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.
He is long remembered as vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 commission, which was created to investigate the U.S. government failures that led up to the 2001 terrorist attacks.
For a good part of his nearly six decades in political life, he was looked up to in real time by members of both parties. He was praised for being moderate, wise and good.
“He was one of the most thoughtful and decent individuals you’d meet anywhere, and he was extraordinarily adept at foreign relations, which was his expertise,” said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, who served in the House with Hamilton in the early 1990s.
“He also was, and it was not uncommon back then, very bipartisan,” Reed said in an interview Wednesday. “He had good Midwestern values and he shared them with others, regardless of party. He was, in many respects, not just an expert but the conscience of the Congress when I was there.”
‘Another form of patriotism’
Hamilton was a solid and stolid presence, both politically and physically.
A former high and college basketball star in hoops-crazy Indiana, he was recognizable as a stocky 6-foot-4 inch man in a trademark crew cut, which he once said was needed to hide a double cowlick.
He garnered a high public profile in 1987 when he chaired the House panel that investigated the scandal surrounding the so-called Iran-Contra affair — the Reagan administration’s secret sales of arms to Iran and funneling of the proceeds to anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.
The central figure in that controversy was Oliver North, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel on the National Security Council. North was convicted in 1989 of obstructing Congress, destroying documents and accepting an illegal gratuity, but the convictions were vacated on appeal in 1991.
At the end of a July 1987 Iran-Contra hearing, Hamilton addressed North with a comment that spoke to the congressman’s values.
“I don’t have any doubt at all, Colonel North, that you are a patriot,” Hamilton said. “But there’s another form of patriotism which is unique to democracy. It resides in those who have a deep respect for the rule of law and faith in America’s democratic traditions.”
9/11 commission
In his 34 years in the House, Hamilton never showed signs of interest in a congressional leadership position, choosing instead to focus on committee work.
Some of his colleagues believed he would have been well cast in a leadership role but that he shunned it because of the fundraising and campaigning required.
“Lee Hamilton would never put himself through this kind of campaign,” former Rep. Matthew McHugh, D-N.Y., told CQ in 1987.
In the two years leading up to his taking a top role on the Iran-Contra panel, Hamilton had chaired the Intelligence Committee.
And from 1993 to 1995 he chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee.
In those chairmanship roles, “he helped to guide us through the Cold War and into a new era of American leadership,” President Barack Obama would later say of Hamilton in awarding him the Congressional Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Hamilton left Congress in 1999. And in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, he was named vice chairman of the 9/11 commission alongside Chairman Thomas Kean, a Republican and former New Jersey governor.
Hamilton’s name is permanently associated with that commission and its landmark 2004 report, and he once told The New York Times it was the highlight of his career.
But he was only asked to serve in that position because Democrats needed a replacement for their first choice for the job, former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine, who had bowed out.
The 9/11 commission recommended the creation of the Homeland Security Department and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence agencies under what would become the Director of National Intelligence.
‘Botching things’
The 9/11 commission and Iran-Contra committee were not the only crisis panels Hamilton served on in his long career.
He also co-chaired the 2006 Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission that, with the aid of Hamilton’s skill at compromise, agreed to recommend a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Iraq war, which had begun in 2003.
In 2020, he served on a U.S. Institute of Peace panel on countering terrorism.
Hamilton was a leading voice advocating the creation of an independent and nonpartisan commission to probe the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. The Senate blocked a bill that would have created such a commission, and the House instead set up a select committee that Hamilton said was too partisan a solution.
He called that decision “the prime example of how Congress is botching things at the present time, because they’re not following the model we had in the commission. As a result, the investigation into the events of that terrible day is not being pursued as it should.”
‘Powerful voice’
Right after Hamilton left Congress and until 2010, he served as the president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Toward the end of his long career, Hamilton taught at Indiana University.
He founded the Center on Congress at that university, which later named its foreign affairs school the Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies in honor of him and the late Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee for many years.
“Lee Hamilton is a legend in Indiana who had a powerful voice in our state for years after he left Congress,” said Jim Banks, R-Ind., in an interview on Wednesday. “He wrote columns and weighed in on national politics in a thoughtful way. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always found him to be humble and thoughtful about the issues in our country.”
Throughout his time as a lawmaker and later in academia, Hamilton was a strong advocate of each of the government’s three branches fully exercising their respective powers.
“In order for our system to work,” he told CQ in 2007, “you need both a strong president and a strong Congress. If the public doesn’t have confidence in Congress, the system can’t work.”
A ‘different era’
Obama, during the Congressional Medal of Freedom ceremony, called Hamilton “a man widely admired on both sides of the aisle for his honesty, his wisdom and consistent commitment to bipartisanship.”
The citation for his medal said Hamilton “played a pivotal role in developing solutions to some of the most complex challenges of our time. His leadership in Congress reflected his profound commitment to preserving the safety and integrity of our nation, and his role in promoting civic engagement has made an impact that will endure for generations to come. Lee H. Hamilton has helped steer the course of American history in a spirit of bipartisanship, and he continues to strengthen the homeland and promote diplomacy.”
The kind of bipartisan compromise that Hamilton practiced is not as common in Congress today, some members say.
“I think we were more productive, frankly,” said Reed of the late 20th century years when Hamilton served. “There was more focus on the substance of what was going on, not the atmospherics. Part of that is a result of many social media. He came of age in a period in which C-SPAN was in its infancy, if it was here at all. So no one was playing for the cameras.”
Banks struck a similar but slightly different note, suggesting that lawmakers today work together across the aisle more than they are given credit for.
“I serve in the Senate, and it seems like compromise happens a lot around here,” Banks said. “Lee Hamilton served in this place, in this town, in a different era than what I did. But I have a lot to learn from him. I didn’t always agree with his commentary, but I respected him.”
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