Notable deaths in 2021 - Politics

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 29th of December, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: remembering those we lost in 2021.

All this week, we are looking back on the lives of those to whom we said goodbye this year.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, some of these names will be familiar to you. But we also want to tell you a few interesting life stories you may not have heard before.

REICHARD: Today we will focus on those we lost in the world of government and politics. That list includes the likes of former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and George Schulz, Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Bob Dole, and Jimmy Carter’s vice president Walter Mondale.

WORLD Radio news editor Kent Covington now picks up that list with a political figure you might not be as familiar with, but his name will forever appear in South African history books.

KENT COVINGTON: F.W. de Klerk was the seventh State President of South Africa and is often referred to as the country’s last apartheid president.

De Klerk began his career as a member of Parliament supporting apartheid. But he would later help to put an end to it.

After becoming president in 1989, he announced sweeping changes to policies that suppressed the majority black population and kept black and white citizens separate.

DE KLERK: The prohibition of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and a number subsidiary organizations is being rescinded.

And in 1990, de Klerk released anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in prison.

Three years later, de Klerk received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Mandela. And when Mandela assumed the presidency in 1994, de Klerk served as his deputy.

Behind the scenes, the two men had a complicated relationship and did not always get along, but their names will be forever inextricably linked.

De Klerk was a divisive figure, and there are darker chapters of his life story that cannot be erased. But earlier this year, he sought to make clear, once and for all, where he stood on apartheid.

DE KLERK: I without qualification apologize for the pain and the hurt and the indiginity and the damage that apartheid has done.

He died on November 11th at the age of 85.

From South Africa, we travel to Iran and then to Washington.

Ardeshir Zahedi served as Iran’s foreign minister for five years until 1971. But for most of the 70’s, Zahedi turned the Iranian Embassy into one of the hippest party spots in Washington.

Until Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the flamboyant diplomat burnished his reputation as a globetrotting socialite and something of a notorious womanizer.

He hosted lavish star-studded parties at the Embassy and rubbed elbows with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand. He was even romantically linked with Elizabeth Taylor.

But he was also good at his job. Some say he charmed leaders in Washington, including then-President Jimmy Carter into accepting assurances that there were no serious threats to the power of Iran’s shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

But Islamic revolutionaries seized power a year later, leading to the Iran Hostage Crisis at the U.S. Embassy.

AUDIO: Some 60 Americans, including our fellow citizen whom you just saw bound and blindfolded, are beginning their sixth day of captivity inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

In the years that followed, Zahedi lived in exile in Switzerland.

And he was later an outspoken critic of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. In a 2019 interview, he said sanctions have hurt the Iranian people.

ZAHEDI: They have suffered in the last so many years because of the unjust which the West has done to the Iranian.

Zahedi died on November 18th. He was 93 years old.

To Colorado now, where Democrat Dick Lamm served three terms as governor beginning in 1975. But he’s best known for a controversial accomplishment three years earlier.

Lamm was a firm believer that not all growth is good. In 1972, then a state lawmaker, Lamm led a successful effort to block funding for the 1976 Winter Olympic Games in Denver. And that remains to this day the only time an awarded host city ultimately rejected the Olympics.

Lamm prided himself on being a teller of tough truths. In a 1986 interview, he said he was not a religious person, but he studied Old Testament prophets.

LAMM: Politics needs more people telling people certain harsh realities like the Old Testament.

He often warned of fiscal dangers, things like government pensions that he said weren’t sustainable long-term. But he became well known for making sometimes controversial remarks.

He was once famously quoted as saying elderly and terminally ill people have a responsibility to die and get out of the way.

LAMM: My aging body can prevent your kids from going to college.

But he later said he was misquoted and was not referring to the sick and elderly.

LAMM: What I really said was we all have a duty to die. It was a philosophical statement.

In 1996, he made an unsuccessful White House bid as a Reform Party candidate.

Lamm died on July 29th. He was 85 years old.

To South Florida now where Democratic Congressman Alcee Hastings built a 40-plus-year career in government. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. That made him the state’s first black federal judge.

Ten years later he made history again, but in a very different way.

SENATE: The Senate will please be in order…

After the House of Representatives almost unanimously impeached him…

SENATE: The Senate will resume its consideration of the articles of impeachment against Judge Alcee L. Hastings.

Hastings became one of only a handful of impeached federal judges ever convicted by the Senate and the first sitting U.S. judge tried on criminal charges.

He was accused of soliciting a six-figure bribe from two convicted racketeers. Hastings was acquitted, but questions remained about his ethics, and a judicial panel accused him of fabricating his defense.

But voters in South Florida weren’t bothered by his impeachment and elected him to Congress in 1992.

He’s heard here on the House floor in 1998 during a debate about voting to censure then-President Bill Clinton.

HASTINGS: This House can work its will on censure and anything else. I was removed from office after being found not-guilty, and here we are talking can we censure. This House has reached the zenith of unfairness.

Hastings found himself at the center of controversy in 2011, when a former aide accused him of sexual harassment. Hastings denied the allegations and the House Ethics Committee later said it did not find credible evidence of wrongdoing.

Hastings died while still in office on April 6th at the age of 84.

But Hastings was not the only sitting member of Congress to die this year.

On February 7th, Texas Republican Congressman Ron Wright became the first sitting U.S. lawmaker to die from COVID-19.

Wright was known by colleagues as a staunch pro-life conservative. Here he is on the House floor last year promoting an amendment in support of religious liberty.

WRIGHT: Earlier this year, the Department of Labor took an important step in preserving the constitution and ensuring the civil rights of religious employers. It’s simple, faith-based groups should be on equal footing as they compete with other employers, without having to give up their sincerely held beliefs.

At the time of his death, Wright was already fighting a years-long battle with lung cancer. He was 67 years old.

And finally, we travel to Louisiana.

Governor Edwin Edwards was often referred to as a “New Deal Southern Democrat” with a firebrand populist appeal that helped him win an unprecedented four terms in office.

New Orleans political columnist Stephanie Grace said Edwards—quoting here—“was a bad boy and people loved him for it—just the ultimate rogue of a politician.”

Edwards cemented his “bad boy” reputation in 1999, when he was indicted on federal racketeering charges. Confident in his ability to charm a jury, he told reporters he would serve as his own lawyer.

EDWARDS: I’m comfortable representing myself in this case given the nature of the case.

But his campaign for an acquittal was one he did not win. The court convicted him in 2001, and he served eight years in prison.

Upon his release, he married his third wife, Trina, who was more than 50 years his junior. The couple starred in a short-lived reality TV show called The Governor’s Wife.

In 2014, Edwards attempted a political comeback with a run for Congress but came up short.

He died on July 12th at the age of 93.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kent Covington.

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