David L. Boren, a popular reform-minded Democrat who led Oklahoma as its governor and then represented it for three terms in the United States Senate, where he was an influential voice on national intelligence, died on Thursday at his home in Norman, Okla. He was 83.
The death was confirmed by Clark Brewster, his lawyer.
The son of an Oklahoma congressman, Mr. Boren rose from academic brilliance as a Rhodes scholar into a steppingstone political career as a state legislator (1967-75), the nation’s youngest governor (1975-79) and a member of the Senate (1979-94), where he became the longest serving chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. His Sooner eminence grew further when he served as president of the University of Oklahoma.
To dramatize his campaign for the governorship in 1974, a 5,000-strong “Boren Broomstick Brigade” converged on the Capitol in Oklahoma City as Mr. Boren vowed to “sweep out the old guard” with reforms. In his single term, he cut state income taxes, abolished inheritance taxes for spouses, pushed through anti-crime laws, improved a troubled prison system, funded public education for gifted students, and invoked so-called sunset laws to eliminate some 100 state agencies, commissions and boards.
A reliably red state today, Oklahoma was long a Democratic stronghold until recent decades.
Rising to national prominence in the Senate, Mr. Boren became a centrist, allying himself on many issues with President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, both Republicans. He championed tax cuts and campaign finance reforms to limit the influence of wealthy donors. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, from 1987 to 1993, he helped shape foreign policy and was a mentor to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
Mr. Boren was also instrumental in building bipartisan support for sanctions against South Africa over its apartheid racial laws, and in 1990 he helped secure the release of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, after 27 years in prison. Mr. Mandela went on to serve as the president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, and he and Mr. Boren became friends.
Mr. Boren resigned midway through his third Senate term to accept the presidency of the University of Oklahoma. In his long tenure there, from 1994 to 2018, he increased enrollments and the number of scholarships, introduced new academic and research programs, raised more funds for endowed professorships, expanded student housing and added classrooms.
For most of his university presidency, Mr. Boren was never far from the national political spotlight. There was talk in 2007 of a third-party presidential campaign by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, with Mr. Boren as a possible running mate. But in 2008, Mr. Boren endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president. Mr. Obama later named Mr. Boren co-chairman of the nonpartisan President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
Mr. Boren also made national headlines in 2015 by closing the campus chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest college fraternities, after a video showed white fraternity members singing a racist chant that included anti-Black slurs, a reference to lynching and vows that African Americans would never be allowed to join the campus chapter.
Mr. Boren retired as the university’s president in 2018.
Months later, in February 2019, Oklahoma news outlets reported that a former student and teaching assistant at the university, Jess Eddy, had reported to the Norman Police Department that Mr. Boren had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in a Houston hotel room in November 2010. Both were drinking alcohol, he said. They and other university personnel were in Houston for a weekend of conferences on alumni affairs, fund-raising and student recruitment.
The accuser, a University of Oklahoma graduate, was quoted as saying in multiple interviews with nondoc.com, an Oklahoma-based independent journalism website, that Mr. Boren had sexually harassed him with “touching” and “kisses” about “once or twice a semester” from 2010 to 2012. The university hired the law firm Jones Day to investigate the allegations. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation also got involved.
Nondoc.com said Mr. Eddy had acknowledged that he had called Mr. Boren and “asked him for compensation for my pain and suffering” and that he had said he regretted that call.
Robbie Burke, a lawyer for Mr. Boren, rejected the allegations. “Even though we have received no complaint, President Boren emphatically denies any inappropriate behavior or unlawful activity,” he said. “He has been a dedicated public servant for more than 50 years, and his life is an open book in Oklahoma.”
The results of the Jones Day investigation were never released, and the allegations did not lead to criminal charges or civil litigation. The episode nevertheless prompted Mr. Boren to sever his ties with the university.
David Lyle Boren was born on April 21, 1941, in Washington to Representative Lyle H. Boren and Christine (McKown) Boren. He had a younger sister, Susan. His father, who served in the House from 1937 to 1947, was a conservative Oklahoma Democrat who opposed the growth of government and what he regarded as excessive federal spending.
David grew up and attended schools in Seminole, Okla., before graduating in 1959 from Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Md. He went on to Yale University, where he majored in American history, joined the Yale Conservative Party and was president of the Yale Political Union. He graduated in 1963 near the top of his class. As a Rhodes scholar, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from the University of Oxford in 1965.
Plunging into Oklahoma politics, Mr. Boren won a seat in the state’s House of Representatives in 1966 and served four two-year terms. He earned a law degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1968; was in the Oklahoma National Guard for a decade, rising to captain in command of a supply company; and was chairman of the social sciences department at Oklahoma Baptist University, in Shawnee.
The Watergate scandal, which forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign in 1974, had permeated politics when Mr. Boren ran for governor that year, and he cast himself as a state-government reformer. He defeated the incumbent Democratic governor, David Hall, in a primary, and a Republican, James Inhofe, in the general election. (Mr. Inhofe was later elected to the House and the Senate. He died in July.)
At 33, Mr. Boren was the nation’s youngest governor when he took office in January 1975.
As governor, he reformed the state’s workers’ compensation law and fostered many improvements to Oklahoma’s correctional system, which was still reeling from a 1973 riot at the overcrowded state penitentiary at McAlester that left three dead and $20 million in damage.
He also drew wide attention during the energy crisis of the mid-1970s by calling for the nationwide deregulation of natural gas prices. President Carter named him chairman of a task force to study the problem. His actions positioned him well for his next move, up to the Senate.
Shortly after graduating from law school in 1968, Mr. Boren had married Janna Lou Little, whose father, Reuel Little, ran for governor on the American Party ticket in 1970. The couple were divorced in 1976.
In 1977, Mr. Boren married Molly W. Shi, an Oklahoma county judge. They exchanged vows at the Governor’s Mansion.
He is survived by his wife; two children from his first marriage, David Daniel Boren and Carrie Headington; and a number of grandchildren. His sister, Susan Boren-Dorman, died in 2020.
Mr. Boren’s son, who goes by the name Daniel, was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 2004 and served four terms before returning to private life.
David Boren was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1988.
As his 26-year political career drew to a close in 1994, Mr. Boren wrote an opinion article for The New York Times titled “Why I Am Leaving the Senate.” He told of his exhaustion after years of 14-hour days with little time for reflection, family relationships, personal friendships or even time to exchange ideas with fellow senators.
“I have come to believe that the revitalization of our nation will not come from Washington but from the grass roots — from those who become active in their own communities,” he wrote. “If America gets everything else right but fails to provide for the education of the next generation, we will lose our strength as a society. A reporter asked me, ‘Why would you give up power and influence to become a university president?’ My answer: At this point, I feel I can do more good at the university.”
In 2011, he published “A Letter to America,” a short book warning that the nation was in trouble because, he said, unrestrained partisanship, the corrosive influence of big money and the growing divide between the very wealthy and everyone else had virtually paralyzed the political processes.
“In truth,” he wrote, “we are in grave danger of declining as a nation.”
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