Hyde in winter: a grand old career in a Grand Old Party.

UNLIKE many of his GOP colleagues, Henry Hyde of Illinois is leaving Capitol Hill by choice: After 32 years in the House of Representatives, this remarkable man has finally decided to call it quits. In January, a Democrat from Texas will occupy his coveted first-floor office in the Rayburn Building. "He's already been in here to measure the drapes," says Hyde. "I'm serious. He actually measured the drapes."

At the age of 82, Hyde leaves behind an impressive legacy as one of the GOP's greatest debaters and legislative champions. "You can spend a lifetime in politics and encounter only a few people of Henry's caliber," said Vice President Cheney in September, at a tribute in Washington. "He's the rare member who can bring the House to silence merely by stepping to the well. When Henry Hyde begins to speak, you don't want to miss a word. You know you're going to hear something persuasive and moving, historically literate, intellectually honest." On December 5, the entire House honored Hyde by naming a room in the Capitol after him.

Born in Chicago in 1924, Hyde grew up in an Irish-Catholic family that went to Mass on Sundays and voted for New Deal Democrats on Election Day. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he finished his undergraduate degree at Georgetown and returned to Chicago for law school at Loyola. The Cold War was heating up, and Hyde began to move away from his political roots. "To me, Republicans were a bunch of bankers, bloated bondholders, and economic royalists," he says. "At Georgetown, however, I had become concerned about Communism--and I found the response of the Democrats to be woefully inadequate. They were too close to the far left. My God, Henry Wallace was actually the vice president!"

While Hyde attended law school, the typographers at the Chicago Sun-Times went on strike. "They needed proofreaders and I got hired," he says. "I was a scab. I wish I could attribute it to high principle, but it was for the paycheck."

One of his tasks at the paper was to proofread Eleanor Roosevelt's column. "I remember how she attacked Elizabeth Bentley," says Hyde, referring to the Communist-party defector who exposed Soviet espionage in the United States and became despised for it by many liberals. In a column released in August 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt condemned "the fantastic story of this evidently neurotic lady"--a line that Hyde can still repeat, almost verbatim. "This definitely pushed me toward the Republican party," he says.

Hyde voted for Eisenhower twice, but he waited until the late 1950s before registering with the GOP. "There weren't many of us in Chicago--it was 'we few, we happy few.'" He ran for Congress in 1962 and lost, though the margin of defeat was much smaller than he and other Republicans had expected. Four years later, he ran for the state legislature and won. He eventually rose to majority leader. He says that one of the proudest accomplishments of his entire career came in Springfield, when he passed a bill requiring government officials to place public money in interest-bearing accounts.

Around this time, Hyde first came into contact with the issue that would define his career more than any other: abortion. "A colleague asked me to co-sponsor a bill to liberalize the Illinois abortion law," he says. "I had never really thought about abortion, so I read the bill and read a book: The Vanishing Right to Live, by Charlie Rice. I became convinced that abortion was an evil." Hyde helped beat back the legislation he had been asked to support.

Even then, he had no idea what role the issue would play in his life. He won election to Congress in 1974, the year after the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision. "When I got to Washington, there was absolutely nothing happening on the abortion front," he says.

That soon changed. One day during his first term, Hyde was standing in the rear of the House chamber. "I was leaning against the rail and probably smoking a cigar, which was allowed back then." Rep. Robert Bauman, a prominent pro-life Republican from Maryland, told Hyde about a measure to pay for abortions through Medicaid. "He wanted to make an effort to take it out," says Hyde. "I told him to go ahead. But then he said I should do it because he was a known quantity and the other side wouldn't see it coming from me." On a piece of paper, they scribbled an amendment to prohibit the funding. Hyde took the lead in offering and debating it. The proposal united both pro-lifers and small-government conservatives. "To my surprise, it passed," says Hyde. "We proved something that day: There was a pro-life majority in the House and it just needed to be activated."

AN ENDURING AMENDMENT

This was the birth of the Hyde Amendment. There were legal and legislative challenges, but it has remained in place ever since--and it is without question the most consequential piece of pro-life legislation ever passed by Congress. "By fairly conservative estimate, in the 30 years that it has been in effect, the Hyde Amendment has saved over 1 million human lives," says Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee. The year before the Hyde Amendment, federal funds paid for some 300,000 abortions. Afterward, this figure dropped essentially to zero. The only major revision to the law came in 1993, when Congress added rape and incest exceptions to the life-of-the-mother clause that had been in place from the start.

The experience catapulted Hyde to the forefront of a national debate that stirs passions like no other. He became a leading spokesman for the pro-life cause and sought out forums to make his case. In 1984, New York governor Mario Cuomo gave an influential speech at Notre Dame explaining how Catholic politicians could embrace abortion rights and still remain true to their religious beliefs. Hyde would have none of it. He paid his own visit to South Bend and condemned "the rise of a militant secular-separationist perspective on the constitutional questions that seeks to rule religiously based values 'out of order' in the public arena." He also denounced the so-called right to choose: "The abortion liberty, we should insist, is a profoundly narrow-minded, illiberal position; it constricts, rather than expands, the scope of liberty properly understood." Elsewhere, he compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust.

Abortion was Hyde's signature issue, but he wasn't a single-issue congressman: He became a hero to just about every faction of the conservative movement. Foreign-policy hawks appreciated his aggressive criticism of the nuclear-freeze movement and strong support for aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Libertarians valued his work to protect property rights against abusive asset-forfeiture laws. Reagan loyalists saw him as an indispensable friend during the Iran-Contra hearings.

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Amazingly, liberals liked Hyde as well. They disagreed with him often, but many also admired his sincere commitment to principle, laughed at his jokes, and found him impeccably courteous during debates--to them, he was more Jekyll than Hyde. They eagerly recruited him to promote a few of their own causes. Hyde has voted for the anti-gun Brady Bill and, perhaps irritated by the occasional charge that he cares about babies only until they're born, the Family and Medical Leave Act. Yet his record is not that of a sail-trimmer: On its congressional scorecard, the American Conservative Union gives Hyde a lifetime rating of 85 percent.

By the late 1990s, Hyde was an elder statesman among the Gingrich Republicans, loyal to much of their agenda but also dissenting on key issues such as term limits (which he opposed). Then came the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton--an episode that continues to animate and haunt Hyde, almost a decade later.

LEWINSKYGATE

Shortly after the allegations against Clinton became public, Hyde advised caution: "You don't impeach him for a peccadillo," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I don't think that constitutes a high crime or a misdemeanor." But by the time he was tapped to head a congressional inquiry into Clinton's behavior, his views had hardened. He laments that, "even today, knowledgeable people believe impeachment was all about sex and more about Republican prurience, rather than rectitude about the rule of law."

Liberals launched a vicious attack on Hyde--a case study in the politics of personal destruction. "History will not be kind to you," warned Rep. Maxine Waters, the Los Angeles Democrat. The actor Alec Baldwin went rabid on Conan O'Brien's late-night TV show: "If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together, all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death!" he shouted. "We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children! We would kill their families!" Hyde's family really did suffer a blow when Salon.com reported that Hyde had an extramarital affair in the 1960s--a secret the congressman had kept buried for three decades.

Ultimately, Hyde helped secure Clinton's impeachment in the House but failed to convince the Senate to remove the president from office. His only regret involves tactics. "I was too accepting of the senators' discipline, and their purpose was not ours," he says. "I should have demanded that Monica Lewinsky and Clinton testify." Although Hyde did not achieve his main objective, it would be wrong to view the entire project as a failure: In the face of a public backlash, he convinced Republicans to follow their consciences rather than the polls. "We had to do it," he says. His resolve helped deliver the outcome that many Americans favored: a meaningful punishment for Clinton--the humiliation of impeachment--but not his ouster.

Hyde was elected to Congress in 1974, a very bad year for congressional Republicans. Now he leaves during a similar moment of upheaval. "I'm a heartbroken Republican. We did it to ourselves this year: The instances of corruption and a war that seems to have no end did not create the impression of competence. We need to get away from the Democratic plan to purchase power by outbidding the opposite party. An awful lot of money is spent that shouldn't be spent. And we must initiate a national search for qualified leadership--people who are competent, incorruptible, and energetic."

So what does Hyde think about the 2008 presidential field? On John McCain: "He's interesting and unpredictable but I think he's electable and correct on social issues." On Rudy Giuliani: "I like him and he's electable, but he's dead wrong on the life issue and that invalidates his candidacy for me." Mitt Romney: "I don't know enough about him but he sounds promising." Then there's Hyde's House colleague, Duncan Hunter: "He's a good man but he's too protectionist." Asked about George Pataki, he simply snarls. And what about Barack Obama? He's not a Republican, but he's from Hyde's hometown: "I've never seen anyone with such a slim record receive such adulation. He seems like a nice and capable man, but he's being treated as Pericles revisited or something."

Until Hyde packed up his office, he displayed a bust of St. Thomas More--the patron saint of lawyers, and a man who died for his principles. Hyde has lived by his, and he wishes that he could advance them further by staying in office longer: "If Mother Nature and Father Time had not assaulted me, I'd run again--but they're standing in the way and they're formidable." So says the Grand Old Party's man for all seasons, in his winter.