43 Facts About Edward Brooke

1.

Edward William Brooke III was an American lawyer and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1967 to 1979.

2.

Edward Brooke served as attorney general for four years, before running for Senate in 1966.

3.

Edward Brooke co-wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited housing discrimination.

4.

Edward Brooke was re-elected to a second term in 1972, after defeating attorney John Droney.

5.

Edward Brooke became a prominent critic of Republican President Richard Nixon, and was the first Senate Republican to call for Nixon's resignation in light of the Watergate scandal.

6.

Edward Brooke died in 2015, at his home in Coral Gables, Florida, at the age of 95.

7.

Edward William Brooke III was born on October 26,1919, in Washington, DC, to a middle-class black family.

8.

Edward Brooke was raised in a racially segregated environment that was "insulated from the harsh realities of the Deep South", with Edward Brooke rarely interacting with the white community.

9.

Edward Brooke graduated from university in 1941, with a bachelor of science degree, and enlisted in the United States Army immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

10.

Edward Brooke reasoned that "race had not mattered during our courtship in Italy, and therefore it should not have mattered in the United States".

11.

Edward Brooke declined offers to join established law firms, instead opening his own law practice in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

12.

Edward Brooke began his foray in politics in 1950, when, at the urging of friends from his former army unit, Edward Brooke ran for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

13.

Edward Brooke won the Republican nomination, and was endorsed by the party, but lost the general election in a landslide to his Democratic opponent.

14.

In 1960, Edward Brooke ran for secretary of state; he won the Republican nomination, becoming the first black person to be nominated for statewide office in Massachusetts.

15.

Edward Brooke coordinated with local police departments on the Boston Strangler case, although the press mocked him for permitting an alleged psychic to participate in the investigation.

16.

In 1964, following the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican party's nominee for president, Edward Brooke found Goldwater's nomination offensive.

17.

Edward Brooke publicly broke with the party, and implored Republicans "not to invest in the 'pseudo-conservatism' of zealots".

18.

In 1966, Edward Brooke defeated former Governor Endicott Peabody with 1,213,473 votes to Peabody's 744,761, and served as a United States senator for two terms, from January 3,1967, to January 3,1979.

19.

In 1967, Edward Brooke was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.

20.

In 1967, Edward Brooke went to Vietnam on a three-week trip as a fact-finding mission.

21.

Edward Brooke began to favor President Johnson's "patient" approach to Vietnam as he had been convinced that "the enemy is not disposed to participate in any meaningful negotiations".

22.

Dissatisfied with the weakened enforcement provisions that emerged from the legislative process, Edward Brooke repeatedly proposed stronger provisions during his Senate career.

23.

Additionally, Edward Brooke voted in favor of the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the US Supreme Court.

24.

On June 9,1969, Brooke voted in favor of President Nixon's nomination of Warren E Burger as Chief Justice of the United States following the retirement of Earl Warren.

25.

Edward Brooke was a leader of the bipartisan coalition that defeated the Senate confirmation of Clement Haynsworth, President Nixon's nominee to the Supreme Court on November 21,1969.

26.

On December 6,1971, Brooke voted in favor of Nixon's nomination of Lewis F Powell Jr.

27.

On December 17,1975, Edward Brooke voted in favor of President Gerald Ford's nomination of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

28.

Edward Brooke repeated the recommendation in a meeting with Nixon at the White House on November 13,1973.

29.

Edward Brooke had risen to become the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee and on two powerful Appropriations subcommittees, Labor, Health and Human Services and Foreign Operations.

30.

In 1974, with Indiana senator Birch Bayh, Edward Brooke led the fight to retain Title IX, a 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which guarantees equal educational opportunity to girls and women.

31.

In 1975, with the extension and expansion of the Voting Rights Act at stake, Brooke faced senator John C Stennis in "extended debate" and won the Senate's support for the extension.

32.

Edward Brooke had an affair with broadcast journalist Barbara Walters in the 1970s.

33.

Edward Brooke went through a divorce late in his second term.

34.

Edward Brooke's finances were investigated by the Senate, and John Kerry, then a prosecutor in Middlesex County, announced an investigation into statements Brooke made in the divorce case.

35.

Prosecutors eventually determined that Edward Brooke had made false statements about his finances during the divorce, and that they were pertinent, but not material enough to have affected the outcome.

36.

Edward Brooke was not charged with a crime, but the negative publicity cost him some support in his 1978 reelection campaign, and he lost to Paul Tsongas.

37.

Edward Brooke served as chairman of the board of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

38.

In 1996, Edward Brooke became the first chairman of the World Policy Council, a think tank of Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity.

39.

In 2006 Edward Brooke served as the council's chairman emeritus and was honorary chairman at the Centennial Convention of Alpha Phi Alpha held in Washington, DC.

40.

On October 28,2009, two days after his 90th birthday, Edward Brooke was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal.

41.

On January 3,2015, Edward Brooke died at his home in Coral Gables, Florida, at the age of 95.

42.

Edward Brooke was the oldest living US senator until his death in January 2015, and the last living US senator born in the 1910s.

43.

Edward Brooke was a self-described moderate or liberal Republican, generally referred to as Rockefeller Republicans.