Mark Hatfield Totally Explained

Everything about Mark Hatfield totally explained

Mark Odom Hatfield (born July 12 1922) is an American politician and educator from the state of Oregon. A Republican, he served for 30 years as a United States Senator from Oregon, and served as Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. A native Oregonian, he served in the United States Navy in the Pacific Theater during World War II after graduating from Willamette University. After the war he earned a graduate degree from Stanford University before returning to Oregon and Willamette as a professor.
Hatfield would then serve in both houses of the Oregon Legislative Assembly while still teaching. He won election to the Oregon Secretary of State's office at the age of 34 and two years later was elected as Governor of Oregon. He was the youngest person to ever serve in either of those offices, serving two terms as governor before election to the United States Senate. In the Senate he'd serve Oregon for 30 years, and now holds the record for longest serving Senator from Oregon. In 1968, he was considered a candidate to be Richard Nixon's running mate for the Republican Party presidential ticket.
Hatfield served as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations on two different occasions. With this role he was able to direct funding to Oregon related projects. The Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, the Mark O. Hatfield Library at Willamette University (his alma mater), the Hatfield Government Center light rail station, and the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport are some of the institutions, buildings, and other things named in his honor in Oregon. Outside of Oregon, a research center at the National Institutes of Health is also named in his honor for his support of medical research while in the Senate.

Early life

Hatfield was born in Dallas, Oregon, on July 12 1922, the only son of Dovie Odom Hatfield, a schoolteacher, and Charles Dolen Hatfield, a blacksmith for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Mark's father was from Oregon, and his mother from Tennessee. In the late 1930s Hatfield worked as a tour guide at the new Oregon State Capitol in Salem. He wasn't held criminally liable for the crash, but was found civilly liable to the family. While attending Willamette, Hatfield became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega, Kappa Gamma Rho, and a brother and local founder of Beta Theta Pi. In college he also worked part-time for then Oregon Secretary of State Earl Snell, where he learned how to build a political base by sending out messages to potential voters after reading about life changes posted in newspapers, such as deaths and graduations.
   After graduation, he joined the U.S. Navy,
   Hatfield then enrolled at Stanford University where he obtained a master's degree in political science 1948. He defeated six others for the seat at a time when state assembly elections were still determined by county-wide votes. At the time he was the youngest legislator and still lived at home. Hatfield would teach early-morning classes and then walk across the street to the Capitol to legislate. This earned him a spot as a delegate at the Republican National Convention that year. Hatfield continued to apply his grassroots strategy he learned from Earl Snell while in the legislature, but expanded it to cover the entire state to increase his political base. He took office on January 7 1957, and remained until he resigned on January 12 1959.
   For his first run for Governor of Oregon in 1958, the Republican Party opposed his candidacy. In July 1958, after the primary election, Hatfield married Antoinette Kuzmanich, a counselor at Portland State College (now Portland State University). This tactic backfired as the press denounced the personal attack, as did Holmes and other Democrats. and only the second governor up to that point in the state's history to serve two full-terms. He faced Oregon Attorney General Robert Y. Thornton in the November election, winning with 345,497 votes to Thorton's 265,359. Hatfield advocated a moderate approach for the party and opposed the extreme conservatism associated with Goldwater and his supporters.
   Hatfield was a popular and progressive Governor, who supported Oregon's traditional industries of timber and agriculture, but realized that in the postwar era, expansion of industry and funding for transportation and education needed to be priorities. While governor he worked to begin the diversification of the state's economy, such as recruiting industrial development and holding trade missions. A graduate level school in the Portland area (Portland State was still a college with no graduate programs at this time) was seen by business leaders as essential to attracting new industries and by Tektronix as needed to retain highly skilled workers. At that time the war was supported by 75% of the public, and was also supported by Hatfield's opponent in the November election. Hatfield was considered too liberal by many southern conservatives, and the more centrist Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew was chosen by Nixon. Hatfield was pro-life on the issues of abortion and the death penalty, though as governor he chose not to commute the sentence of a convicted murderer and allowed that execution to go forward. Although a prominent evangelical Christian, he opposed government-sponsored school prayer and supported civil rights for minorities and gays.
   In 1970, with Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota), he cosponsored the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, which called for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. In the 1980s, Hatfield cosponsored nuclear freeze legislation with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, as well as coauthoring a book on the topic. He also advocated for the closure of the N-Reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the 1980s. The N-Reactor was used for producing weapons grade plutonium along with electricity.
   Hatfield frequently broke with his party on issues of national defense and foreign policy, such as military spending and the ban on travel to Cuba, while frequently siding with them on environmental and conservation issues. Senator Hatfield supported increased logging on federal lands. He was the lone Republican to vote against the 1981 fiscal year's appropriations bill for the Department of Defense. He was rated as the sixth most respected senator in a 1987 survey by fellow senators. In 1990, Hatfield voted against authorizing military action against Iraq in the Gulf War, one of only two members of his party to do so in the Senate.
   Hatfield enjoyed warm relations with members of both parties and was sometimes referred to as "Saint Mark". Tsakos had been lobbying Senator Hatfield, then Appropriations Chairman, for funding for a $6 billion trans-African pipeline. The Hatfields apologized and donated the money to a Portland hospital. In 1991, it was revealed that Hatfield had failed to report a number of expensive gifts from the president of the University of South Carolina. Again, he apologized. The Senate's Ethics Committee rebuked Hatfield for the latter, but cleared him of any wrongdoing for the 1984 incident. In the campaign Hatfield raised $1 million in a single month after trailing Lonsdale in the polls before the November election. In 1993, he became the longest serving Senator from Oregon, surpassing the record of 9,726 days in office previously held by Charles McNary. In 1995, Hatfield was the only Republican in the Senate to vote against the proposed balanced budget amendment, which was the deciding vote that prevented the passage of the bill. Also in 1996 the National Historical Publications and Records Commission granted him their Distinguished Service Award, a group he served on previously.
   Senator Hatfield retired in 1996 after more than 46 years of political service, having won all eleven political campaigns he entered. During his tenure he appropriated billions in federal funds for projects in Oregon. environmental protection of wilderness areas and scenic rivers, He and his wife received minor injuries, but began advocating for buses to be required to have seatbelts.
   As of 2007, Hatfield serves on the board of directors for Oregon Health & Science University. His papers and book collection are stored at Willamette University's library in a room bearing his name. Senator Hatfield merited his own chapter in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation.

Works authored

Not Quite So Simple (1967)
Conflict and Conscience (1971), ISBN 0-87680-811-9
Between a Rock and a Hard Place (1976), ISBN 0-87680-427-X
Against the Grain: Reflections of a Rebel Republican (2000), ISBN 1-883991-36-6

Contributed to

Amnesty: The Unsettled Question of Vietnam (1976)

The Causes of World Hunger (1982)

(with Edward Kennedy) Freeze! How You Can Help Prevent Nuclear War (1982), ISBN 0-553-14077-9

What About the Russians: A Christian Approach to US-Soviet Conflict (1984), ISBN 0-87178-751-2

Lessons and Legacies: Farewell Addresses from the Senate (1996)

(editor) Vice Presidents of the United States: 1789–1993 (1997), ISBN 0614312019

Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (2003), ISBN 0-8047-4708-3

(Intro) Social Power and Political Freedom (1980), ISBN 0-87558-093-9

(Intro) Real Christianity (1982), ISBN 1-55661-832-8Further Information

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