Outside the Beltway

Former Congressman And Republican Leader Bob Michel Dies At 93

Doug Mataconis · Friday, February 17, 2017 · 4 comments

Former Congressman Bob Michael, who served as House Republican Leader during a prolonged period when the party was in the minority, has died at the age of 93:

Robert H. Michel, who became the longest-serving Republican leader in the history of the House of Representatives while earning a reputation as a genial conciliator who worked with Democrats to get major legislation passed, died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 93.

His death, at a hospital there, was confirmed by his son-in-law David Norcross, who said Mr. Michel had had pneumonia and the flu.

Mr. Michel (pronounced MIKE-el), who was from Peoria, Ill., had represented his hometown district for 38 years. He lived in Washington at his death.

He led his party as minority leader in the House for 14 years, from 1981 until he retired in 1995, having decided, at 71, not to seek another term in 1994. It was one election too soon.

The ’94 midterm elections produced what was called the Republican Revolution, with the party winning control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years, capturing a majority of the nation’s governorships and dealing Bill Clinton a crushing setback only two years into his presidency.

Mr. Michel, having announced his retirement, was wistful after Election Day. “I feel like the small boy who ate his spinach and his broccoli but leaves the table before his mom brings the strawberry shortcake,” he told a Republican gathering.

In an interview for this obituary in 2008, Mr. Michel said the “most exhilarating time” in his long years in the House had been when he got President Ronald Reagan’s economic program through the House. Though Republicans had picked up seats on Mr. Reagan’s coattails in the 1980 election, they were still 26 short of a majority, and Mr. Michel had to sway enough conservative Democrats to pass tax and spending bills.

Mr. Michel freely called himself the president’s “handmaiden,” but he warned Mr. Reagan off measures that he thought could not pass. One was an administration plan in 1985 to aid right-wing counterrevolutionaries trying to oust the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Mr. Michel told the president that the measure was “dead in the water.”

He told a reporter: “I don’t serve a president well by telling him only good news. You get in trouble that way.”

For many years, he was known for getting along with Democratic leaders, golfing frequently with Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill of Massachusetts. But younger Republican House members — especially Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the assistant leader, or whip — later began challenging the Democrats constantly and complaining that Mr. Michel was too pliable.

The new breed of Republicans was not much more conservative than Mr. Michel, whose votes were judged 85 percent correct by the American Conservative Union. But they believed that the only way to win control of the House was through confrontation and denunciation.

In 1992, without warning Mr. Michel, Mr. Gingrich told reporters that he would run for House Republican leader in two years — a potential face-off that was averted by Mr. Michel’s retirement.

A triumphant Mr. Gingrich went on to become House speaker in the wake of the Republican tide of 1994. Afterward, Mr. Michel was critical of the agenda on which Republicans ran that year, which they called a “Contract With America,” saying that its proposed tax cuts and increases in military spending could deepen the budget deficit.

Mr. Michel did not get along with all Democrats. In particular, he had a difficult relationship with Jim Wright, the highly partisan House speaker from Texas who served from 1987 to 1989, when Mr. Gingrich helped force his resignation. But he got along well both with Mr. O’Neill and with Mr. Wright’s successor, Tom Foley of Washington State.

“With Tom and Tip, ye gads, we got along,” Mr. Michel said in the 2008 interview, referring to Mr. O’Neill by his nickname. “Sure, we had our doggone partisan differences; I expect that. You can’t be namby-pamby about it. But when push came to shove, or during a real nitty-gritty situation, why, I always knew that I could talk with either one of them on a simply man-to-man basis and no holds barred. And that’s a good feeling to have.”

He added, “I doubt if any of that goes on like it did in my old days.”

(…)

Robert Henry Michel was born in Peoria on March 2, 1923, the son of a French immigrant who had chosen to change the pronunciation of his surname from mee-SHELL. After attending public schools he enlisted in the Army in 1942, landed at Normandy, was wounded by machine gun fire in Germany and won two Bronze Stars along with the Purple Heart. He graduated from Bradley University in 1948.

As a congressman, he wore the ribbon designating his Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

In a statement on Friday, the elder President George Bush called Mr. Michel “a masterful legislator.”

“There were some who thought he was too easygoing with his friends across the aisle,” the statement said, “but no one accused him of being soft after the invasion of Normandy.”

Mr. Michel’s wife of 54 years, the former Corinne Woodruff, whom he met when they sang in the choir at Bradley, died in 2003.

His survivors include three sons, Scott, Bruce and Robin; a daughter, Laurie Michel; a sister, Betty Lou Riggenbach; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

While he was a conservative, Michel came from a different generation of politician, one that saw the value in cooperation and working across the aisle rather than confrontation and partisanship. Of course, given the fact that his party was in the minority for the entirety of the time that he led it in the House meant that he was required to work in a bipartisan manner in order to ensure that President Reagan’s agenda was enacted by a largely hostile Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Because of that, he was often grouped by those to his right as a ‘moderate’ Republican and, in the end, distrusted by Newt Gingrich and the group that gathered around him as the 1994 elections approached. Afterwards it was remarked that Michel would have been Speaker had he run for reelection in 1994. While that’s possible, it’s also true that Gingrich would have challenged him for that position just as he had planned to challenge him for party leadership even if the GOP had failed to take control of the House. Given the number of Gingrich loyalists that were elected in 1994, I’m not at all certain that Michel would have won that election.