Delbert L. Latta (1920-2016): Iconic Congressman Stayed in Close Touch With His Home District
May 13, 2016
By: Mark Zaborney, Toledo Blade
May 13, 2016
Delbert L. Latta, a Republican congressman for 30 years known for running his office on a shoestring and keeping close contact with constituents by returning to his northwest Ohio district most weekends, died Thursday in Wood Haven Nursing Home, Bowling Green, after an extended illness. He was 96.
He had a stroke two weeks ago, according to his son, U.S. Rep. Bob Latta (R., Ohio). He said his father had lost almost all of his hearing, and the family communicated with him by writing on a white board.
Mr. Latta served during seven presidencies, from the last two years of the Eisenhower Administration through the Reagan Administration. At his retirement after 15 terms in January, 1989, he was dean of the Ohio congressional delegation, ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, and a member of the House Rules Committee.
Mr. Latta, who once placed himself “to the right of the right” in conservatism, was as steady in his fiscal prudence and staunch support for military spending as he was largely absent from the national spotlight.
There were two notable exceptions.
He and U.S. Rep. Phil Gramm of Texas — a Democrat who later became a Republican and a U.S. senator — co-sponsored legislation in 1981 to put in force President Ronald Reagan’s economic program of military spending increases, but budget cuts elsewhere.
Seven years earlier, in 1974, Mr. Latta found himself the subject of attention in the events that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives reassigned Mr. Latta — over his protests — from the House Rules Committee to the Judiciary Committee so he could be a reliable supporter of Mr. Nixon’s during impeachment hearings.
The tide of damning evidence against Mr. Nixon seemed to swell by the day. Yet Mr. Latta remained unconvinced and into the summer became one of only a handful of loyalists the president had remaining.
Finally, days before Mr. Nixon’s eventual resignation, the president released three transcripts that convinced even hardcore congressional supporters, Mr. Latta included, that Mr. Nixon was involved in the Watergate cover-up. Mr. Latta said he would vote for impeachment.
“We were just dumbfounded,” said Mr. Latta, quoted in a Time magazine retrospective of events leading to Mr. Nixon’s resignation. “We’d put our trust in the president. We felt he was telling us the truth. I think every American has that right — to put his trust in the president. It was a terrible, let-down feeling.”
When Mr. Nixon resigned, Mr. Latta said, it was “a sad, sad day.” He added, “Hopefully history will remember him as a peacemaker rather than for his personal shortcomings as recently revealed.”
Mr. Latta left the Judiciary Committee in November, 1974.
His was an overwhelmingly Republican district made up of smaller towns and rural areas, and challengers of either party never threatened him, even late in his career. He defeated Democrat James Sherck with 63 percent of the vote in 1984 and Democrat Tom Murray with 65 percent of the vote in 1986.
He was first elected to Congress in 1958 with 54 percent of the vote, succeeding 11-term U.S. Rep. Cliff Clevenger, a Republican from Bryan who retired.
A Blade news obituary on Mr. Clevenger in December, 1960, noted that he opposed increased Social Security or public housing benefits.
“It was said that he voted against anything that cost money and involved change,” the obituary said.
Mr. Clevenger, after announcing his retirement from Congress in 1958, listed some of his dislikes in testimony to an appropriations subcommittee of which he was a member. Among them were the U.S. Information Agency, reciprocal trade, relief programs abroad, and what he called “socialistic” plans to aid schools.
Mr. Clevenger’s district bordered Lake Erie, but he opposed building the St. Lawrence Seaway, calling it a “ditch” that could only mean further injury to the railroads and more business for foreign vessels.
Mr. Latta’s margins of victory were uphill, with slight variations, from there. He was re-elected with more than 67 percent of the vote in 1960. His high point was the 1966 election, in which he received more than 75 percent.
Congressional district boundaries were redrawn by the 1968 election, the result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling — often called one-man, one-vote — that required districts to be as nearly equal in population as possible.
To balance the 5th District, Mr. Latta was given a section of largely Democratic Lucas County, which meant the county had two congressional voices for the first time. Longtime U.S. Rep. Thomas Ludlow Ashley (D., Toledo) was the other.
Still, Mr. Latta that November bested Democrat Louis Richard Batzler with 71.2 percent of the vote.
His low point, unlike the Republican Party’s, was not the post-Watergate 1974 congressional elections, in which 48 Republicans lost their House seats. He won more than 62 percent of the vote that year.
His low point was the midterm congressional election in 1982, a time of recession, when he garnered just over 55 percent of the vote against Mr. Sherck, his Democratic challenger. A Democrat, Richard Celeste, was elected governor that year, even sweeping Mr. Latta’s district.
Four years later, in 1986, Mr. Latta faced opposition in the Republican primary, albeit token opposition, for the first time since 1958.
Mr. Latta didn’t coast on name recognition or the conservative cast of his district. Instead, he went home to the 5th Congressional District most weekends — by car or train at first, and later by air. His last two terms, his traveling companion often was U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), who said when he announced his retirement, “I will miss our frequent conversations on our weekly flights between Washington and Toledo.”
Back when Bowling Green had passenger rail service, Mr. Latta caught the train Sunday evening from Bowling Green. In Willard, he’d get a sleeping car. Mr. Latta once recalled that he occasionally had to drive to North Baltimore, stand on the platform and flag down a train, and then catch a connection on the main east-west line to Washington.
Still, Mr. Latta needed a sturdy vehicle. Nearly every weekend, he visited church dinners, town barbecues, social clubs, and Republican Party events, and met with constituents from one end of his district to the other.
Small groups of voters gathered in private homes, and he stopped by to visit — sometimes with younger politicians as a way to help introduce them. One car was a red Pontiac station wagon, dubbed the “War Wagon,” his son, Bob, said.
Joyce Hamilton, who kept his schedule his last 16 years in office, told The Blade in 2002 that Mr. Latta never was tempted to stay in Washington when the House was out of session. Instead, he was eager to get back to the district, even if that meant a long train trip or drive.
“He wanted to know what people were thinking at the grocery store,” Ms. Hamilton said. “He wanted to go to the barber shop. When the kids were growing up, he wanted to be involved with their events and their friends, and by that, he knew how they felt. He knew how the constituency felt. ... He was the 5th District.”
Mayors and other local officials in the district knew they could call Mr. Latta’s Washington office and get him — not an assistant, not a liaison.
In 1969, he put 34,000 miles on his car as he tended to district business and drove back and forth from Washington.
And constituents remembered, even years after he left office.
“I had a man come up to me a few weeks ago,” Mr. Latta recalled in 2002, “and tell me about how he was owed $400 from the military and couldn’t get paid. He told me about it and then he got his check.
“That’s really something when people remember that after all these years,” Mr. Latta said.
Mr. Latta consistently spent the least on office payroll and expenses of his Ohio congressional colleagues.
“I practice what I preach,” he said in 1980. “I don’t use taxpayers’ money for campaign purposes.”
Mr. Latta remained steadfast in his opposition to raising the ceiling on the national debt. It was not until 1981 that, at the request of David Stockman, President Reagan’s budget director, he voted to authorize an increase in the national debt.
He urged a funding cut of NASA in April, 1970 — less than a year after astronauts landed on the moon.
“With the many problems on Earth that urgently demand the priority attention of this country and its resources, I can’t understand why we should keep sending more and more men to the moon,” Mr. Latta said in 1970.
In 1962, he proposed a constitutional amendment to nullify the Supreme Court decision about prayer in public schools, which he said carried the doctrine of separation of church and state to a ridiculous conclusion.
The net effect of the ruling, he said, was to legally favor paganism over Christianity as the law of the land.
He received honors for his service well into retirement. In May, 2004, he received a lifetime achievement award from McComb, Ohio, where he attended high school, and the village offices were renamed the Delbert L. Latta Government Center. The next month, the Bowling Green post office was named — by act of Congress — the Delbert L. Latta Post Office Building, and at a ceremony his successor, U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor (R., Old Fort), and Miss Kaptur spoke highly of his career.
“Never did I think I’d have anything named after me,” Mr. Latta said in 2004.
Mr. Latta was born March 5, 1920, in Weston, Ohio, and was a 1938 graduate of McComb High School. From 1938-40, he attended Findlay College. He received a bachelor of law degree in 1943 and a bachelor of arts degree in 1945 from Ohio Northern University. He began to practice law in 1944 in Bowling Green.
Mr. Latta became a member of the Ohio National Guard and, in 1940, the unit was activated as part of the Army’s 37th Infantry Division. He was in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1942 and 1943.
He first was elected to the Ohio Senate in 1952 and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1958.
He retired at the end of his 15th term, announcing in January, 1988, that he would not seek re-election. He was then ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee and a member of the House Rules Committee.
Upon his retirement, he donated his congressional papers to the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University.
He was appointed in 1992 to the BGSU Board of Trustees by Gov. George Voinovich. Mr. Latta was edged out of a slot a year earlier when Mr. Voinovich instead appointed Tom Noe, even then a Republican contributor, to the board. Mr. Latta’s term expired in 2001, and he served as chairman of the board during his tenure.
He attended McComb Church of Christ for most of his life. Surviving are his wife of 67 years, Rose Mary; daughter, Rose Ellen Jackson; son, Robert; sisters Corrine Harden and Hilda Smith; five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Visitation will be from 1-5 p.m. Sunday in Deck-Hanneman Funeral Home, Bowling Green, with a Masonic service at 5 p.m. Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. Monday in the McComb Church of Christ, McComb, Ohio, with visitation after 9 a.m.
The family suggests tributes to the McComb Church of Christ or the Del Latta scholarship funds at the BGSU Foundation, Ohio Northern University, and the University of Findlay.