Jay Rockefeller was the Democratic United States senator from West Virginia for 30 years, from 1985 to 2015, and the state's governor for two terms before that, from 1977 to 1985. He was John Davison Rockefeller IV — the great-grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil — and the only member of his family's political dynasty to hold office as a Democrat. He has died at his home in Washington at the age of 89, the Associated Press reports, citing Mary Stewart of the public broadcasting station WETA, where his wife, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, is president and chief executive.
The plain reality of his life is how far it ran from the one he was born into. Rockefeller was born in New York City in 1937 into one of the richest families on earth. In 1964 he arrived in Emmons, West Virginia, a remote Appalachian coal community, as an anti-poverty volunteer, and West Virginia became his life's work: he was elected to the state House of Delegates in 1966, became secretary of state in 1968, lost a first run for governor in 1972, won the office in 1976 and again in 1980, and in 1984 won the Senate seat he would hold for five terms. The AFP obituary notes that the experience of those first years in Appalachia shaped a career spent on working families — coal miners, veterans and children above all.
His work helped shape our state and left a lasting mark on the lives of generations of West Virginians. — Governor Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia
The tributes show how completely the state claimed him. Governor Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, said West Virginia had lost a man who devoted much of his life to serving the state and its people, and he ordered United States and West Virginia flags at the State Capitol and state facilities flown at half-staff through sunrise on Friday, November 13. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, the Republican who succeeded him in the Senate, posted that she was deeply saddened by the loss. The United Mine Workers of America honoured a senator who made protecting miners a central priority across his whole career.
The common-sense point of his story is the direction the money and the power flowed. A Rockefeller fortune usually buys distance from poverty; Rockefeller used the name to win office in one of America's poorest states and then spent the power on the people who had neither money nor a famous name — on children's health coverage, on miners' health benefits, on veterans.
The details that matter are the ones still standing. He helped establish the Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, which extended health coverage to millions of children from low-income families, and he was a leading Senate voice on health care for his whole tenure. He chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and the powerful Commerce Committee, and chaired Veterans' Affairs; he voted for the Iraq war authorization in 2002 and then became a fierce critic of President George W. Bush's handling of the war. He backed the Coal Act of 1992, which protected retired miners' health benefits. A Harvard graduate who studied Japanese in Tokyo before West Virginia, he announced in 2013 that he would not seek a sixth term, ending nearly half a century in public office in January 2015. He is survived by his wife Sharon and their four children — and the question his life leaves behind is the one West Virginia answered about him long ago: not what a Rockefeller was doing in a coal town, but whether anyone born to that name has ever spent it better.
Rockefeller gave his own measure of it when he announced his retirement: "Championing those most in need has been my life's calling, and I will never stop fighting to make a difference for the people who mean so much to me."