Former U.S. senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois, a dashing corporate executive whose meteoric political rise as a liberal Republican was later eclipsed by the sense that his potential went unfulfilled, died Sept. 17 at the Washington Home and Community Hospice in the District. He was 91.
He had Alzheimer’s disease, said Kate Kelly, the director of national publicity at the public broadcasting outlet WETA, whose president and chief executive is Sen. Percy’s daughter Sharon Percy Rockefeller.
For a time, not even the White House seemed beyond Sen. Percy’s reach. But his ambitions were foreclosed when he was narrowly defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1984, generally a landslide year for Republicans. His loss, after three terms, was a striking finish to the political career of a man once viewed as the heir apparent to the liberal Nelson Rockefeller wing of the GOP.
In today’s polarized political climate, Sen. Percy would be described as a rare breed — an unabashed liberal and skeptic about military spending and war.
After an arduous Depression-era upbringing, he advanced quickly as a young man through the ranks of Bell & Howell, a Chicago-based manufacturer of home-movie and other motion-picture equipment. At 29, he was the youngest chief executive of a major American corporation.
His rags-to-riches backstory, telegenic looks, resonant voice and prodigious Republican fundraising led many admirers, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, to conclude that he was of presidential timber.
He landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1964 — two years before he launched a successful Senate bid. Three years later, New York Times political columnist James Reston called Sen. Percy “the hottest political article in the Republican Party,” citing his industriousness on progressive causes such as housing for the poor.
From the moment he arrived in Washington in 1967, he staked out dovish positions on the Vietnam War and defense spending in general. He urged colleagues to think about the “diplomatic, psychological and economic” effect of their votes on military expenditures. Meanwhile, he called attention to substandard medical care and legal services for the nation’s elderly, an effort that culminated in his 1974 book “Growing Old in the Country of the Young.”
He repeatedly clashed with President Richard M. Nixon on foreign and domestic issues, including funding of an antiballistic-missile system and Nixon’s nomination of conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sen. Percy also spoke out aggressively on the Watergate affair.
To no one’s surprise, he landed on the president’s “enemies list,” and some Republicans even urged him to switch parties. He said he was comfortable as a loner in the otherwise clubby Senate.
“I am not the cracker-barrel type,” he told the Miami Herald in 1974. “It doesn’t come naturally for me to sit around a potbellied stove in a general store.”
If there was a moment when Sen. Percy might have realized his White House ambitions, it probably came in 1976, two years after the Watergate scandal drove Nixon from office. But he took himself out of the running when President Gerald R. Ford, who had succeeded Nixon, chose to seek a full term.
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