J. Dennis Hastert, who parlayed early success as an Illinois wrestling coach into a long political career but who saw his distinction as the longest-serving Republican speaker in the U.S. House tarnished a decade after leaving office when he was revealed to have sexually abused young members of his sports team, has died. He was 84.
An Illinois coroner, Jacquie Purcell of Kendall County, announced in a statement Monday that Mr. Hastert died at home over the weekend “due to natural causes.” Additional details were not immediately available.
Mr. Hastert was frequently called the “accidental speaker” because his political ascent to the highest levels of power owed more to chance than to overt ambition.
Nevertheless, he proved initially worthy of the speakership, guiding the House past the national trauma of a presidential impeachment and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and muscling through major pieces of President George W. Bush’s legislative agenda.
He wielded great authority while cultivating the genial identity of an uncomplicated former high school teacher and coach, even after a snowballing series of Republican scandals forced him from the speaker’s chair in 2006.
That perception was irreparably changed in 2015, when federal authorities charged Mr. Hastert, by then a well-compensated lobbyist, with seeking to hide financial transactions related to “past misconduct” and then lying about it to investigators.
What he wanted to keep secret, he eventually admitted in court, was that he had sexually abused a young man — one of several he molested decades ago.
Mr. Hastert acknowledged the abuse allegations under questioning from the judge who heard his felony guilty plea and imposed a 15-month prison sentence. The person he agreed to pay $3.5 million for his silence was identified only as “Individual A,” but another former wrestler described in court Mr. Hastert’s fondling of him in 1979.
“They looked to me, and I took advantage of them,” the former House speaker said in court.
The towering irony of Mr. Hastert’s fall was that his rise to high legislative office was cleared by his apparent moral rectitude amid a morass of sex scandals in late 1990s Washington.
Republican efforts to harness public outrage over President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky were threatened when the consensus GOP choice to succeed Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) as speaker, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-Louisiana), confessed to having dalliances of his own — leaving Mr. Hastert, a married father of two boys, to claim the gavel.
“He’s as decent a guy as you’ll ever find in Washington,” then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Florida) told the American Spectator magazine in 1999, expressing a view that would not be seriously challenged for 16 years.
As speaker, Mr. Hastert showed little desire to stand in front of cameras and microphones as a standard-bearer for his party, let alone much talent for it. He tended to squint and mumble, and he showed little taste for the political jugular in his public statements, instead preferring the frequent deployment of football metaphors and references to his years as a coach and teacher.
Mr. Hastert’s political talent was better seen in Capitol hallways and on the House floor, where he served for years as a deputy whip, corralling votes with his meaty right arm over the shoulders of reluctant colleagues.
It was also on display in closed-door meetings and private conversations, where he demonstrated an immense capacity to absorb fellow lawmakers’ gripes and suggestions and translate them into legislative action — or, in many cases, inaction.
He sought to placate the lawmakers he disappointed by spinning his decisions as the plainspoken common sense of “a kid from the cornfields of Illinois,” as he once called himself. And, most of the time, it worked.
A complete obituary will be published soon.
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