John Dingell was the longest-serving Dean of the US House of Representatives, who remained in the capacity from 1995 to 2015, and Dean of the Michigan congressional delegation.
47 Facts About John Dingell
2.
John Dingell was one of the final two World War II veterans to have served in Congress; the other was Texas Representative Ralph Hall, who left Congress in 2015.
3.
John Dingell was the last surviving member of the United States Congress to have served during the presidencies of Dwight D Eisenhower and John F Kennedy.
4.
John Dingell was most proud of his work on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
5.
John Dingell announced on February 24,2014, that he would not seek reelection to a 31st term in Congress.
6.
John Dingell's father was the son of Polish immigrants, and his mother had Swiss and Scots-Irish ancestry.
7.
John Dingell was on the floor of the House when President Franklin D Roosevelt gave his famous speech after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
8.
In 1944, at the age of 18, John Dingell joined the United States Army.
9.
John Dingell rose to the rank of second lieutenant and received orders to take part in the first wave of a planned invasion of Japan in November 1945; the Congressman said that President Harry S Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war saved his life.
10.
John Dingell attended Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry in 1949 and a Juris Doctor in 1952.
11.
John Dingell was a lawyer in private practice, a research assistant to US District Court judge Theodore Levin, a congressional employee, a forest ranger, and assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County until 1955.
12.
John Dingell won a full term in 1956 and was reelected 29 times, including runs in 1988 and 2006 with no Republican opponent.
13.
John Dingell's district was numbered as the 15th District from 1955 to 1965, when redistricting merged it into the Dearborn-based 16th District; in the primary that year, he defeated 16th District incumbent John Lesinski Jr.
14.
John Dingell always won re-election by double-digit margins, although the increasing conservatism of the mostly white suburbs of Detroit since the 1970s led to several serious Republican challenges in the 1990s.
15.
John Dingell was generally classified as a moderately liberal member of the Democratic Party and throughout his career he was a leading congressional supporter of organized labor, social welfare measures and traditional progressive policies.
16.
At the beginning of every Congress, John Dingell introduced a bill providing for a national health insurance system, the same bill that his father proposed while he was in Congress.
17.
John Dingell strongly supported Bill Clinton's managed-care proposal early in his administration.
18.
John Dingell worked to balance clean air legislation with the need to protect manufacturing jobs.
19.
For many years, John Dingell received an A+ rating from the NRA.
20.
John Dingell helped make firearms exempt from the 1972 Consumer Product Safety Act so that the Consumer Product Safety Commission had no authority to recall defective guns.
21.
John Dingell is an old-fashioned social Democrat who knows that most voters don't agree with his goals of a single-payer national health insurance plan but presses forward toward that goal as far as he can.
22.
On December 15,2005, on the floor of the House, John Dingell read a poem sharply critical of, among other things, Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, and the so-called "War on Christmas".
23.
On June 7,2013, John Dingell became the longest serving member of Congress, surpassing the late Senator Robert Byrd's combined House and Senate service of 20,995 days.
24.
John Dingell was well known for his approach to congressional oversight of the executive branch.
25.
John Dingell subpoenaed numerous government officials to testify before the committee and grilled them for hours.
26.
John Dingell insisted that all who testified before his committee do so under oath, thus exposing them to perjury charges if they did not tell the truth.
27.
John Dingell claimed that the committee's work led to resignations of many Environmental Protection Agency officials, and uncovered information that led to legal proceedings that sent many Food and Drug Administration officials to jail.
28.
John Dingell lost the chairmanship for the 111th Congress to Congressman Henry Waxman of California in a Democratic caucus meeting on November 20,2008.
29.
John Dingell was given the title of Chairman Emeritus in a token of appreciation of his years of service on the committee, and a portrait of him is in the House collection.
30.
John Dingell appealed the decision and the Department of Health and Human Services appeals panel dismissed the charges against Imanishi-Kari and cleared her to receive grants.
31.
From 1991 to 1995 John Dingell's staff investigated claims that Robert Gallo had used samples supplied to him by Luc Montagnier to fraudulently claim to have discovered the AIDS virus.
32.
John Dingell opposed raising mandatory automobile fuel efficiency standards, which he helped to write in the 1970s.
33.
In June 1999, John Dingell released a report in which the General Accounting Office cited concurrent design and construction was the reason for production of high levels of explosive benzene gas.
34.
In July 2007, John Dingell indicated he planned to introduce a new tax on carbon usage in order to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.
35.
John Dingell was closely tied to the automotive industry, as he represented Metro Detroit, where the Big Three automakers of General Motors, Chrysler, and the Ford Motor Company, are headquartered.
36.
John Dingell worked as a lobbyist for the corporation until they married.
37.
John Dingell had four children from his first marriage to Helen Henebry, an airline stewardess.
38.
Dingell's son Christopher D Dingell served in the Michigan State Senate and is a judge on the Michigan Third Circuit Court.
39.
In 1981, John Dingell married Deborah "Debbie" Insley, his second wife, who was 27 years his junior.
40.
In November 2014, Debbie John Dingell won the election to succeed her husband as US Representative for Michigan's 12th congressional district.
41.
John Dingell is the first non-widowed woman to immediately succeed her husband in Congress.
42.
John Dingell had surgery in 2014 to correct an abnormal heart rhythm, and the next year had surgery to install a pacemaker.
43.
On September 17,2018, John Dingell suffered an apparent heart attack and was hospitalized at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
44.
In 2018, John Dingell was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasized.
45.
John Dingell chose to forgo treatment, and entered hospice care.
46.
John Dingell died on February 7,2019, at his home in Dearborn, Michigan.
47.
John Dingell received the Walter P Reuther Humanitarian Award from Wayne State University in 2006.