Former Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV, the Democratic heir to America’s most famous oil fortune who spent decades expanding government healthcare from coal country, has died at 89.
The New York Post reported that John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV died Friday at his home in Washington. His family did not give a cause. He was 89.
Rockefeller represented West Virginia in the U.S. Senate for five full terms after two terms as governor. He was a great-grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and a reliable Democratic vote on health coverage, poverty programs, and later climate rules that clashed with the coal industry that still anchors his adopted state.
He arrived in impoverished rural West Virginia in the mid-1960s through a national service program, built a local political base, and stayed. Voters sent him to the state legislature, the secretary of state’s office, the governor’s mansion, and then the Senate in 1984.
Born June 18, 1937, weeks after the death of his great-grandfather, Rockefeller grew up inside one of America’s wealthiest families. Uncles included Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor and U.S. vice president; David Rockefeller, who headed Chase Manhattan Bank; and Winthrop Rockefeller, governor of Arkansas.
Jay Rockefeller graduated from Harvard, then spent 1964 to 1966 in a national service program in poor West Virginia communities. He won a state House seat in 1966 before age 30, became secretary of state in 1968, lost a governor’s race in 1972, served as a college president, and won the governorship in 1976.
In 1984 he spent millions of his own money to win the first of five six-year Senate terms. West Virginia’s other longtime Democratic powerhouse, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 at 92. Rockefeller remained the state’s senior brand-name Democrat until he chose retirement.
He married Sharon Percy Rockefeller, a public television executive. They had four children.
Rockefeller made health coverage his signature cause. He backed President Bill Clinton’s failed push for near-universal insurance in the 1990s. He helped shape the 1997 program that still funnels federal money to states for medical coverage of millions of uninsured children. He fought for President Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare overhaul and pushed, without success, for a federal public insurance option during that debate.
He also worked on benefits for coal miners and military veterans and usually defended West Virginia’s coal and steel employers in Washington. That alliance frayed in 2012, when he opposed Republican efforts to block emissions rules on coal-fired power plants and drew open anger from coal executives.
In 2013, at 75, he announced he would not seek a sixth Senate term. He framed the choice in the language he had used for decades.
Rockefeller said at the time:
"Championing those most in need has been my life’s calling, and I will never stop fighting to make a difference for the people who mean so much to me."
Rockefeller’s national profile rose with the intelligence wars after September 11, 2001. In 2002 he voted for the measure authorizing force in Iraq. The U.S.-led invasion followed in 2003. By 2004 he was telling the Charleston Gazette he regretted the vote.
He told the paper:
"If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it."
He added that “the intelligence was shaped” and “the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped,” and that President George W. Bush “was determined to go to war.”
As Senate intelligence committee chairman, Rockefeller oversaw a 2008 report that accused Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other top officials of exaggerating pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons and alleged ties to al Qaeda. The report rejected claims that Iraq might hand weapons of mass destruction to the terrorist network responsible for the 2001 attacks.
When the report landed, Rockefeller put the charge in blunt terms.
"Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises."
He had voted for the authority first. The critique came after the war was underway and the political cost was clear.
Fox News reported tributes from West Virginia figures in both parties after his death. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said she was deeply saddened and that Rockefeller “dedicated his life to serving West Virginia and our nation, leaving a lasting legacy.” Former Sen. Joe Manchin called him a mentor and friend who “showed me how to be an effective U.S. Senator and best represent our state.”
Those remembrances fit a long Senate career that also included turns chairing the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and the Veterans Affairs Committee. Rockefeller’s nearly 30 years in the chamber made him one of the most durable Democrats from a state that has since moved hard in the other direction.
He entered public life as a wealthy outsider who chose West Virginia, spent personal fortune to stay there, and left a record defined by bigger government health programs, a late break with coal regulators’ critics, and an Iraq war vote he later disowned. The fortune opened doors. The voters kept him in office. The policy fights are what remain.
Powerful families can buy a ballot line. They cannot erase the votes that follow.
