Photograph by Lisa Bery U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois chairs the House Judiciary Committee, the panel responsible for half of the items in the Republicans' Contract With America, including immigration policy.

When Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley got into trouble with his constituents in Washington state last fall over the issue of term limits for congressmen, he turned to a seemingly unlikely source for political cover — Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, the patriarch of conservative Republicans.

Foley, defying Washington voters who had approved a referendum on term limits, sued, contending that such limits could be imposed by constitutional amendment only. Besides, he argued, they were unnecessary — people could remove unwanted incumbents simply by voting.

Good point, his constituents responded, and voted Foley out of office. Hyde, a 20-year incumbent who looks like an editorial cartoon of one — silky, backswept, bright white hair; substantial height and girth — opposes term limits too, and with a vehemence the genial 71-year-old generally reserves only for abortion. Last fall, two months before an election in which sitting lawmakers looked like sitting ducks, Foley asked the Illinois Republican to file a brief against term limits with the U.S. Supreme Court. Consulting no one on his staff, Hyde happily complied.

But while Foley's constituents were tossing him out of office, Hyde's conservative, suburban constituents responded to this slap at perhaps the most popular political proposal in America today by returning Hyde to Congress for the 11th straight time, with more than three-quarters of the vote.

Two months later, Hyde assumed the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, the panel that would handle fully half the items in the Contract for the House that Newt built. In the First Hundred Days, Henry Hyde sat at the center of national debates on a balanced budget amendment, tort reform, crime — and term limits, which he sent to the House floor, as per the Contract, and then energetically and eloquently opposed. Still ahead are committee debates on immigration, affirmative action,

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civil rights enforcement and a school-prayer constitutional amendment. No member of the chamber's Republican triumvirate — Speaker Newt Gingrich, Majority Leader Richard Armey, Majority Whip Tom DeLay — attended law school. Henry Hyde is the most important lawyer in the House.

Internal gyroscope
Hyde, of Bensenville, has been a fixture in Illinois politics for 28 years, with his congressional career preceded by eight years — including two as majority leader — in the Illinois House. A nationally known spokesman for conservatism, Hyde is best known for his eponymous amendment, which since his first term has barred Medicaid from funding abortions for low-income women unless their pregnancies threaten their lives or result from incest or rape.

But Henry Hyde is more than his amendment, and not so easy to pinpoint ideologically as it might seem.

"I went to him after he took up the cudgels for [abortion]. He'd done it better than it had ever been done before, and I congratulated him, but I said that the problem with taking on an issue like that is it makes for a single-issue career: You'll be known as Mr. Anti-abortion," said White House Counsel Abner Mikva, whose service in the U.S. House, from an adjoining Illinois district, overlapped with Hyde's first two terms. (President Jimmy Carter named Mikva to the federal appellate bench in 1979.) "I told him they should find someone else to handle it next time, but of course he never dropped it, and yet he's been able to become a truly broad-based legislator."

Hyde is a respected authority on international matters, having served prominently for many years on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees. In debate on the floor he's considered about the best there is. He tends to the needs of his middle-class, 92 percent white, west-suburban district with the care a Chicago committeeman brings to his ward, and he loves to read and to write — and writes well: Dozens of his witty, literate and rigorously argued opinion pieces have appeared in the nation's newspapers and political and religious magazines and journals.

And ideologically, Hyde has accomplished the improbable task of becoming known in a positive way as a politician who is simultaneously unpredictable and principled.

His conservatism is certainly unquestioned. He refers to the handful of exceptions to his abortion amendment as "loopholes" and accepts them reluctantly. He calls Oliver North an American hero for his service in Vietnam and was eagerly anticipating the election of the firebrand to the stodgy U.S. Senate in November.

But Hyde has split with conservatives, his party and even his district on numerous notable occasions, swayed by data and argument. He backed family leave legislation against President George Bush, he was an early GOP convert to the Brady Bill, he supports a proposal to let nonviolent, first-time, low-level drug offenders escape five- and 10-year mandatory federal sentences, and he was the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee last April to vote to ban assault weapons. "Our district is loaded with hunters and fishermen and, generally speaking, they're for guns," says Illinois Senate President James "Pate" Philip, whose district and Hyde's overlap and who was once Hyde's seatmate in the Illinois House.

"The thing about Henry is he has his own internal gyroscope. It's conservatism, but a thoughtful and independent conservatism," said Rep. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who sponsored the gun ban and last year chaired a House crime subcommittee on which Hyde served.

"He's very principled, and you can appeal to his principles, and if you convince him he'll take heat by taking positions that go against his party," said Mikva, whose political reputation was about as left as Hyde's is right.

Hyde considers family leave consistent with his broader concern for the state of the family. He co-sponsored legislation to give responsibility for past-due child-support collection to the IRS when he was stung by criticism that conservatives' concern for the unborn ends with birth. "I think government has its uses in our very complex society, but I agree it isn't the sole answer, and many times government can be the enemy rather than the friend," Hyde says of his political philosophy. "Abuses of government power are particularly egregious as far as I'm concerned. But I do think there are things that only the government can do and do well."

Irish-Catholic Republican
Hyde's distinctive political identity was visible during two weeks in June. First he oversaw the Grafting of controversial anti-terrorism legislation, holding three contentious committee meetings, more than for any item under the Contract, on a bill opponents from both ends of the spectrum derided as broadly unconstitutional. The next week Hyde announced the publication of his book — Forfeiting Our Property Rights: Is Your Property Safe from Seizure? published by the Libertarian Cato Institute — on prosecutorial misuse of civil asset forfeiture laws, and his introduction of legislation to make it harder for the government to seize property from suspected criminals.

"I expect to be shot at from the far left and the far right, and I take some pleasure in the equipoise," Hyde said. "A balanced attack from the extremes to me is a compliment."

His periodically iconoclastic politics may be traced in part to his past: It's surprising now, but Henry Hyde started out lean, athletic and a Chicago Democrat. "The working man and woman had to be a Democrat," said Hyde, whose father worked for the phone company collecting coins from pay phones.

Hyde's political shift 45 years ago is one that much of the nation's electorate has made over the past two decades; Hyde just got there first. His first vote was for Harry Truman and above his desk in his chairman's office hangs a picture signed, "Your friend. Newt." It shows Hyde at a podium with Newt Gingrich approaching and was taken last December just after Hyde, leading the historic GOP meeting, had formally announced that Gingrich was the new majority's choice for speaker of the House. Gingrich's inscription reads, "To Henry: The moral leader of our movement introduces the understudy. A wonderful moment."

Hyde started at Georgetown University in 1941 on a basketball scholarship, then enlisted in the Navy at the end of his freshman year. He spent 18 months at a supply depot in the

Philippines, filling his downtime reading books about communism and the Soviet Union. In March 1947, shortly before getting his history degree and returning to Chicago for law school, he met Jeanne Simpson, whom he wed that November. The couple lived in Chicago with Hyde's parents while he attended Loyola for two straight years, including summers, to make up time lost to war. Both Henry and Jeanne worked — she as a secretary, he after classes as a proofreader for the Chicago Sun-Times. After law school he tried cases with an insurance-defense firm, then opened a general practice, trial-oriented office of his own.

His disaffection with the Democrats grew during law school over what he considered the party's benign view of Stalin and godless communism and its growing fealty to unions. "I loaded freight cars when I was in high school, I did janitor work, I worked in an insurance company lugging IBM cards around in basements, I delivered eggs to grocery stores — so I recognize the indispensability of organized labor," Hyde said. "I could hardly have been called a bloated bond holder. But I was concerned about the direction the party was going."

Hyde wrote letters to the editor in response to Sidney J. Harris, a liberal Chicago Daily News columnist, and gave speeches for a group called "Democrats for Ike" before taking the plunge in 1958 and becoming an Irish-Catholic Republican. He devoured ex-communists' autobiographies (he calls Whittaker Chambers' Witness "a literary masterpiece") and William F. Buckley's new National Review, which "made conservatism respectable," taking it from "the hands of reactionary rednecks and naysayers and green-eyeshade wearers and [giving] it some intellectual and historical context."

Hyde got involved in Republican Cook County politics, ran for Congress in 1962 and lost, then won an open seat in the Illinois House in 1967. Six years later he was majority leader, a post he loved for the place it gave him at the center of debate. "He's just a masterful speaker," said John C. Hirschfeld, who served with Hyde and is now a partner in a Champaign law firm. "That place can be damn noisy, but it was never noisy when Henry spoke. He was a big man, and he sat in the middle on the main aisle, and I don't care how minuscule the issue was: When Henry spoke, you turned to listen." U.S. Rep. Richard Durbin, a Springfield Democrat, agrees. "He continues to be the premier orator on the Republican side [of the U.S. House], and he has enjoyed that distinction as long as I've been here," said Durbin.

In 1972, Republican renegades chose Hyde to challenge Speaker W. Robert Blair. Hyde lost after a dozen bruising ballots. In 1974 he succeeded his district's retiring congressman with 53 percent of the vote. Since 1978, he's beaten every opponent by at least 2-to-1.

Although Hyde attended Catholic grammar and high schools, he didn't find religion on abortion until he entered the Illinois House, when he was asked to co-sponsor a bill liberalizing the state's abortion laws. He read up on the topic and was quickly convinced that abortion took "particularly vulnerable and defenseless life." He declined to sponsor the bill, then rose to speak against it when few others did. "I got up and entered into the fray to avoid a default by vacuum, and I've never been able to [leave]," Hyde said.

In his first term in Congress, an abortion foe suggested Hyde try to cut the $50 million appropriated to Medicaid to fund perhaps 100,000 abortions: The veteran correctly felt an unknown freshman might have a better shot at sneaking the amendment through. "A whole pantheon of women [lawmakers] just went berserk when it passed," Hyde said. "Everyone was dumbfounded, because similar amendments in previous years had always lost."

In a final vote on the measure — after women's groups, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood had mobilized — Hyde's margin of victory grew. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the amendment 5-4 on June 30, 1980.

Pew lawmakers arouse as intense and starkly polar emotions as Henry Hyde: He is revered for saving the lives of many millions of babies; he is condemned for driving millions of poor women deeper into poverty.

The two sides will presumably react differently to Hyde's decision, after more than a quarter century of leadership, to reduce his role on the issue, passing the torch but protecting the flame.

"I am very emotionally committed to defending the unborn, but I also understand that it is sensible and prudent to develop other leaders in the House who have a similar commitment and are willing to express themselves on the floor and in committee," he said. "There was a time when I was almost the only one, but that has now changed, and I want to foster more participation by other people. At the same time, I will be hovering around. When I think it's appropriate, I intend to speak my piece."

Not enough fire in the belly
In March 1989 Hyde ran for Republican whip but dropped out the day of the vote when Minority Leader Robert Michel backed Ed Madigan, a genteel, fellow Illinoisan. Madigan then lost by two votes to a noisy Georgian named Newt. Hyde says he is not surprised things have since worked out as they have. "Newt did the job all of us wanted done but didn't have the talent or the guts to do. He has a constant roaring fire in the belly. I don't have that. Politics has been my life's work for 28 years, but I'm not consumed by it. It takes that drive to forge a leadership post from a minority backbench position and become the focal point of politics in Washington, eclipsing the president. That's an extraordinary achievement, and it takes somebody with a focus, with a single-mindedness and energy and drive that I couldn't begin to approach."

In late 1992 Hyde became chairman of the House GOP policy conference, the fourth-ranking post in the Republican hierarchy, placing him in the middle of the development of the party's positions, strategy and tactics. Hyde was prized for his ability to speak with equal ease to the conciliatory old-timers — Bob Michel's camp — and to the large and growing ranks of Newt's first- and second-term Turks, who disdained the Democrats and liked Hyde's vigorous conservatism. Similarly, Illinois Democratic Sen. Paul Simon says that individuals of both parties in the state's congressional delegation turn to Hyde "to ameliorate differences among us and to pull the delegation together."

Hyde gave up his policy post to take Gingrich's offer of the

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Judiciary chairmanship, a job whose personnel, administrative and legislative demands have left him little time for work with the OOP leadership or to "indulge" his love of foreign affairs. His newfound prominence as Judiciary chairman has also highlighted the unpleasant fact that Hyde is the only sitting member of Congress who is a defendant in a federal suit over a failed savings and loan.

The Resolution Trust Corp. sued Hyde in 1993 in federal court in Chicago, accusing him and 11 others of gross negligence for their role as officers or directors in a $17.2 million loss at Clyde Federal Savings and Loan Association, an Illinois thrift that failed in 1990. Hyde is charged in relation to a $3.7 million loss on a construction loan in Texas, the thrift's first non-Illinois loan, and not in regard to charges against other defendants concerning risky options trading. His motion to get himself dismissed is pending. Hyde served on the board as a $330-per-month director from December 1981 until July 1984. He says he took his duties seriously, and that he voted for the Texas loan at the recommendation of the thrift's various financial advisers.

Given that the charge is gross negligence, Hyde suggests something he perhaps should not: that he might not have been the best choice for the post.

"I'm not gifted at making money. I've decided it's a knack, like shooting pool. Some people have it and some don't," he said. "I live on my salary. I haven't any investments, I don't own any stock. I own a condominium in Falls Church [a Virginia suburb of D.C.I and I just bought one [in his district]."

Hyde's financial disclosure form declares only two assets: a credit union account of $100,001 to $250,000 and an IRA of $15,000 to $50,000. (Congressmen needn't declare their residences.) He got less than $5,000 in interest income and $5,578 from his General Assembly pension.

Photograph by Lisa Berg 'I'm not gifted at making money. It's a knack, like shooting pool'

Hyde also reported no liabilities, not even for his RTC defense. He is represented by William J. Harte, a leading Democratic lawyer who acted as the party's redistricting counsel in 1981 and 1991 and who has known Hyde for decades. (He calls him "the funniest guy who ever drew breath.") Hyde has received permission from the House to open a legal defense fund, by which supporters can contribute to defray his legal costs, but he hasn't opened one yet. Harte says he began keeping track of his hours last year, when informed that House rules prohibit members' receipt of significant amounts of legal services for free. Hyde subsequently gave Harte a $5,000 retainer that Harte says he has not yet depleted.

"If Henry had decided to put the same effort into the trial of lawsuits as he decided to put into his political agenda, he would have been a superstar trial lawyer," said superstar plaintiffs' lawyer Philip H. Corboy, who attended parochial schools in Evanston and Rogers Park with Hank Hyde from kindergarten until the end of high school, studied with him again at Loyola, and then tried a few cases against him. "But Henry's never been interested in money. His needs — his intellectual and philosophical and moral needs — did not require him to be a financially secure person at an early age."

Religion remains important to Hyde, who attends church weekly and casually peppers his speech with theological allusions. He says his faith grew deeper during the years his wife, Jeanne, battled ovarian cancer. She died on July 28, 1992, spending her last 28 days without food, after she tired of fighting and the couple conferred with their pastor about euthanasia and the Church.

"The monsignor said nobody has to engage in heroic methods of sustaining life," Hyde said. "Because she could only get food by [a stomach tube], it was not sinful to withdraw food from her."

Exacerbating her final months was what Hyde said the doctor flatly called medical negligence: A nurse's error during surgery caused Mrs. Hyde post-operatively to throw up stomach acid, which destroyed her esophogus. Hyde, who went on to lead this year's sweeping federal tort-reform legislation through the House, chose not to sue: The error did not cause his wife's death, he said, and she was gone and money was just money.

As his wife of 45 years declined and died, Hyde contemplated retiring. He put the thought aside not long after her funeral, at which Joseph Cardinal Bernardin and New York's John Cardinal O'Connor presided.

"When the service was over, I was just a blubbering mass, sitting there with my dark glasses on," Hyde said. "Cardinal O'Connor came right off the altar and up to me, he pointed at me and said, 'You have work to do, and we're counting on you to do it.' It was marvelous. It made me start thinking that this wasn't the end. I do have work to do. It was just the right thing to say." *

Harvey Berkman is a staff writer for The National Law Journal in Washington, D.C.