Strom Thurmond

Craig Thomas

Alan Simpson

Charles B. Rangel

Sam Nunn

Trent Lott

J. Bennett Johnston

Ernest Hollings

A native of Charleston, S.C., Fritz Hollings graduated from the Citadel in 1942. He then served in World War II as a U.S. Army officer in North Africa and Europe. He was decorated with seven campaign stars, including the Bronze Star Medal. He attended the University of South Carolina School of Law from which he graduated in 1947. The following year Hollings was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. After a term as a state representative, he was elected twice to be Speaker Pro Tempore. In 1955, he became South Carolina's lieutenant governor. Four years later, he was elected governor. In 1966, Hollings was elected to the United States Senate, and has been re-elected five times. He is the sixth-ranking senior member of the Senate and is the fifth-leading senior Democrat.

Jesse Helms

Augustus Hawkins

Mark Hatfield

Mark Hatfield is a former United States Senator from Oregon who has been a student, teacher, and practitioner of the American political system for virtually his entire life. A veteran of the Pacific Theater in World War II, Mark Hatfield has dedicated his life to preventing and ending armed conflict and improving the human condition through a lifetime of public service.

While teaching political science and serving as Dean of Students at his alma mater, Willamette University, Mark Hatfield began his political career in the Oregon Legislature in 1950. After two terms in the Oregon House of Representatives and two years in the Oregon Senate, he became the youngest Secretary of State in Oregon history in 1956 at age 34. He was elected Governor of Oregon in 1958 and came the state's first two-term governor in the Twentieth Century when he was re-elected in 1962. He has never lost an election.

In 1966, then Governor Mark Hatfield was elected to the United States Senate as an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. In August of 1993, he became the longest serving U.S. Senator from Oregon, surpassing the previous record set by Senator Charles McNary.

A deeply religious man, Hatfield has always sought peaceful resolutions to world conflicts and domestic disputes. As a Lieutenant, j.g. in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Hatfield saw battle at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and was among the first U.S. servicemen to enter Hiroshima following the atomic bombing.

His experience during the war and his compassion for life have made him an ardent proponent for nuclear disarmament. Hatfield's tireless efforts to bring an end to the proliferation of nuclear weapons culminated in 1992 with the passage of legislation he authored calling for an end to U.S. nuclear testing.

As Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Hatfield has provided for the development of major public works projects throughout Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The results of his efforts can be seen in the reforestation of millions of acres of federal forest lands, in the Portland Metropolitan area's light rail system, the new Bonneville Lock on the Columbia River, the Marine Science Center in Newport, the Oregon Health Sciences University, the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Portland State University and numerous other projects around the state.

At the national level, Senator Hatfield constantly strives to remind his colleagues of what he calls "the desperate human needs in our midst." He has consistently opposed increases in defense spending and United States military involvement abroad while focusing on improving health, education, and social services programs.

He is know as an independent legislator who votes his conscience, a trait that has earned him bipartisan respect from his colleagues. Much of his success in the Senate can be attributed to his unique ability to work across party lines to build coalitions which secure the enactment of legislation.

Senator Hatfield serves as Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He is also a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Rules Committee, the Joint Committee on the Library, and the Joint Committee on Printing.

Senator Hatfield was born on July 12, 1922, in Dallas, Oregon. He is the son of Dovie Odom Hatfield, a school teacher, and Charles D. Hatfield, a railroad construction blacksmith. He and his wife, the former Antoinette Kuzmanich, were married in 1958. They have four children and three grandchildren.

Charles Grassley

Keeping in touch with Iowans enables Sen. Chuck Grassley to bring Iowa common sense to official Washington. From the river towns along the mighty Mississippi to the farm communities nestled among the Loess Hills in Western Iowa, Chuck Grassley stays well-informed by holding open meetings in each of Iowa’s 99 counties every year. A hallmark of Grassley’s commitment to make representative government work, the senior senator from Iowa works hard to give individual Iowans a voice in Washington. Plus, from his assignments on Capitol Hill, Grassley is where he needs to be to advocate for Iowans in Congress.
The only working family farmer in the U.S. Senate, Grassley brings true grit to his congressional oversight responsibilities. Seeking a more accountable government, Grassley works to keep Washington honest. Whether it’s tracking constituent casework or going head-to-head with the Pentagon, Grassley works to make the federal government work better. He successfully led a six-year campaign to make Congress live under the same laws as the rest of the country.
Sinking his teeth into the federal government’s bureaucratic alphabet soup, Grassley has fostered reforms of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the federal agency that runs Medicare, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
Keeping a vigil against waste, fraud and abuse, Grassley also is a nine-time recipient of the Taxpayer’s Friend Award. As the second most senior member of the Senate Budget Committee, Grassley champions fiscal discipline. Involved in negotiating the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Grassley helped shepherd through Congress the first balanced federal budget since 1969.
Grassley’s tenacity has earned renown inside the Beltway and outside Washington. The Iowa senator’s tight grip on the federal purse strings has brought remarkable results for the taxpayers. Working to combat fraud against the government by defense contractors in 1986, Grassley won passage of amendments to the False Claims Act. To date, the Grassley amendments have recovered $1.8 billion to the U.S. Treasury and have helped to deter untold billions more. The Grassley provisions have become the government’s most effective weapon against health care fraud.
Honoring the memory of the American servicemen still missing from the Vietnam War, it was Chuck Grassley who in 1992 successfully challenged the U.S. government to release over a million pages of documents about those left behind as POWs and MIAs. Grassley pulled back the cloak of secrecy that had surrounded this painful chapter in American history. For the families and loved ones of those brave men, there was no stronger advocate than Iowa’s senior senator.
A farm state lawmaker, Grassley exercises his authority on the Senate Judiciary and Finance Committees to watch out for rural America’s interests. Trouble-shooting for the Midlands, Grassley continues to monitor mega-mergers and potentially anti-competitive behavior. Specifically, Grassley has asked the U.S. Justice Department to gauge disproportionate impacts that mergers in the banking, airline, chemical, seed, railway, telecommunications, and utilities industries may have on farmers, small business owners, workers, and consumers in rural America.
Grassley’s crusade to bring health care equity to rural areas helps keep small town hospitals open and brings fairness to Iowa Medicare beneficiaries and to the qualified health care professionals, including physicians assistants and nurse practitioners, who serve them.
From his position on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Grassley considers all legislation affecting tax relief for families, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and international trade.
A Butler County native, Grassley brings real life work experience to the Senate Agriculture Committee. Grassley understands the ins and outs of farming and how policy decisions from Washington impact the hardworking American farmer. Scoring a major victory for the Upper Midwest, Grassley orchestrated congressional approval to extend the ethanol program to 2007.
The farmer-senator also chairs the International Trade Subcommittee. Here, he works to open new markets for value-added Iowa products. Committed to a strong, diversified economy to keep good-paying jobs that keep young people in Iowa, Grassley advocates free and fair trade opportunities to enhance Iowa’s competitiveness in the global economy. Since 1986, Grassley has hosted hundreds of international ambassadors on a biennial tour of his home state to showcase Iowa’s people, products and places to our global trading partners.
Chuck Grassley sits in a unique position to look out for aging Americans. Elected chairman of the Senate Aging Committee in 1997, Grassley takes advantage of the committee’s broad jurisdiction to tackle issues that will improve the quality of life of older citizens. Chairman Grassley has addressed predatory home lending practices that target seniors; retirement income security, including pensions, Social Security and personal savings; home health care; America’s shortage of geriatricians; age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer; and, quality long-term care, including nursing homes. With a forward-looking eye to the largest demographic shift in America’s history, Grassley says it’s critical the nation is prepared for the retirement of 77 million baby boomers shortly after the turn of the century.
Grassley’s commitment to Iowa’s future and the next generation prompted him to launch an extensive, first-of-its-kind statewide initiative to address Iowa’s growing drug problem. Called Face It Together (F.I.T.), Grassley has solicited input from thousands of Iowans to develop a long-term statewide anti-drug strategy. As chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Grassley takes aim at money laundering, crime rings and drug trafficking that victimize America’s youth.

Barry Goldwater

Samuel J Ervin Jr

Ervin died at about 4:15 p.m. at North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he had been undergoing artificial kidney dialysis. He had been hospitalized March 30 in his home town of Morganton, N.C., for treatment of emphysema and an infected gall bladder, and developed kidney failure after undergoing gall bladder surgery there.
"The cause of death was attributed by his doctors to respiratory failure which developed during the day," a hospital spokesman said. "The kidney failure for which Mr. Ervin was admitted to the center was a significant contributing factor."

Ervin served 20 years in the U.S. Senate, beginning in 1954 at the height of the McCarthy era and ending with his retirement in December 1974, four months after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. As chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices - known more popularly as the "Ervin Committee" or the "Watergate Committee" - which was established to investigate Watergate, Ervin was a major figure in Nixon's downfall.
With his arching eyebrows and flapping jowls that signaled his moral indignation at much of the testimony before his committee, his half-country, half-courtly demeanor and his predilection for making points by quoting the Bible and Shakespeare and telling folksy stories, Ervin quickly became a hero to many.

Ervin became so popular that "Senator Sam" T-shirts and buttons appeared all over the country, but he was far from being a pop cult figure. At a time when Americans were buffeted by the Vietnam War and Watergate and increasingly distrustful of their leaders, Ervin came across as a stern father figure who wasn't confused about what was right and wrong, moral and evil, and who took for granted the moral courage to stand up for what was right.
Ironically, it was because he was a strict constitutionalist whose interpretation of a document he revered defied ideology or party lines - the sort of person Nixon professed to admire - that Ervin was the choice of then-Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) to head the special committee.

"Sam is the only man we could have selected on either side who would have the respect of the Senate as a whole," Mansfield said.

Ervin came to an uncomplicated verdict on Watergate: Nixon and his chief aides tried to pull some funny business in order to weaken the Democratic presidential ticket and enhance Nixon's chances for reelection in 1972, tried to lie about it and cover it up in violation of the law, and got caught. His remarks at the opening of his committee hearings underscored the profound seriousness with which he viewed the Watergate case.
"If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States," Ervin said. "And if these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other precious property of American citizens, but something much more valuable - their most precious heritage: the right to vote in a free election."

He said that Watergate "for the first time undertook to destroy the integrity of the process" and said its perpetrators showed "the same mentality as the Gestapo."

Not surprisingly, he rang down harsh judgments on the perpetrators. Quoting Mark Twain's injunction, "The truth is very precious; use it sparingly," Ervin said of Nixon: "He used it sparingly."
On the convictions of former attorney general John Mitchell and former White House aide John Ehrlichman for their roles in the scandal, he said: "I don't think either one of them would have recognized the Bill of Rights if they met it on the street in broad daylight under a cloudless sky."
When Nixon initially refused to let his aides testify before the committee, Ervin snapped: "Divine Right went out with the American Revolution and doesn't belong to White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great? .... I don't think we have any such thing as royalty or nobility that exempts them. ... That is not executive privilege. That is executive poppycock."

He used country humor to help bring down Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who terrorized a large proportion of the political community, including the Senate, in the early 1950s. Shortly after he arrived at the Capitol in 1954, then-Vice President Nixon appointed Ervin to a committee to study whether McCarthy should be censured, an assignment few were eager to take.
The fledgling senator helped strip away the awe in which many of his colleagues held McCarthy with a notable speech in which he said that McCarthy reminded him of the preacher who didn't like the top knots women were wearing and wanted to denounce them as being counter to the will of God, although he had trouble finding an appropriate biblical text to support his argument.
Finally, the preacher delivered a sermon entitled "Top Knot Come Down," and someone asked him his source.
The preacher cited Matthew 24:17, which reads: "Let him who is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house." Much of Ervin's colleagues' apprehension dissolved in laughter and Ervin followed up in a speech advocating that McCarthy be censured.
Ervin came by his views and expressions directly. Born in Morganton on Sept. 27, 1896, a descendant of Scots-Irish Calvinists, he began memorizing the King James version of the Bible under the tutelage of his pious mother.
His father, a fiery, flamboyant, self-taught lawyer, made Ervin the most formidable name in Burke County, N.C., and gave his son a reverence for the Constitution.
After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1917, Ervin joined the Army and was sent to France during World War I. After resigning his commission because of his dissatisfaction with his performance in combat, he won the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts for heroism as an enlisted man.
He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1922, then practiced law in Morganton; served three terms in the state Assembly, where he helped defeat a bill prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution, and served on the state Supreme Court from 1948 to 1954.

Robert Dole

American politician and United States senator (1969-1996). He was born in Russell, Kansas. Dole suffered severe wounds during World War II (1939-1945) and left the military with a disabled right arm. In 1960 he was elected as a Kansas representative to the Congress of the United States, where he opposed many of the liberal spending policies of the Democratic administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Dole was elected United States senator in 1968. Dole sometimes deviated from his strict conservatism, especially in supporting aid to feed the hungry and civil rights legislation. He married Elizabeth Hanford in 1975.

Robert Byrd

Conrad Burns

Auctioneer, broadcaster, county commissioner, football referee, livestock fieldman and Marine, Senator Conrad Burns became the first Republican in the history of Montana to be elected to a second term in November 1994. He won the election with more than 62 percent of the vote.

Burns became Montana's 19th United States Senator on January 2, 1989. In 1988, Burns defeated incumbent Senator John Melcher by a 52 to 48 percent margin, becoming only the second Republican Senator ever elected from his state. He was the only Republican challenger to defeat an incumbent that year.

Richard Bryan

Senator Richard Bryan was re-elected to a second term in the United States Senate on November 8, 1994. Senator Bryan, a native of Southern Nevada and a former two-term Governor, has pursued a challenging and demanding agenda focusing on issues that affect our nation, while protecting Nevada's interests in Congress.

For more than a decade, Bryan has been the most ardent defender of Nevadans' health and safety by opposing the federal government's plans to locate a permanent high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Recent efforts by the nuclear power industry have focused on making Nevada a so-called “interim storage” site for nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site. Senator Bryan is aggressively fighting this interim storage legislation which would actually create a de facto permanent storage and which waives almost all health, safety and environmental standards.

Since coming to the Senate in 1989, Senator Bryan has gained a national reputation as an advocate for consumers. As the former Chairman of the Senate Consumer Subcommittee, Senator Bryan was responsible for enacting laws to combat errors in the credit reporting system giving new powers to consumers to correct errors found on their credit reports and putting the burden of proof on the credit bureaus. He has also led the fight against telemarketing fraud and to improve auto safety. The Senator has also worked to ban ATM fees, and to stop “telephone slamming.”

Senator Bryan has been recognized for his efforts to balance the federal budget and cut unnecessary government programs. His record on budget cutting resulted in his being named to the Concord Coalition’s Deficit Hawk Honor Roll. Bryan also received the "Spirit of Enterprise Award" from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, given to Members of Congress who have an exceptional voting record on business issues. Bryan is an original sponsor of a Constitutional Amendment to require a balanced budget and has introduced and supported numerous budget cutting amendments on the Senate floor. He led the successful fight to cut the controversial program from NASA’s budget which sought to contact aliens in space. Bryan continues the fight to eliminate the Market Access Program, an agricultural program which provides American and foreign companies with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to advertise their products overseas.

Senator Bryan is a leading protector of the environment. He helped establish the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area and the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Senator Bryan is working to help the Las Vegas Valley better manage growth by changing the way federal lands are turned over for development. His bill, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act would require BLM lands, identified for development, be auctioned to the highest bidder, thereby ensuring taxpayers of the highest price and giving local government a greater say in development decisions. Senator Bryan established and now serves as Chairman of the Board of the Corporation for Solar Technology and Renewable Resources, which is working to bring the solar power industry to Nevada. He is also a leading advocate of protecting Nevada’s jewel in the North -- Lake Tahoe. For nearly four years Senator Bryan fought to protect the environmentally pristine Galena property located near Mount Rose.

As a member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, Senator Bryan is in a unique position to protect Nevada’s gaming industry, which employs more than 200,000 Nevadans. In recent years, the gaming industry has been under attack in Congress, culminating in the creation of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, formed by some of gaming’s most ardent foes. Bryan is also working to reform the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and crack down on illegal Indian gaming operations in several states, including California.

Senator Bryan’s position on the Senate Finance Committee has also given him a forum to help protect programs which are important to Nevada's large senior citizen population. He has worked to ensure that the Medicare system remain solvent for today’s Medicare recipients and future generations. When it was determined that the federal budget would run a surplus for the first time in 30 years, Senator Bryan joined with others in calling for the surplus to be used to protect Social Security.

Believing that long-term economic prosperity is closely tied to quality education, Senator Bryan has consistently worked to improve education in Nevada. As Governor, Richard Bryan created and chaired a commission on educational excellence. Today, as United States Senator he supports policies by the federal government that encourage educational opportunities for all children.

Senator Bryan has a long and successful career of public service in Nevada. His service began in the law enforcement field, serving as Clark County Deputy District Attorney in 1964. Senator Bryan later went on to be Clark County's first public defender. His first elected position came with the Clark Country voters sending him to the State Assembly in 1968, where he served until 1972. That year, he was elected to the State Senate.