Young politician was inspiration for film
John Varick Tunney, US politician, b New York City, June 26, 1934; m Mieke Sprengers, 1d, 2s; Kathinka Osborne, 1d; d Los Angeles, January 12, aged 83.
John Tunney, a California congressman and senator once hailed for his Kennedyesque manner and whose 1970 Senate campaign inspired the Oscarwinning film The Candidate, starring Robert Redford.
The cause of death was prostate cancer, his brother, Jay Tunney, said.
Tunney was the son of Gene Tunney, a heavyweight boxing champion of the 1920s, and was a law school classmate and close friend of the late Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy.
Standing 6-foot-3, with a shock of blond hair, Tunney was a compelling figure on the campaign trail, first winning election to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1964. After three terms representing a district south of Los Angeles, he ran for the Senate in 1970, defeating Republican incumbent George Murphy. At 36, Tunney was the youngest member of the Senate at the time and seemed to have a golden political future.
In 1972, one of his campaign workers, Michael Ritchie, directed The Candidate, a dark comedy about a California Senate election in which Redford played a longshot candidate running against an aging incumbent. The film’s screenplay, by Jeremy Larner — a former campaign worker with 1968 presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy — won an Academy Award.
During his six years in the Senate, Tunney was unusually active for a freshman lawmaker, sponsoring more than three dozen bills that were enacted into law. He helped lead efforts for antitrust reform and was a primary sponsor of the Noise Pollution Control Act of 1972. In 1975, he helped expand the Voting Rights Act.
Tunney was seen as a possible vice-presidential contender in 1972 and had a liberal voting record that included opposition to the Vietnam War and support for abortion rights and gun control. Yet when he ran for re-election in
1976, he was challenged from the left in the California Democratic primary by Tom Hayden, a onetime student activist and the husband of actress Jane Fonda.
Tunney prevailed, but in the general election he faced a political newcomer, S. I. Hayakawa, a
70-year-old former college president. Hayakawa won a narrow victory with support from conservative voters who applauded the way he stood up to campus demonstrators at San Francisco State University.
Tunney returned to California to practice law and never ran for elective office again.
John Varick Tunney was born June 26, 1934, in New York City and grew up on an estate near Stamford, Connecticut. He studied anthropology at Yale University, graduating in 1956. He then attended law school at the University of Virginia, where he met Kennedy on the first day of class.
They were room-mates in their second and third years and won a law-school moot-court competition together. Tunney received his law degree in 1959 and later served in the Air Force Judge Advocate General Corps.
Tunney, who grew up as a Republican, developed an interest in politics while working on Kennedy family campaigns and changed his party affiliation to Democrat.
His first marriage, to Mieke Sprengers, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 40 years, the former Kathinka Osborne of Los Angeles; three children from his first marriage; a daughter from his second marriage; two stepchildren; a brother; and two grandchildren.
Tunney remained close to Kennedy, who died in 2009, and occasionally spoke out against what he considered the deteriorating quality of political discourse in recent decades.
He said he was proud of putting principle ahead of political expediency, including stances against guns.
‘‘I knew it was politically unpopular but I didn’t care,’’ he said. ‘‘I said to myself, I’m never going to vote for a bill that I think would allow again a guy like Bobby Kennedy to be assassinated.’’
— The Washington Post.