It's hard to believe I've never got around to paying my last respects in
this column to the late great Henry Hyde on his passing earlier this year -
a congressman whose ballast and bulk, stentorian voice and rhetorical
flourishes, and general pomp and circumstance made him almost a caricature
of the kind of politico who once dominated Congress.
Henry Hyde's fustian manner is very much out of style now - as it was even
during his heyday. In some ways he might have stepped out of an "Illustrated
History of Late 19th Century American Political Leaders." One almost expects
to find his portrait alongside those of forgotten but once powerful figures
like James G. Blaine and Roscoe Conkling.
By the time of his death at 83, Henry Hyde had long been something of a
curio. He was a man out of his time in many ways, which may have been just
what made him great. He was a living antique. For on the critical issues of
his day and ours, The Honorable Henry Hyde proved honorable indeed,
unwavering in his devotion to principles that have grown decidedly
unfashionable. He stood very much apart from his more sophisticated,
flexible, blow-dried contemporaries - the smooth Mitt Romneys of an earlier
time. Trimmers and triangulators all, they knew how to shift with the wind.
Why pick a side before it was clear which would be the popular one? They
were Clintonesque even before Bill Clinton.
Not that Henry Hyde didn't have his faults (who doesn't?) but, when a crisis
arose, he took his stand on principle, even if he might have to take it with
precious little company. As when he took evidence of perjury and obstruction
of justice seriously, and wound up manager of a presidential impeachment
that was bound to fail in these cynical times. ("They all do it, don't
they?") It didn't seem to matter to Henry Hyde whether his side would
prevail, only that he do his duty by his own, old-fashioned - some would say
outmoded - lights.
What touched Henry Hyde's years in Congress with greatness was the
monotonous regularity, no matter how quixotic it seemed at first, with which
he introduced what came to be called the Hyde Amendment, which forbade the
use of federal funds for abortions. When he first introduced it in 1976,
shortly after Roe v. Wade was decided, he himself was surprised when it
actually passed, for in those years many assumed that the question had been
permanently, definitively, unquestionably settled by the Supreme Court. A
gadfly like Henry Hyde was not welcome. To borrow a line from Ring Lardner:
Shut up, they explained.
He wouldn't. Session after congressional session through the '70s and '80s
and '90s, Henry Hyde came back with his pro-life amendment. The man would
not give up, just as later he would take the lead against the
semi-infanticide known as partial-birth abortion. How many lives his
unswerving stand may have saved over the years must remain a matter of
speculation - a million, two million? - but you got the idea he would have
done the same if it had been only one.
In the few years before the Hyde Amendment took effect, there had been
300,000 federally funded abortions annually. The Clinton Administration once
complained that the amendment had prevented 325,000 to 675,000 such
abortions every year. An ancient sage once said that he who saves a single
life saves a whole world. In that case, Henry Hyde saved worlds.
Some politicians are remembered not for their high office or electoral
successes but because of the improbable cause they embraced. One thinks of
John Quincy Adams, who, long after he had been secretary of state and
president of the United States, and had garnered many another honor,
returned to Congress to present anti-slavery petitions - year after year,
congressional session after session, only to see them routinely rejected.
What a bore and bother he must have seemed. Yet those were his greatest
years because they saw his greatest service to his country and to the cause
of freedom - not because he won his fight but because he fought.
So it was with Henry Hyde, who was willing to go against the rushing current
of his time no matter how long it took to reverse it. That is why, before
this year ends, I hasten to express my gratitude for a life lived in service
to life.