Dave Durenberger, a former moderate Republican Senator from Minnesota who was censured by the Senate in 1990 for financial improprieties that destroyed his 16-year Washington career and led to a plea deal to avoid felony criminal charges, died on Tuesday at his home in St. Paul, Minn. He was 88.
The cause was heart failure, his wife, Susan Bartlett Foote, said.
Before the roof caved in, Mr. Durenberger was a favorite son in a traditionally Democratic state. Minnesota had sent him to Washington not as a version of Frank Capra’s sweetly naive Mr. Smith but as an independent, ethically irreproachable successor to the storied Hubert H. Humphrey, the ebullient Democrat who had returned to the Senate after losing the 1968 presidential race and whose widow, Muriel Humphrey, had been holding her husband’s unexpired term.
Mr. Durenberger was elected to complete the term in a special election in 1978, becoming the first Republican Senator from Minnesota in 20 years.
A decade later, after what colleagues and constituents called the senator’s yeoman service as an advocate on health and environmental issues, a hidden side of Mr. Durenberger began to surface. He was arrested after a dispute with a police officer. Two of his sons had drug problems. He and his second wife separated. And the Senate Ethics Committee began investigating his financial affairs.
What it found was a series of unsavory deals to evade Senate income and expense rules. In one scheme, Mr. Durenberger took...
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