Donald W. Riegle, who represented Michigan in Congress for nearly three decades and switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democratic during the Nixon presidency, died on Friday at his home in San Diego. He was 88.
His death was caused by cardiac arrest, his family said.
Mr. Riegle was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from his native Flint, Mich., in 1966, at the age of 28, when he ran as a Republican in a traditionally Democratic district.
Brash and ambitious, he announced as a freshman congressman that he would run for president in 15 years, a prognostication that did not come to pass.
In the early 1970s, he grew increasingly disenchanted with President Richard M. Nixon over the Vietnam War and other issues, including civil rights; by 1972, he was voting with his fellow Republicans only 10 percent of the time. He switched parties the next year, saying that the Democrats, who at the time controlled both houses of Congress, were “much more the people’s party.”
He was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1976 and remained a progressive for the rest of his life, endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the self-described democratic socialist, for president in both 2016 and 2020.
Mr. Riegle declined to run for a fourth Senate term in 1994 after being tarnished in the Keating Five scandal, when he and four other senators were accused of performing favors for Charles H. Keating Jr., the chairman of a failed savings and loan association.
The Senate Ethics Committee found in 1991 that while Mr. Riegle had not technically violated Senate rules, he had given “the appearance of being improper” by seeking to influence banking regulators looking into Mr. Keating, who had sought senators’ help after making large donations to them. Mr. Keating and his associates contributed more than $78,000 to Mr. Riegle’s campaign, which he later returned.
While in office, he took a lead role in passing a 1979 bill to rescue the Chrysler Corporation from bankruptcy and was a sponsor of the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status in granting credit.
He served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1989 until he left Congress, a period that coincided with the height of the savings and loan crisis. Despite his cozy relationship with Mr. Keating, he pushed through a 1991 law giving the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation added powers to close troubled thrifts.
After hearing from several Michigan veterans of the Persian Gulf war who were ailing, Mr. Riegle called a hearing into whether U.S. troops had been exposed to chemical weapons during the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq. The Pentagon denied that Iraq had used chemical weapons in battle.
Mr. Riegle charged the military with hiding the truth. “This is such a remarkable abdication of responsibility after the fact that it takes your breath away,” he told The New York Times. In 2008, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that “gulf war illness is a real condition” affecting about one in four veterans, and was likely linked to exposure to toxic chemicals.
Donald Wayne Riegle Jr. was born on Feb. 4, 1938, in Flint, one of three children of Dorothy (Fitchett) Riegle and Donald Wayne Riegle, who owned a printing business and was a mayor of Flint in the 1950s.
Donald Jr. earned a bachelor’s degree in business and economics from the University of Michigan-Flint in 1960 and a master’s degree in finance from Michigan State University in 1961.
He worked as a financial analyst for IBM in the early 1960s and then studied for a Ph.D. in business and government at Harvard Business School. There, he met Mr. Nixon, who had come to Harvard to recruit lawyers for his New York City firm and to meet with campus Republicans.
Mr. Nixon, who had been the Republican presidential nominee in 1960 and was planning another run in 1968, encouraged Mr. Riegle to run for Congress and attended a Riegle fund-raiser in Flint in 1966.
Mr. Riegle’s marriages to Nancy Brandt and Meredith Ann White ended in divorce. In 1978, he married Lori Hansen, a Senate staff member. She survives him, along with three children from his first marriage, Donald W. Riegle III, Caethe Riegle Richardson and Laurie Riegle Dodge; two children from his third marriage, Ashley and Allison Riegle; 10 grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
After retiring from politics, Mr. Riegle worked as a corporate lobbyist in Washington.
In 1972, he published “O Congress,” a candid account, written with Trevor Armbrister, of his penultimate year as a Republican in the House. He considered himself an insurgent in the party as it swerved rightward under President Richard Nixon.
“My disagreements with the White House extend far beyond the war,” he wrote, citing “the lack of moral leadership, the economy, civil rights” and “the seeming contempt for young people.”
Mr. Riegle became a leader of the Dump Nixon movement ahead of the 1972 election. He described a meeting with his fellow Michigan representative, Gerald R. Ford, who would go on to become Mr. Nixon’s vice president during his second term and, after the president’s resignation in the wake of Watergate, his Oval Office successor.
But all of that was in the future. In 1971, Mr. Ford counseled Mr. Riegle to fall in line.
“This is the big leagues,” Mr. Ford said. “Nixon has a hundred times the number of chips you do.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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