Congress and afterward, to represent a seemingly fading ideal of bipartisan compromise and reasonable practicality.
Hamilton had been a Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees chairman in the House, where he was a Democrat serving a Republican-dominated district from 1965 to 1999. In the years since, he burnished his reputation as an elder foreign policy mandarin.
