Hyde in winter: a grand old career in a Grand Old Party

UNLIKE many of his GOP colleagues, Henry Hyde of Illinois is leaving Capitol Hill by choice: After 32 years in the House of Representatives, this remarkable man has finally decided to call it quits. In January, a Democrat from Texas will occupy his coveted first-floor office in the Rayburn Building. "He's already been in here to measure the drapes," says Hyde. "I'm serious. He actually measured the drapes."

At the age of 82, Hyde leaves behind an impressive legacy as one of the GOP's greatest debaters and legislative champions. "You can spend a lifetime in politics and encounter only a few people of Henry's caliber," said Vice President Cheney in September, at a tribute in Washington. "He's the rare member who can bring the House to silence merely by stepping to the well. When Henry Hyde begins to speak, you don't want to miss a word. You know you're going to hear something persuasive and moving, historically literate, intellectually honest." On December 5, the entire House honored Hyde by naming a room in the Capitol after him.

Born in Chicago in 1924, Hyde grew up in an Irish-Catholic family that went to Mass on Sundays and voted for New Deal Democrats on Election Day. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he finished his undergraduate degree at Georgetown and returned to Chicago for law school at Loyola. The Cold War was heating up, and Hyde began to move away from his political roots. "To me, Republicans were a bunch of bankers, bloated bondholders, and economic royalists," he says. "At Georgetown, however, I had become concerned about Communism--and I found the response of the Democrats to be woefully inadequate. They were too close to the far left. My God, Henry Wallace was actually the vice president!"

While Hyde attended law school, the typographers at the Chicago Sun-Times went on strike. "They needed proofreaders and I got hired," he says. "I was a scab. I wish I could attribute it to high principle, but it was for the paycheck."

One of his tasks at the paper was to proofread Eleanor Roosevelt's column. "I remember how she attacked Elizabeth Bentley," says Hyde, referring to the Communist-party defector who exposed Soviet espionage in the United States and became despised for it by many liberals. In a column released in August 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt condemned "the fantastic story of this evidently neurotic lady"--a line that Hyde can still repeat, almost verbatim. "This definitely pushed me toward the Republican party," he says.

Hyde voted for Eisenhower twice, but he waited until the late 1950s before registering with the GOP. "There weren't many of us in Chicago--it was 'we few, we happy few.'" He ran for Congress in 1962 and lost, though the margin of defeat was much smaller than he and other Republicans had expected. Four years later, he ran for the state legislature and won. He eventually rose to majority leader. He says that one of the proudest accomplishments of his entire career came in Springfield, when he passed a bill requiring government officials to place public money in interest-bearing accounts.

Around this time, Hyde first came into contact with the issue that would define his career more than any other: abortion. "A colleague asked me to co-sponsor a bill to liberalize the Illinois abortion law," he says. "I had never really thought about abortion, so I read the bill and read a book: The Vanishing Right to Live, by Charlie Rice. I became convinced that abortion was an evil." Hyde helped beat back the legislation he had been asked to support.

Even then, he had no idea what role the issue would play in his life. He won election to Congress in 1974, the year after the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision. "When I got to Washington, there was absolutely nothing happening on the abortion front," he says.

That soon changed. One day during his first term, Hyde was standing in the rear of the House chamber. "I was leaning against the rail and probably smoking a cigar, which was allowed back then." Rep. Robert Bauman, a prominent pro-life Republican from Maryland, told Hyde about a measure to pay for abortions through Medicaid. "He wanted to make an effort to take it out," says Hyde. "I told him to go ahead. But then he said I should do it because he was a known quantity and the other side wouldn't see it coming from me." On a piece of paper, they scribbled an amendment to prohibit the funding. Hyde took the lead in offering and debating it. The proposal united both pro-lifers and small-government conservatives. "To my surprise, it passed," says Hyde. "We proved something that day: There was a pro-life majority in the House and it just needed to be activated."

AN ENDURING AMENDMENT

This was the birth of the Hyde Amendment. There were legal and legislative challenges, but it has remained in place ever since--and it is without question the most consequential piece of pro-life legislation ever passed by Congress. "By fairly conservative estimate, in the 30 years that it has been in effect, the Hyde Amendment has saved over 1 million human lives," says Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee. The year before the Hyde Amendment, federal funds paid for some 300,000 abortions. Afterward, this figure dropped essentially to zero. The only major revision to the law came in 1993, when Congress added rape and incest exceptions to the life-of-the-mother clause that had been in place from the start.