John B. Anderson, 1980 presidential candidate, 95
John B. Anderson, the former Illinois congressman whose independent 1980 presidential campaign helped propel Ronald Reagan to the White House, died Sunday at his home in Washington. He was 95.
Mr. Anderson was a Republican who became more liberal as his party shifted rightward. He received 7 percent of the vote in 1980 — enough, observers believed, to tilt the election to Reagan and help defeat President Jimmy Carter.
Boston lawyer Jeffrey Robbins recalled working with Mr. Anderson against Reagan’s re-election.
“I was privileged to travel with him, just the two of us, for 10 weeks in the fall of 1984 as he hauled himself (and me with him) from campus to campus across 30 states, a former 10-term Republican congressman campaigning for Democrat Walter Mondale in an obviously doomed effort to defeat Ronald Reagan, the popular Republican President,” Robbins said. “At age 62, preferring an evening poring through public policy monographs to shaking hands by a wide margin, this was not his idea of fun. But he was a man with a very old-fashioned sense of civic duty, and if fulfilling his duty meant carrying his own luggage onto second-tier airlines to travel to third-tier venues to make the case for what he thought was right for America, why, then, he would do it. He was the epitome of independence, and of integrity, one of a breed that was never big to begin with, and which seems to many largely gone.”
Born Feb. 15, 1922, in Rockford, Ill., Mr. Anderson was the son of Swedish immigrant grocers who belonged to the Evangelical Free Church, a conservative Swedish American sect. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1942 and served in the Army in Europe during WWII. He later received a law degree from Harvard University. Mr. Anderson practiced law in Rockford until 1952, when he joined the U.S. foreign service and met his future wife, Keke Machakos, a State Department photographer.
In 1960, he was elected to Congress. Early on, Mr. Anderson sponsored a constitutional amendment to officially declare the United States to be a Christian nation — later apologizing to Jewish leaders for it during his presidential campaign. By the late ’60s, Mr. Anderson broke with the GOP by voting for a bill to outlaw discrimination in housing, supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and backing restrictions on guns and nuclear weapons. He spoke out against the Vietnam War and was among the first Republicans to call for President Richard Nixon’s resignation during Watergate.
Mr. Anderson is survived by his wife; son John Jr.; daughters Eleanora, Diane, Karen and Susan; and 11 grandchildren.