CHICAGO — Dennis Hastert, the nation’s longest-serving Republican Home speaker, who helped flip a lot of President George W. Bush’s agenda into legislation earlier than his personal political legacy was eternally fouled by allegations that he molested highschool athletes when he was a wrestling coach, died over the weekend, a coroner stated Monday. He was 84.
Hastert, who was speaker from 1999 till 2007, died of pure causes at his dwelling, in response to Kendall County Coroner Jacquie Purcell.
When he was sentenced in 2016 to greater than a yr behind bars, the previous historical past trainer turned one of many highest-ranking American politicians ever ordered to jail.
Within the late Nineties, Hastert was a little-known Illinois lawmaker with a fame for congeniality that had helped him ascend the ranks of congressional leaders. When Newt Gingrich misplaced help due to ethics violations and the GOP’s poor displaying in an election, Republicans elected Hastert to succeed him. In his first weeks on the job, he presided over the Home whereas the Senate carried out Invoice Clinton’s impeachment trial.
After the GOP reclaimed the White Home, Hastert took a lot of what Bush proposed and steered it to passage, together with large tax cuts and a measure that amounted to an enormous enlargement of prescription drug advantages — the largest change in Medicare in many years.
His legacy was abruptly thrown into doubt in 2015, when he was accused of evading banking laws as a part of a plan to pay hush cash to hide unspecified “prior misconduct.” Practically a yr later, prosecutors filed papers that described what media reviews had urged for months: Hastert’s misconduct concerned the sexual abuse of teenage boys on his wrestling crew within the small city of Yorkville, west of Chicago.
Throughout a 16-year teaching profession, he led his crew to a state championship and was named nationwide coach of the yr in 1976. However behind the accolades, prosecutors stated, Hastert sexually abused a minimum of 4 crew members from 1965 to 1981.
The individual Hastert was paying, recognized in court docket papers solely as Particular person A, stated the abuse occurred in a motel room when he was 14 on the way in which dwelling from wrestling camp. Hastert allegedly touched different wrestlers in a locker room after saying he would give them massages. Two wrestlers stated Hastert carried out intercourse acts on them.
Prosecutors additionally described a recliner the place Hastert usually sat within the locker room with a direct view of the stalls the place the boys showered.
Hastert agreed to plead responsible to evading banking legal guidelines. In all, he paid greater than $1.7 million out of $3.5 million that he had promised to Particular person A, typically in lump sums of $100,000 money.
On the sentencing listening to the place he obtained 15 months behind bars, the visibly indignant choose known as Hastert a “serial baby molester.” A former wrestler struggled along with his feelings as he informed the court docket about his “darkish secret” from adolescence.
In his personal assertion, Hastert stated he was “deeply ashamed” and admitted that he “mistreated” a few of his athletes. However he by no means referred on to sexual abuse.
The general public knew nothing about Hastert’s previous when Republicans misplaced seats within the 1998 midterm elections. Hastert confronted Gingrich about dissatisfaction within the GOP ranks, saying it was unlikely Gingrich might maintain his put up, Hastert wrote in “Speaker: Classes from 40 Years in Teaching and Politics.”
“Nicely, I am going to make them help me,” he quoted Gingrich saying of the GOP rebels. Advised that was unlikely, Gingrich requested Hastert what to do.
“Do what you need to do,” he replied. The subsequent day, Gingrich stepped down as speaker and left the Home.
Hastert’s path to the speaker’s workplace was cleared when Louisiana Rep. Bob Livingston, who was thought of a lock to switch Gingrich as speaker, resigned after acknowledging a number of extramarital affairs.
In January 1999, Hastert broke with custom by delivering his acceptance speech from the Home ground and by permitting Minority Chief Dick Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat, to briefly preside over the day’s proceedings.
“Options to issues can’t be present in a pool of bitterness,” Hastert stated in his speech. “They are often present in an surroundings wherein we belief each other’s phrase, the place we generate warmth and keenness, however the place we acknowledge that every member is equally essential to our total mission of bettering the lifetime of the American folks.”
Hastert was conscious of the non-public pitfalls of holding the highly effective place.
“You understand, on this enterprise, particularly in a job like this, you will get your head someplace the place it should not be,” Hastert stated in a 1999 interview with The Related Press. “However you come again dwelling, and also you’re dwelling. You are again the place you have all the time been, and your toes are again on the bottom.”
He was usually considered as a pleasant, even-tempered lawmaker. His wrestling expertise adopted him to Washington, with GOP colleagues usually calling him “coach.”
Hastert stated he lacked the urge for food for larger workplace.
Because the recount of the 2000 presidential election dragged on, Hastert’s aides briefed him on the chance that he would possibly grow to be appearing president within the occasion of an Electoral School impasse.
“I actually did not need to be president, momentary or in any other case,” he wrote in his e-book. However he determined that he wouldn’t move the workplace to the constitutional officer subsequent in line if an Electoral School impasse prolonged past Inauguration Day. In the long run, the Supreme Court docket’s 5-4 ruling ended the recount, and Bush moved into the White Home.
Hastert’s journey to Congress from his boyhood farm gave the impression to be the results of destiny and luck.
In 1980, he completed third in an Illinois Home main. However the incumbent turned fatally ailing, and GOP leaders selected Hastert to take his place on the November poll, the place he received in a conventional GOP stronghold.
Hastert turned a congressional candidate in 1986, when native Republican leaders put him on the first poll, changing freshman Rep. John Grotberg, who was battling most cancers. Hastert went on to beat the Democrat with 52 p.c of the vote, his smallest margin of victory in a congressional race.
In Washington, Hastert served quietly in Home management, working intently with Gingrich and then-Home Majority Whip Tom DeLay after Republicans took management in 1995. A number of years later, DeLay was the power driving Clinton’s impeachment and was just too poisonous to hunt the speaker’s chair.
Hastert’s tenure was marked by a shift of energy from committee chairmen to GOP leaders, fealty to the Bush administration and an explosion of congressional pet initiatives referred to as earmarks. Democrats fumed that he weakened the ethics course of that ensnared DeLay, who left Congress underneath a cloud of prison costs in 2006.
Hastert turned rich largely by way of a fancy internet of transactions that coincided with considered one of his personal freeway earmarks growing the worth of land he had bought in his district.
He was compelled to step down as speaker in 2007, when Democrats gained management of the Home, and he resigned his seat later that yr. In 2008, he joined the Washington lobbying agency of Dickstein Shapiro as a senior adviser, specializing in authorities legislation and technique.
Born in Aurora, Illinois, Hastert earned a bachelor’s diploma in economics from Wheaton School in 1964 and a grasp’s in training from Northern Illinois College in 1967.
In 2007, Wheaton named its newly created public coverage heart the J. Dennis Hastert Middle for Economics, Authorities and Public Coverage. After Hastert’s indictment, the varsity eliminated his identify in 2015. Different organizations deserted associations with Hastert, and his portrait was faraway from a hallway outdoors the Home chamber.
Hastert lived his whole life in Chicago’s suburbs, primarily within the Yorkville space. Whereas rising up, he helped his father with the household feed enterprise.
Survivors embody his spouse, Jean, and two grownup sons.
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Tarm and McCann are former Related Press reporters.
