Johnny Isakson, a courtly Georgia Republican senator who made veterans’ legislation a cornerstone of his political legacy and who was regarded as one of the dwindling band of bipartisan dealmakers on Capitol Hill, died Dec. 19 at his home in Atlanta. He was 76.
“He was a transitional figure,” said Ross Baker, a Rutgers University congressional scholar. “He was the person who set the tone for debate, who was a facilitator rather than a legislative innovator. His bipartisan brand of politics harks back to a different era in American politics. With his leaving the Senate, a very important link to the past [has been] lost.”
Mr. Isakson, a former real estate executive and one of the wealthiest members of Congress, advanced from the Georgia state House in the 1970s to the state Senate in the 1990s, his climb mirroring the GOP’s brightening fortunes as Democratic dominance in Atlanta waned.
He was a Republican, he liked to say, “before being Republican was cool,” and in those years of his political career, when he wielded little clout, he forged the conciliatory style that would distinguish him in Washington.
After losing races for governor and U.S. senator, he plowed a small fortune into a 1999 special election to fill a U.S. House seat created by the resignation of Speaker Newt Gingrich (R). That victory catapulted him in 2004 to the U.S. Senate seat that opened following the retirement of Zell Miller (D).
With his genial, soft-sell style, Mr. Isakson stood in stark contrast with the two contentious and bombastic men he replaced in Congress. “Isakson saw the increasing diversity in the state,” Baker said, “and saw it to his political advantage to adopt much more moderate, inclusive positions.”
Over the years, Mr. Isakson became the beachhead for Democrats looking to form bipartisan coalitions on immigration and education policy. He chaired the Ethics and Veterans’ Affairs committees and became his state’s senior senator when Saxby Chambliss (R) retired in 2015.
In 2018, four years after a scandal exposed the long delays in medical care to which many veterans had been subjected, Mr. Isakson championed a multibillion-dollar expansion of the veterans’ health-care system that allowed patients greater access to private-sector health care.
Mr. Isakson said the bill, signed by President Donald Trump that year, offered “more choice and fewer barriers to care.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of the bill’s prominent opponents, said the VA Mission Act would move the veterans’ agency “too far in the direction of privatization” and slowly starve it of resources while leaving tens of thousands of positions unfilled.
A former staff sergeant in the Georgia Air National Guard, Mr. Isakson also sought to improve the backlog of VA benefit appeals. He was the lead Senate sponsor of a bill, signed by Trump in 2017, to speed a process that sometimes took years or even decades to complete.
He generally avoided divisive issues and had little inclination to posture before the news media, but Mr. Isakson was not a pushover. He flared with disapproval over the 16-day government shutdown in 2013, when arch-conservative tea party leaders tried to paralyze most government operations in an effort to defund the 2010 Affordable Care Act — legislation Mr. Isakson had opposed.
He said he wished to work with Democrats to revise rather than repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health-care measure and called the tea party approach a “dumb idea.”
During the 35-day Trump-led shutdown over border wall funding that lasted from winter 2018 into early 2019, Mr. Isakson took to the well of the Senate with uncharacteristic force. “The fact of the matter is we’re not doing a damned thing while the American people are suffering,” he said. “We’re just doing the wrong thing, punishing the wrong people, and it’s not right.”
In the latter years of his career, Mr. Isakson’s pragmatic style became unfashionable as hard-right elements increasingly gunned the engine of his party. Yet he retained the confidence of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), as well as the respect of leading Democrats, who said they valued his comity and institutional spirit.
Mr. Isakson picked his battles with Trump, whom he endorsed before the 2016 Republican National Convention, and spent his goodwill with the mercurial president on bills affecting veterans and executive-branch nominees. But he also willingly used his seniority to defend what he regarded as the boundaries of propriety when Trump made ad hominem attacks against the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), which Mr. Isakson described as “deplorable,” and when Trump did not rapidly or explicitly condemn a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
For more than a decade, Mr. Isakson held an annual barbecue in an effort to unite colleagues of all political persuasions.
“It is said that the quickest route to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” he said on the Senate floor in 2019 in his lilting Georgia drawl, while gripping his cane. “All I have had all day long is people coming by and saying: Is there anything I can do for you? So I want my constituents to know I wasn’t wasting my time eating barbecue. I was gaining good points from [fellow] members so if I need a vote I can get it. That is not any way of using influence, but it is a way of using barbecue.”
John Hardy Isakson was born in Atlanta on Dec. 28, 1944. His father, a onetime Greyhound bus driver, became a real estate salesman. The younger Isakson became the first member of his family to attend college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Georgia in 1966.
He joined his father in business before taking over the family’s Northside Realty in 1979 and building it into one of the South’s largest residential brokerage firms. Meanwhile, he began to establish his political reputation in 1976, when he won a state House seat in the same election that propelled former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, to the White House.
In 1990, then-Lt. Gov. Miller defeated him 53 to 45 percent in a general election race for governor. Six years later, Mr. Isakson took a gamble in a campaign to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Sam Nunn (D) by pitching himself as a moderate who favored abortion rights. “I trust the women of Georgia to make the right choice,” he said in TV ads that also featured his wife and daughter.
He lost a GOP primary to millionaire businessman Guy Millner, who was then defeated by decorated veteran and Georgia secretary of state Max Cleland (D) in the general election.
With his political hopes seemingly in the doldrums, Mr. Isakson received a boost from Zell Miller, by then the governor, who in late 1996 appointed him chairman of the state’s board of education. That perch helped Mr. Isakson gain name recognition as well as support from GOP establishment in time to succeed Gingrich. Once in Washington, he faced little serious opposition at the polls.
Although a reliable GOP vote, Mr. Isakson found areas of common ground with Democrats, particularly as a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Among his Democratic partners was the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), with whom he collaborated on pension legislation to aid Delta Air Lines employees as the Atlanta-based carrier navigated its bankruptcy-related restructuring.
“Senator Isakson is widely respected in the Senate, and I’ve enjoyed working with him on a range of questions from education for children to the safety of coal miners,” Kennedy told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We may not always agree on the issues, but he’s always thought them through.”
Survivors include his wife of 53 years, the former Dianne Davison; three children; and nine grandchildren.
Journalists drew comparisons between Mr. Isakson and another political animal who made a fortune in real estate. Both the senator and Trump, it was said, saw their business and political careers as testaments to the “art of the deal” but derived wildly different lessons from the experience.
In the Georgia state legislature, Mr. Isakson told the Journal-Constitution, Republicans were outnumbered eight to one, and “you didn’t walk to the table with much of an advantage in anything.”
Sometimes, he said, the positions of the two sides were so distant that it seemed they could never be bridged. “But if you can find common ground,” he continued, “you can do amazing things.”
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