Christopher S. Bond, who was Missouri’s youngest governor and the state’s first Republican governor since 1945 when he was elected in 1972, and who went on to serve four terms in the U.S. Senate, died on Tuesday in St. Louis. He was 86.
His death was announced by Gov. Mike Kehoe, a fellow Republican. The announcement did not say where in St. Louis he died.
Mr. Bond, known as Kit, was 31 in 1970 when he was elected state auditor, defeating a 17-year incumbent. He served from 1971 to 1973, when he became governor, having been elected in November 1972 at age 33. He was the first Republican to hold that position since Forrest C. Donnell left office in 1945.
Mr. Bond was defeated for re-election, but he staged a comeback in 1980 by ousting Joseph P. Teasdale, the Democrat who had replaced him. He succeeded Thomas F. Eagleton, a Democrat, in the Senate in 1987 after Mr. Eagleton retired.
His election to a fourth term in 2004 was the seventh time that Mr. Bond won statewide office — more than any other candidate in Missouri’s history.
In 2009, he announced that he would not seek a fifth term in 2010.
“In 1973, I became Missouri’s youngest governor,” Mr. Bond, then 69, said at the time. “I do not aspire to become Missouri’s oldest senator.”
Shortly after Mr. Bond retired from the Senate, John D. Ashcroft, a Missouri Republican who served with Mr. Bond in the Senate before becoming U.S. attorney general, said: “Kit Bond put his heart, soul and life into public service — like virtually nobody I’ve ever seen. He lives it, he breathes it, he sleeps it and he awakes to it.”
Christopher Samuel Bond, who was born on March 6, 1939 in St. Louis, was a sixth-generation Missourian. His father, Arthur, had been captain of the 1924 University of Missouri Tigers football team and a Rhodes scholar who headed the export division of his father-in-law’s fire brick factory. His mother was Elizabeth (Green) Bond.
Kit was raised in Mexico, Mo., about 120 miles northwest of St. Louis. As a child he lost vision in one eye from amblyopia, or lazy eye, a condition that affects the nerves connecting the retina and the brain.
He graduated from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1956; from Princeton, with a bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, in 1960; and from the University of Virginia School of Law with a Juris Doctor degree in 1963.
He clerked for Elbert Tuttle, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Georgia; practiced law at Covington & Burling in Washington; and unsuccessfully ran for Congress from a rural House district in the northeastern part of Missouri in 1968. He was hired by John Danforth, the state attorney general, as an assistant attorney general in 1969 and promoted to head the office’s consumer protection division a year later. He was 31.
After leaving public office, Mr. Bond practiced law and served as a corporate strategy consultant.
He and his wife, Carolyn, divorced in 1994. His survivors include his son from that marriage, Sam; his second wife, Linda (Pell) Bond, a Republican fund-raiser; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Bond’s record as governor and in the Senate was generally considered moderate, although he leaned to the right on issues of the economy and national security.
As the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he staunchly supported President George W. Bush’s Iraq war and domestic security crackdowns.
He was one of only nine senators who opposed a bill to insist that Central Intelligence Agency interrogators adhere to Army standards. He said he opposed torture, but he once compared waterboarding to swimming.
Mr. Bond supported the Equal Rights Amendment but opposed same-sex marriage. He favored free trade, offshore drilling and a ban on gifts from lobbyists to members of Congress. He was also a sponsor of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which required employers with 50 or more workers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family medical emergencies, childbirth or adoption.
In 1976, as governor, he rescinded a fiat issued by Gov. Lilburn Boggs in 1838 that ordered the expulsion or extermination of all Mormons from the state.
In 2010, after curators at the Missouri State Museum discovered that what they thought was a moon rock was actually a sample of lunar dust, Mr. Bond disclosed that he had inadvertently taken the actual Apollo 17 lunar sample, worth about $5 million, when he left as governor. He returned it.
In 1998, when the Internal Revenue Service declared that a fan who caught a record-breaking home run hit by the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire — a ball estimated to be worth about $140,000 — could be responsible for paying gift tax, Mr. Bond declared, “If the I.R.S. wants to know why they are the most hated federal agency in America, they need look no further than this.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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