By David Shribman
Washington, Sept. 2— Senator Henry M. Jackson, (click here) the Washington Democrat who served in Congress for more than half of this century, ran for President twice and was regarded as one of the nation's leading voices on military affairs, died Thursday night in Everett, Wash., after suffering a massive heart attack. He was 71 years old.
Mr. Jackson died hours after he called a news conference in Everett to deplore the downing of a South Korean airliner by a Soviet fighter plane.
Senator Jackson's death signaled the end of a political era in his home state of Washington and altered the political landscape of Capitol Hill. It gives Gov. John Spellman, a Republican, an opportunity to make a temporary appointment that will increase the Republicans' majority in the Senate.
The death also and removed a staunch advocate of military preparedness nine days after Senator John Tower, a Texas Republican who is another leading supporter of the military, announced that he would not seek re-election next year. Arms, McCarthy, Soviet Jews.
In nearly 43 years in Congress, Mr. Jackson was involved in the major themes of American political life, from the issues of the early years of the nuclear age to the arcane details of strategic arms treaties, and from the drama of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 to efforts in the 1970's to the freedom for Soviet Jews.
Senator Jackson died less than an hour after he was taken to Providence Hospital, only a dozen blocks from his home in Everett. The Senator, who had been considered in good health and was known as an energetic man, had just returned from a two-week trip to China and talks with Chinese leaders.
Shortly before President Reagan left California this morning to return to Washington, he said he and Mrs. Reagan were ''deeply saddened'' to hear of Senator Jackson's death. ''He was a friend, colleague, a true patriot, and a devoted servant of the people,'' Mr. Reagan said. Sought Out by Presidents
Mr. Jackson was John F. Kennedy's choice to head the Democratic National Committee in 1960. Presidents of both parties sought his counsel, particularly on military and diplomatic matters.
Over the years, he defended Adm. Hyman G. Rickover and the nuclear submarine; he spoke out for the survival of Israel; he strove to win military contracts for the Boeing Company, his state's largest employer.
He was a strenuous supporter of organized labor and civil rights. In the last decade he emerged as a leader of a strain of Democrats committed to a strong national defense and skeptical of their party's impulses in foreign affairs. These Democrats, some of whom called themselves neoconservatives, often regarded Mr. Jackson as the symbol of the party's traditional center. They supported him vigorously when he campaigned for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976. Remembrances by Colleagues
Mr. Jackson suffered a string of primary defeats in the 1972 race, but in 1976 he won important victories in the Massachusetts and New York primaries before his campaign languished.
In later years he confined his energies to the Senate, concentrating on his role in the Senate Armed Services Committee and urging colleagues to resist the entreaties of the political action committees that proliferated in the wake of the campaign financing laws prompted by the Watergate scandals.
His death brought expressions of sadness and tributes from Democratic and Republican colleagues. Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, the Senate majority leader, termed Mr. Jackson ''a seasoned politician who understood the need for bipartisan cooperation on issues of vital national interest.''
Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, characterized him as a ''great statesman'' and ''guiding force for democracy'' who ''never wavered in his dedication to the true principles of peace, liberty and freedom.''
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that he felt a ''deep and personal loss'' and added, ''The Senate has lost one of its great leaders.'' 'Labor Had No Stauncher Friend'
Senator Jackson's death was also seen as a loss for the labor movement, which had given him considerable support in his Presidential campaigns. ''Labor had no stauncher friend,'' said Lane Kirkland, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. ''He shared our commitment to social and economic justice and to a strong national defense adequate to protect those values against totalitarians of the left or the right.''
Henry Martin Jackson was born in Everett May 31, 1912, the son of Norwegian immigrants. His father was a building contractor, his mother a devoutly religious woman, and on the wood-plank streets of his hometown the young Henry Jackson drew from their examples of hard work and demands for achievement. As a newspaper delivery boy he once set a record by delivering 74,880 copies of The Everett Herald without a single complaint. Sister Named Him 'Scoop'
His sister called him ''Scoop'' because she thought he resembled a character in a cartoon strip and the name remained with him, even on the floor of the Senate.
At Everett High School he managed the basketball team and was a member of the debating team. He earned his way through college, graduating from the University of Washington and taking a law degree there. As a young lawyer, he became a prosecutor in Snohomish County and won a reputation as a foe of prostitutes, slot machine operators and bootleggers.
Mr. Jackson was a vigorous supporter of President Roosevelt, catapulted into prominence by his success as a prosecutor, Mr. Jackson was to Congress in 1940.
He was 28 years old and one of the youngest members of the House. He became something of a specialist in nuclear energy and military affairs. He was re-elected five times before he challenged the Republican incumbent Harry P. Cain in 1952 for a Senate seat. He won a plurality of 135,000 votes. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Presidential candidate, took Washington State by more than 100,000 votes.
Thus began a tenure of three decades as his state's junior senator. Mr. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, who was elected to the Senate in 1944 and served until he was unseated in 1980 by Slade Gorton, a Republican, made up perhaps the most formidable team in the Senate.
Together, ''Maggie and Scoop,'' as they were called, accumulated 64 years of Senate seniority by 1980. They played decisive roles, Mr. Magnuson as chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Mr. Jackson as an expert in armed services issues.
''We worked together so many years for the benefit of the state and nation,'' Mr. Magnuson, who is 78 years old, said today. ''We were in intimate contact. We were in so many contests together on the same side.'' The Jackson Personal Style.
In manner Mr. Jackson was quiet, contemplative, a bit
ascetic, and just short of unfashionable in his demeanor. But in many ways he was a political figure from the old school. It was the new force in politics, television, that put him on the national stage.
In 1954, a year after he and two other Democrats, Senators Stuart Symington of Missouri and John L. McClellan of Arkansas, left the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, Mr. Jackson charged that the committee was ''hunting headlines instead of hunting Communists,'' in part because of a dispute over committee staffing and in part as a protest against the techniques of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.
But he and the others returned to the committee, and as television sent the Army-McCarthy hearings across the nation, Mr. Jackson came across as sober and fair-minded, by one account a ''clean-cut James Stewart type.'' The hearings were an outgrowth of Senator McCarthy's charges of Communist infiltration of the Army.
Mr. Jackson voted for the censure of Senator McCarthy in late 1954. He became a leading critic of the military policies of the Eisenhower Administration. He pointed out deficiencies in the nation's infant missile program and spoke out in favor of the nuclear submarine ideas advanced by Admiral Rickover. Key Party Role, Then Marriage
In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy considered Mr. Jackson for the Vice Presidential nomination that eventually was given to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Shortly afterward Kennedy, who had pledged to select a Protestant to head the party, chose Senator Jackson to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
A year later, Mr. Jackson, a regular on Washington society writers' lists of bachelors, married Helen Eugenia Hardin of Albuquerque, who was working in the office of Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico.
Mr. Jackson was a longtime supporter of American involvement in Southeast Asia. In 1962 he urged that the United States ''draw the line'' in Laos. Later, though he muted his views on Vietnam as the nation grew weary of American involvement there, and even voted against President Ford's request in 1975 for emergency aid for the deteriorating Government of South Vietnam, Senator Jackson retained his belief that the United States had been correct in entering the Vietnam War.
''The basic decision to go into Vietnam was right,'' he said in April 1975, when such a position was unfashionable.
He also was a leading advocate of the antimissile missile, arguing that the Soviet Union was a ''dangerous, unpredictable opponent.'' He held up approval of the first treaty on limiting strategic arms, insisting that future treaties not limit the United States to missile levels inferior to those of the Soviet Union. He was perhaps the most vociferous Democratic opponent of the second strategic arms pact. Defense and Conservation.
Through his years in the capital, Mr. Jackson's commitment to the national defense has been coupled with his dedication to winning military contracts for Boeing. He was sometimes referred to in the capital as ''the Senator from Boeing,'' which he resented bitterly. He was, however, criticized for permitting a Boeing lobbyist to operate out of his Senate office in the unsuccessful battle for a Federal subsidy to build the supersonic transport plane.
The aircraft failed to win Congress's support. Senator Jackson's support of the measure angered some conservationists. But he regarded himself as a protector of the environment and was identified with Congressional battles over strip mining and land-use questions. He was a major architect of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the first modern statement of the nation's environmental goals. It created the Environmental Protection Agency.
Senator Jackson won perhaps his greatest attention for his efforts in behalf of Israel and Soviet Jews. He dated his repugnance to anti-Semitism to lectures from his mother. He solidified his support for the survival of Israel after a visit to a Nazi concentration camp. Easing Curbs to Free Jews.
In 1974 he prevailed in persuading Congress to tie an easing of trade barriers to provide freer passage of Jews out of the Soviet Union. The arrangement collapsed a year later, but it won Mr. Jackson the support of many influential American Jews.
Today, Howard I. Friedman, president of the American Jewish Committee, said Mr. Jackson was ''a man whose name will ever be associated with American legislation that already has helped more than a quarter of a million Jews emigrate from the Soviet Union to freedom.''
Although his two Presidential campaigns failed to win widespread support, Mr. Jackson, one of the last remaining New Dealers in Washington, remained an influential figure on Capitol Hill. Late this spring he was the leading voice in the successful effort to limit the amount of honorariums given Senators.
''There is growing and, I think, justifiable criticism that this has undermined the integrity of the Senate,'' said Mr. Jackson, who for years donated all his income from honorariums to charity. ''This is a scandal waiting to happen.'' Jackson Urged Latin Panel
Less than a week later, Mr. Jackson, along with Senator Charles McC. Mathias Jr., Republican of Maryland, urged President Reagan to appoint a commission on Central America, an idea that took form in Mr. Reagan's special commission on Central America.
Mr. Jackson was a member of the Board of Overseers of both Harvard University and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and a member of the Board of Advisers for the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard. He was also a member of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by a daughter, Anna Marie Jackson, a student at Stanford University, and a son, Peter Hardin Jackson, a student at the St. Alban's School in Washington.
Memorial services are to be held Tuesday evening in Washington's National Cathedral and in the Everett Civic Auditorium, Everett, Wash. A private service for the family and for a Congressional delegation is scheduled for noon Wednesday in the First Presbyterian Church in Everett.
photos of Henry M. Jackson
I am trying to find the link to where the USA turned from a country where honesty and integrity mattered in political standing and elections. There is a profound place where 'tone' changed in the USA. It was the 1960s. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the greenhouse effect and the deadly nature of chemicals in our environment. There is no one who would debate the 1960s were some of the most turbulent years in the country.
Previous to the 1960s the country was a majority in it's moral content and decency. It was more politically homogenous in social settings. There were campaign slogans such as "I like Ike." Interesting isn't it. The people of the USA liked friendly slogans and valued a man for president that could be their neighbor and a war hero.
I sincerely believe before the 1960s it was about the quality of life. "Two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot." Coming out of the agrarian era of the USA, having won two World Wars, the country was one. The politics friendly and the outcomes of elections stabilizing and not destabilizing.
Then came the 1960s, turbulence, and deaths of great leaders. The face of politics would change forever because of the loss of some of the most promising members of our brain trust being murdered. Senseless murders.
The USA set it's foot on the moon in 1969. We were in awe of the greatness of the USA. The world stopped and realized the people of the USA were incredible achievers with visions of the future only others could never imagine. Some of that imagination played out in Hollywood movies.
In 1969, Richard Nixon was elected to the Presidency. He had originally run against John Fitzgerald Kennedy and lost. Lyndon Johnson would become the anchor for the next eight years to a country traumatized.
By the time Richard Nixon took office the country was engaged in Vietnam for nearly 11 years, if my memory serves me. The Vietnam War was started under President Eisenhower, but, it wasn't a war then, it was assisting an ally, France, a member of SEATO. President Kennedy would send military advisors and humanitarian supplies to Vietnam, but, he was known to desire an end to USA involvement, much the way France did. President Kennedy was assassinated before he could bring all USA personnel home. President Lyndon Johnson expanded the war.
When Richard Nixon took office the country was demonstrating and demanding a return home of troops. He cried the war was to prevent the Domino Effect and was backed by the Moral Majority. His campaign for re-election was difficult. In 1972, a campaign chairman, by the name of Donald Segretti would find defaming and lies a suitable method to increase concerns by the electorate and Nixon won a second term. We all know the history after that. But, Segretti would prove to be a divider, not a uniter and the man capable of vicious politics.
A former military prosecutor and civil lawyer, (click here) Segretti ran a campaign of political sabotage against the Democrats for Nixon's reelection effort. In 1974, he served 4 1/2 months in prison after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign literature, including a letter falsely claiming that former senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl.
Segretti briefly threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for Superior Court judge in Orange County, Calif., in 1995 but withdrew after a week, saying the shadow of Watergate hung over the campaign. "It was supposed to be a low-key campaign and a non-partisan office," Segretti said. "But it wasn't treated that way."
If an election strategy worked it was repeated. I believe Mr. Segretti was the first brick in the Republican wall that changed it's direction and tone. I also believe he mentored a man who has proven to be a powerful assassin of character. Even a CIA agent by the name of Valerie Plame could not escape his maniacal methods.
Karl Rove took Segretti's methods and magnified them. Fear became a driving factor along with privilege. As the years went by and Segretti's GOP became more and more extreme, the social and economic justice of Senator Henry M. Jackson was abandoned. What took over was the ideology of wealth and privilege accompanied by methods of pushing the envelope to greater and greater Wall Street wealth. (Please know there are decent companies on the stock exchanges run by decent people, but, I also believe they are the companies that still value "the worker.") The "trickle-down economics" destroyed the Middle Class and the "Contract with America" created the working poor. Wall Street welfare became an everyday concept and Walmart set up an office to help employees apply for Food Stamps and Medicaid.
The country of the USA has been lost. The name is the same, but, the face of the country is drastically different and I am not referencing race or skin color. I am referencing the moral content of the country.
Kindly read this New York Times obituary to completion of one hasn't already. Reflect on the country we were, even with the flaws. We were a moral country. We achieved greatness and it wasn't through war. I think when reading about Senator Jackson versys the stark difference of today, our deranged evolution will be obvious. Senator Jackson wasn't interested in changing the USA into an efficient business. He knew government served the people and people are not perfect or efficient.
