Tillie Fowler, 62, a Florida Republican who represented Jacksonville in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2001 and became one of the top-ranking women in her party, died of a brain hemorrhage March 2 at a hospital in Jacksonville.
Rep. Fowler, a champion of increased defense budgets during her years in Congress, had served since her retirement on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, which aids the defense secretary on strategy and policy matters. She was appointed its chairwoman in summer 2003, succeeding Richard Perle, who stepped down amid allegations of conflicts of interest with his business ventures.
Throughout her career, Rep. Fowler was sometimes called the "Steel Magnolia" and described as a hybrid of a "Southern belle and a Marine drill sergeant."
She took these as compliments and saw her longtime friend Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) as an inspiration. She considered Dole a model of a working woman: "She doesn't have this hard edge that some women acquired along the way. . . . It's that part of her that makes her less threatening to some of the good ol' boys."
During her House career, Rep. Fowler became the vice chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, the fifth-ranking GOP leader, and served for six years as a deputy majority whip.
Fowler was called on in recent years to serve on panels investigating allegations of sexual misconduct at the U.S. Air Force Academy as well as prisoner abuse in Iraq. The academy panel, which Fowler chaired, excoriated "the highest levels of Air Force leadership" for knowing about serious sexual misconduct problems but failing to take effective action.
The Iraq panel, headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, was critical of military and civilian leadership. Schlesinger, Rep. Fowler and other panel members said in later interviews that it would be a mistake for Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign as current defense secretary.
In the House, Fowler served on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Armed Services Committee, the second a natural choice considering that the area around her district supports several naval installations.
In the late 1990s, she tried to limit American involvement in the warring Balkan region, saying she "could never look into the eyes of a mother or father or spouse or child of a soldier killed in Bosnia and say that American interests in Bosnia were worth their sacrifice."
Her conservative line on defense issues extended to race-based preferences in education, immigration, environmental and gun legislation. But a moderate side to her voting was detected on minimum wage and abortion; she once said: "As the mother of two daughters, it is horrifying to me to think of anyone's daughter having to suffer the consequences of rape or incest without recourse." Tillie Kidd Fowler was born in Milledgeville, Ga., on Dec. 23, 1942. She was the daughter of Georgia State Sen. Culver Kidd, a longtime state legislator whom she once called "a progressive good old boy, if there is such a thing."
He pushed his daughter to pursue a profession, she once told a Jacksonville reporter, because he had seen widowed women during the Depression unable to earn a living. She said her father called her naturally argumentative, and thus it was decided she should go to law school.
After graduating from Emory University and its law school in the mid-1960s, Rep. Fowler spent three years as a legislative assistant to Rep. Robert G. Stephens Jr. (D-Fla.) because no Atlanta firm would hire a female litigator, she said.
She served in the White House as general counsel in the Office of Consumer Affairs from 1970 to 1971.
Afterward, Rep. Fowler moved to Jacksonville with her new family and grew active in volunteer activities and the Junior League. Those connections created an enormous base of supporters and money during her campaigns. She also switched party affiliations because of the Republican's stated belief in "small government."
She was a member of the Jacksonville city council from 1985 to 1992. In 1989, as council president, she ordered the arrest of three black council members who walked out of a council hearing when they were denied better funding for sewage and drainage projects affecting their constituents.
With several other council members absent, Rep. Fowler called in the police because she needed a quorum to continue work on passing the budget. In the aftermath, she spent significant time repairing the public relations damage and denying her actions were racially motivated.
"Some people thought that would be the end of my career," she told the Jacksonville Times-Union in 2003. "But I wasn't thinking about my career."
She sought national office when Rep. Charles E. Bennett (D) announced his retirement in 1992. She pledged to serve only four terms, a pledge she only briefly reconsidered after a surge of negative television ads began calling her "Slick Tillie," a variation on a slur for President Bill Clinton.
In recent years, she was a Washington-based partner at the law firm of Holland & Knight and did lobbying work on behalf of the city of Jacksonville during military base realignment and closures.
Survivors include her husband, Buck Fowler of Jacksonville; and two daughters, Tillie Fowler of Washington and Elizabeth Fowler of San Francisco.
