Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and leader of the 9/11 Commission, has died at the age of 94

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who wore a crew and was a leading voice on foreign affairs during three decades in Congress and helped oversee investigations into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died Tuesday. He was 94 years old.

He died peacefully at his home in Bloomington, Ind., said his son, Doug Hamilton, who also led a congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra affair for the Reagan administration while representing a rural district in southern Indiana, without giving a specific cause.

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Hamilton was at the forefront of congressional opposition to the 1991 Gulf War launched by President George H. W. Bush, and called for continued economic sanctions against Iraq before military action over its invasion of Kuwait.

He decided not to seek re-election in 1998 and said after leaving Congress that he believed the United States needed to be seen around the world as more than just a leader of military alliances.

“The United States must be—and must be seen as—an optimistic and benign power,” Hamilton said in 2003. “We must speak and act as a source of optimism, a beacon of freedom, a benign force forging a consensual approach toward a world of peace, growth, and freedom. American power must be accompanied by American generosity.”

President Barack Obama presented Hamilton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, saying during the ceremony that Hamilton was a man “widely admired” on both sides of the aisle “for his honesty, wisdom, and unwavering commitment to bipartisanship.”

9/11 investigations

Hamilton was a small-town attorney known for his exploits as a high school basketball star when he first won election to his congressional seat from southern Indiana in 1964 at the age of 33.

With his thick glasses and deliberately calm manner, Hamilton rose to become Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committee and a Democratic leader on international relations before retiring from Congress in 1999.

His reputation as a moderate moderate has led Capitol Hill leaders to turn to him on some of the most turbulent matters facing Washington. But he also faced criticism that he was not aggressive enough in pursuing accusations of wrongdoing by Republican administrations.

In 2002, Hamilton was appointed vice chairman of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks Commission. That group spent 20 months investigating the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people when 19 hijackers piloted passenger planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.

It formed a united front with the committee’s Republican chairman, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, through its clashes with the White House under George W. Bush and its lobbying efforts to introduce changes to the US intelligence system.

The committee found that the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to recognize the seriousness of terrorist threats and took measures so weak that they were unable even to slow the al-Qaeda plotters.

“The fact of the matter is we haven’t achieved that in this country,” Hamilton said when the commission released its report in 2004. “We couldn’t understand that people wanted to kill us, wanted to hijack planes and crash them into big buildings.”

Iran-Contra Committee

Hamilton gained national prominence in the mid-1980s with his selection as co-chairman of the Congressional Iran-Contra Committee, which investigated the Reagan administration’s diversion of profits from Iranian arms sales to aid Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The commission’s report found that President Ronald Reagan created an atmosphere in the White House in which his subordinates felt free to circumvent the law and the Constitution.

“There was a lot of secrecy and deception,” Hamilton said at the time. “Information was withheld from Congress, other officials, friends, allies, and the American people.”

However, Hamilton was able to garner little Republican support for the committee’s work. Then-Rep. Dick Cheney, a senior Republican on the Iran-Contra Committee, called the report a political document that selected only the most damaging evidence against the Reagan administration.

Hamilton was considered a potential running mate for both Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992, but they decided against the non-TV congressman from a Republican-leaning state.

Born on April 20, 1931, in Daytona Beach, Florida, the son of a Methodist minister moved with his family to Evansville, Indiana, when he was a child.

Hamilton went to college at DePauw University and attended Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, before graduating from Indiana University School of Law in 1956.

After Congress

After his service in Congress, Hamilton continued his interests in foreign affairs and congressional reform as Director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center. He also spent time as a faculty member at Indiana University, which in 2018 named its School of Global and International Studies after Hamilton and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who died in 2019.

Hamilton and his wife were married for 58 years after meeting while students at DePauw. Nancy Hamilton died in 2012. He is survived by three children, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Associated Press writer Isabella Vollmert contributed from Lansing, Michigan. Davis is a former Associated Press writer.