Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509110121
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: JACKSON, MISS. LENGTH: Medium
Whitten, a Democrat who retired in 1994, died from complications of chronic cardiac and renal disease, said Drs. Keith Mansel and Michael King, his physicians at Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi in Oxford. He had been hospitalized since Monday.
``His mind stayed fine until the very end. Just his body broke down,'' said his son, Jamie Whitten Jr., a Washington lawyer.
Whitten had battled health problems since 1992, including several strokes and a recent bout with pneumonia.
A conservative Democrat, Whitten served with 11 presidents and was chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee from 1979 to 1992.
He was elected to Congress on Nov. 4, 1941, about a month before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. At his retirement, he was the last member still serving who had been in Congress when the United States entered World War II.
Whitten won re-election 26 times. On Jan. 6, 1992, he broke the record held by Georgia Democrat Carl Vinson for longest service in the House.
``I really meant to stay only three years, but I got swept up in all this,'' Whitten once said.
Critics said Whitten epitomized a system that divided federal spoils instead of improving the economic health of the nation and called him a ``pork barrel king.''
``You know what a pork barrel is? Anything you can't see from the Washington Monument, the press calls a pork barrel,'' Whitten said.
Whitten was sometimes called the ``permanent secretary of agriculture'' for his interest in farm matters. Except for 1953-55, when Republicans last controlled the House, Whitten was chairman of the Appropriations Committee's agriculture subcommittee from 1949 until 1992.
``We can leave our children all the paper money in the world, but it's what we do for our land and our people that make our real wealth,'' he said.
Even though his district in northern Mississippi was more than half black, Whitten signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto declaring that the Supreme Court's landmark desegregation case two years earlier started the United States ``on the downhill road to integration and amalgamation and ruin.''
His conservative views, mirrored in his 1966 book ``That We May Live,'' which questioned regulation of pesticides, created problems for Whitten in the early 1970s when young, liberal House Democrats sought to strip him of his jurisdictions.
He opposed Medicare, expansion of the food stamp program and nearly all anti-poverty programs, and voted against all major civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Democrats in 1978 tried to block his ascension to chairman of appropriations, but Speaker ``Tip'' O'Neill stepped in to assure the chairmanship for his poker buddy.
In return, Whitten began supporting food stamps and liberal programs backed by the Democratic Party, and fellow Democrats continued to back him as appropriations chairman until health problems interfered with his ability to run the committee.
by CNB