The oldest living former member of Congress, Ken Hechler, celebrated his 100th birthday Saturday. The Charleston Daily Mail has the story. Hechler is quite a colorful character. He grew up in an affluent Long Island suburb, graduated from Swarthmore College and Columbia University in the 1930s. He served in the Army in World War II and was part of the division that captured the intact bridge across the Rhine in Remagen, Germany, and wrote about that in The Bridge at Remagen, a book published in 1957. He served on the staff of President Harry Truman and, while director of research at the American Political Science Association from 1953 to 1957 worked as research director for Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. At various times Hechler taught at Columbia, Barnard, Princeton; in 1957 he secured a position at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. You may not have heard of this school, the alma mater of West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, who was forced to drop out for lack of funds after getting excellent grades but who was finally awarded an A.B. there in 1994.
Why did Hechler decide to teach at Marshall? Over the years he has both encouraged and discouraged the belief that, after serving as a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson in 1956, he searched the country for a congressional district currently represented by a Republican which would probably go Democratic in 1958 and remain safely Democratic for many years afterwards. The district in question was the 4th district of West Virginia (which then had six House districts; it now has three), which in the 1956 Eisenhower landslide elected Republican Will Neal by a 53 to 47 percent margin over Democrat M.G. Burnside. Huntington, the home of Marshall, is and was the largest city in the district, and tended to lean Republican; the coal counties to the south and east leaned Democratic. Hechler won the seat by beating Neal 51 to 49 percent in 1958 and was re-elected by larger margins in 1960, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1972 and 1974. In 1972, redistricting forced him into a primary against a fellow incumbent, Democrat James Kee, who was preceded in the district by his father (first elected in 1932) and mother. Hechler won by a solid margin.
Over the years Hechler has taken stands against positions supported by the coal industry, from looking askance at strip mining in the early 1970s to opposing mountaintop mining (more or less the same thing) in the early 2010s. In 1976 he ran for governor and finished third in the Democratic primary, with 13 percent of the vote, behind Jay Rockefeller (who had 49.6 percent, just under 50 percent, but won the nomination because West Virginia does not have a runoff) and James Sprouse (29 percent). After a period out of public office, Hechler was elected West Virginia secretary of state in 1984, at age 70, and re-elected in 1988, 1992 and 1996. In 2000 he ran for Congress again, but lost the Democratic primary; in 2004, at 90, he lost a race for secretary of state to Republican Betty Ireland; in 2010 he ran in the special Senate primary to replace Byrd and lost to Gov. Joe Manchin by a 73 to 17 percent margin.
West Virginia politics has not been going Hechler’s way lately: Manchin is not his kind of Democrat and the other Senate seat is about to be won by Republican Shelley Moore Capito. Republicans hold two of West Virginia’s House seats and are threatening the tenure of the lone Democrat, Nick Joe Rahall, who was first elected in 1976 in the district represented for the preceding 18 years by Hechler. But to judge from the Charleston Daily Mail’s account, Hechler remains undaunted and cheerful, so let’s wish the oldest living member of Congress a happy 100th birthday.
