Clifford P. Case: New Jersey Republican Who Backed Universal Health Care

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Clifford P. Case was born in 1904 in Franklin Park, New Jersey, the eldest of six children of a Dutch Reformed minister so partisan that he canceled a newspaper subscription in 1912 when it endorsed Woodrow Wilson. After his father died in 1920, Case paid his way through Rutgers partly by playing the pipe organ in churches, earned Phi Beta Kappa, and finished Columbia Law School in 1928, the year he married Ruth Miriam Smith. He served on the Rahway Common Council and in the New Jersey General Assembly, then won a U.S. House seat in 1944, never dropping below 55 percent over five elections and outpolling Dwight Eisenhower in his district by 10,000 votes in 1952. In 1953 he resigned to lead the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic.

Running for the Senate in 1954, he pledged to vote to keep Joseph McCarthy off investigative committees. Opponents falsely tied his sister Adelaide to communist front groups, confusing her with a deceased professor of the same name, and pushed a write-in for Fred Hartley, but with support from Eisenhower and Nixon he won by just over 3,500 votes. Over 24 years he backed the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, was one of 13 Senate Republicans to vote for Medicare, and co-sponsored Ted Kennedy's 1971 Health Security Act. In 1978 he lost the Republican primary to tax cut advocate Jeffrey Bell, who then lost to Bill Bradley. Case taught at Rutgers' Eagleton Institute until his death in 1982.

• His high school yearbook predicted he would become vice president.
• Conservative groups scored his record at zero, and he described himself as a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke.
• The Case Zablocki Act of 1972 required the executive branch to report international agreements to Congress within 60 days.
• The Case Church Amendment of 1973 barred further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
• At the 1968 convention, his favorite son bid to stop Nixon collapsed when 18 New Jersey delegates defected.