Former Sen. Paul Simon dies following heart surgery

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- Paul Simon, the bow-tie-wearing missionary's son who rose from crusading newspaper owner to U.S. senator and presidential aspirant, died Tuesday, a day after undergoing heart surgery. He was 75.

Simon was surrounded by family members at St. John's Hospital in Springfield when he died, according to a statement from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where Simon started a public policy institute after his retirement.

Simon had a single bypass and heart valve surgery Monday at St. John's Prairie Heart Institute, where he also underwent heart surgery in 1999. The cause of death was extensive bowel ischemia, in which blood flow to the intestines is stopped, causing the release of toxic material into the body, said Dr. James Dove.

Eventually, all of Simon's organs shut down, Dove said. The ischemia was a "very rare event," and Dove could not say whether it was directly related to the heart surgery.

Simon was a frequent visitor to the Southeast Missouri State University campus, serving as spring commencement speaker in May 1999. His last stop there was April 30, when he lectured on the topic "Leadership and Iraq."

Former Gov. Jim Edgar said that although he was a Republican and Simon a Democrat, "I think we were probably as good a friends as you can be in those circumstances. He's just somebody I've had the utmost respect for."

In 1948, at age 19, Simon dropped out of college, borrowed $3,600 and bought a failing weekly newspaper in Troy, a town of about 1,500 across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. He became the nation's youngest editor-publisher at the time.

His political career began with his election to the state legislature in 1954 and culminated with his election to the U.S. Senate in 1984. He retired from Congress in 1997.

Simon was in his first Senate term when he sought the Democratic nomination for president. He halted his campaign in April 1988 after winning only his home state's primary.

Simon was a bespectacled, slightly rumpled man with a strong reputation for honesty, a politician who began disclosing his personal finances in the 1950s. He had the sober, straight-laced bearing of a Sunday school teacher and wrote 22 books.

Simon blended fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. Raised during the Depression, the son of a Lutheran minister, he saw the great needs facing the country and how government responded through New Deal programs.

"I learned that you have to be careful with money," he said.

That explained his reputation as a "pay-as-you-go" Democrat who would rather raise taxes than rely on deficit financing -- and why he long championed a balanced budget amendment.

"To be a liberal doesn't mean you're a wastrel," said Simon, citing the words of a political mentor, former Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois.

Simon was born Nov. 29, 1928, in Eugene, Ore., shortly after his parents returned from China, where his father was a missionary. He enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1945 at age 16 to study journalism and transferred to Dana College in Blair, Neb., in 1946 when his parents moved to Southern Illinois.

In 1953, Simon decided to run for the Illinois legislature. Though he declared himself a Republican and endorsed Thomas E. Dewey over Harry Truman in a 1948 editorial, Simon made a fundamental concession to the local political climate: He ran as a Democrat.

The reform-minded Simon soon was nicknamed "Reverend" in Springfield and scored some legislative triumphs, including Illinois' first open-meetings law. He later served in the state Senate.

In 1968, Simon won election as lieutenant governor. He appeared headed for the top office when then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley tapped Simon for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1972 against a Republican incumbent who had enacted Illinois' first state income tax.

But an anti-Daley backlash blunted the Democratic machine's strength in Chicago, and corporate lawyer Dan Walker defeated Simon in the party primary.

Simon spent the next two years lecturing at universities. His political return came in 1974 when he went to the U.S. House representing part of Southern Illinois.

In 1984, he took on three-term GOP Sen. Charles Percy, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and won by a 50-48 margin. He accused Percy of lying, contended Percy profited from the Reagan tax cuts, and portrayed the millionaire senator as the candidate "of country clubs and board rooms."

Six years later, Simon faced a re-election challenge from then-U.S. Rep. Lynn Martin, a Republican. Simon won with 65 percent of the vote.

Simon decided not to seek a third term in the Senate and retired from Congress in 1997. In retirement, he taught at Southern Illinois University, near his hometown of Makanda, and ran the Public Policy Institute, a bipartisan think tank he founded.

While he was in the Senate, Simon helped overhaul the federal student loan program to enable students and their families to borrow directly from the government. As a crusader against television violence, he successfully pushed the industry to monitor the amount of violence on the screen.