Mark Hatfield: 46 Years Unbeaten and the Vote That Sank a Balanced Budget

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Mark Hatfield was born in 1922 in Dallas, Oregon, the son of a railroad blacksmith and a schoolteacher. As a teenage tour guide at the Oregon State Capitol he slipped into the governor's office, sat in the governor's chair, and wrote out a life plan: legislature, Senate, then a blank space for the presidency. In 1940, at 17, he struck and killed a six year old girl while driving his mother's car and was found civilly liable. After Willamette University he served as a Navy landing craft officer at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, walked through Hiroshima after the bombing, and saw colonial inequality in French Indochina. Elected to the Oregon House in 1950 at 28, he passed a 1953 law banning racial discrimination in public accommodations.

Hatfield became Oregon's youngest secretary of state in 1956 and governor in 1958, winning in a landslide after Senator Wayne Morse suggested he had lied about the car accident. At the 1964 Republican convention he gave the keynote and opposed Barry Goldwater's conservatism, and he was the only governor to vote against a resolution backing the Vietnam War. Elected to the Senate in 1966, he was passed over for vice president by Richard Nixon in 1968 despite Billy Graham's backing. He co-wrote the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to cut off war funding, and in 1995 he cast the deciding vote against the balanced budget amendment. He retired in 1996 after 11 campaigns and no defeats.

• He built early support by sending handwritten notes to people named in newspaper notices of births, deaths and graduations.
• As a student he drove Paul Robeson to Portland after Salem hotels refused to house him.
• He was the only senator to vote to confirm both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.
• In 1984 it emerged that his wife had been paid $55,000 by arms dealer Basil Tsakos, who was lobbying him on a pipeline project.
• As Appropriations chair he steered money to medical research, and an NIH clinical research center bears his name.