Third-party candidate known as free-thinking
John B. Anderson, an Illinois Republican who cultivated a free-thinking reputation during his 20 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, and who mounted a serious third-party bid for the White House in 1980, died Sunday in Washington. He was 95.
His family announced the death in a statement.
After entering Congress in 1961, Anderson spent many years in lock step with Republican Party orthodoxy and was a supporter of ultraconservative Sen. Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964.
But Anderson, who had voted against many of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society economic and social programs, gradually came to embrace them. As part of his incremental political evolution, he spoke of being deeply moved while attending funerals for civil rights activists. He began to travel more widely, seeing the effects of housing discrimination and racism.
His signature legislative achievement came in April 1968, days after riots sparked by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tore through Washington. King’s death and unrest so close to the Capitol prompted Congress to take up the Fair Housing Act, which, as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, would prohibit racial discrimination in housing.
Under pressure from both parties, Anderson broke with his fellow Republicans on the House Rules Committee and cast the deciding eighth vote to send the bill to the House floor. During debate in the House, he gave a rousing speech that championed the bill and led to its passage.
The vote heralded Anderson’s arrival as a voice on national affairs. He remained a fiscal conservative but sided with liberals on social issues.
He supported the Equal Rights Amendment, freedom of choice on abortion and food-stamp programs. His reversal of support for the Vietnam War by the early 1970s and his early call for President Richard Nixon’s resignation during the Watergate scandal placed him in sharp relief against a growing conservatism in the Republican Party.
He asked the president to “spare the nation one last agony” by resigning, which Nixon did a few months later, in August 1974.
In a field including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Anderson campaigned in the Republican presidential primaries in 1980. His second-place finishes in the Massachusetts and Vermont primaries in March and his announcement of an independent bid in April drew media curiosity.
His “campaign of ideas,” as he called it, crystallized the independent movement and fired up disenchanted voters who wanted a choice other than Reagan, a former California governor who won the GOP nomination, or President Jimmy Carter.
Anderson’s best-known campaign proposal was a national 50-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax that would be used to reduce employee Social Security taxes. The federal gas tax at the time was 4 cents, and Anderson’s talk of sacrifice often irked voters who had struggled through the stagflation of the Carter years.
After his career in elective office, Anderson taught constitutional law for many years at Nova Southeastern University near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he had a home.
In the early 2000s, Anderson was president and chief executive of the World Federalist Association, now known as Citizens for Global Solutions, a group formed to promote strengthening the United Nations and forming an international court to try crimes of terrorism or genocide.