Former senator from Georgia was known as consensus builder
ATLANTA — Johnny Isakson, an affable Georgia Republican politician who rose from the ranks of the state Legislature to become a U.S. senator known as an effective, behind-thescenes consensus builder, died Sunday. He was 76.
Isakson died in his sleep before dawn at his home in Atlanta, his son John Isakson said. He said that although his father had Parkinson’s disease, the cause of death was not immediately apparent.
“He was a great man and I will miss him,” John Isakson said.
Johnny Isakson, whose real estate business made him a millionaire, spent more than four decades in Georgia political life. In the Senate, he was the architect of a popular tax credit for first-time homebuyers that he said would help invigorate the struggling housing market. As chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, he worked to expand programs offering more private health care choices for veterans.
Isakson’s famous motto was, “There are two types of people in this world: friends and future friends.” That approach made him exceedingly popular among colleagues.
President Joe Biden, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Isakson, said in a statement Sunday that he and the late senator “found common ground built on mutual respect for each other and the institutions that govern our nation.”
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, on Sunday referred to Isakson as “one of my very best friends in the Senate.”
“His infectious warmth and charisma, his generosity, and his integrity made Johnny one of the most admired and beloved people in the Capitol,” McConnell said in a statement.
In 2015, while gearing up to seek a third term in the Senate, Isakson disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a chronic and progressive movement disorder that had left him with a noticeably slower, shuffling gait. Soon after winning reelection in 2016, he underwent a scheduled surgery on his back to address spinal deterioration. He frequently depended on a cane or wheelchair in later years.
In August 2019, not long after fracturing four ribs in a fall at his Washington apartment, Isakson announced he would retire at year’s end with two years remaining in his term.
In a farewell Senate speech, he pleaded for bipartisanship at a time of bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats. He cited his long friendship with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat and civil rights hero, as an example of two men willing to put party aside to work on common problems.
“Let’s solve the problem and then see what happens,” Isakson said. “Most people who call people names and point fingers are people who don’t have a solution themselves.”
In his statement Sunday, Biden said, “In Johnny’s memory, let us heed the wisdom he offered upon retiring from the Senate.”
Lewis, who died last year, saluted Isakson on the House floor in 2019, saying, “We always found a way to get along and do the work the people deserve.”
Isakson’s jump to Congress came about in 1998, when U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided not to seek reelection. Isakson won a 1999 special election to fill the suburban Atlanta seat.