Jay Rockefeller dies: six-term Democratic senator from West Virginia

Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia and a member of one of the wealthiest families in the United States, has died in his 89th year. According to Reuters, he served six terms in the Senate and became known for his fight for access to healthcare and for his support of the most vulnerable Americans.

A rich man who defended the poor

Rockefeller was born in New York. He was first elected to the Senate in 1984, having previously served two terms as governor of West Virginia. The result was an unusual combination: the heir to one of the country’s most affluent dynasties represented one of its poorest states.

In the Senate, he focused on expanding access to medical care, fighting poverty, securing healthcare guarantees for miners and supporting war veterans. He also helped create the program through which the federal government provides health coverage to millions of uninsured children.

In 2013, after six terms, Rockefeller announced that he would not seek reelection. “Protecting those who need it most has been the work of my life, and I will never stop fighting to help the people who mean so much to me,” he said at the time.

The vote for the Iraq war

Much of his career was defined by the Iraq war. In 2002, Rockefeller voted to authorize it. The administration of then-Republican President George W. Bush justified the invasion by claiming that Iraq supposedly had weapons of mass destruction — which turned out to be false — and by pointing to alleged ties between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the years that followed, Rockefeller repeatedly said he regretted his vote and criticized the war. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,” he said in 2004. In his words, the intelligence had been deliberately shaped, as had its interpretation, and the president, as is now known, was determined to go to war.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which Rockefeller himself chaired, concluded in 2008 that Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, had overstated the findings of the intelligence agencies and presented assumptions as established fact. They also failed to mention that some intelligence officers disputed those assumptions. According to the committee’s conclusion, the country was drawn into war on the basis of false arguments.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz