Joseph Tydings, Democratic Ex-Senator and Nixon Target, Dies at 90

Joseph D. Tydings, a progressive Democratic U.S. senator from Maryland who pressed for gun controls, opposed the war in Vietnam and helped scuttle two of President Richard M. Nixon’s nominees for the Supreme Court, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 90.

The cause was complications of cancer, his son, Millard Tydings, said.

Tydings, an acolyte of President John F. Kennedy’s, left a greater imprint in the capital than most freshmen senators. But he was toppled in 1970 after only one term.

He had enraged the National Rifle Association by supporting the registration and licensing of firearms in the aftermath of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968; vexed fellow liberals by embracing preventive detention and other tough responses to crime and urban riots that had reached within blocks of the White House; and was linked by Life magazine to financial improprieties. He was later largely cleared, and the charges proved to have been leaked by the Nixon White House.

Tydings hailed from a prosperous family with a history of bucking tradition in a state where Baltimore ward heelers and rural Democratic leaders had dominated local politics.

His mother’s father, Joseph M. Davies, an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and later the U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, married cereal scion Marjorie Merriweather Post, the richest woman in America, an art collector and the builder of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate now owned by President Donald Trump.

His stepfather, Millard Tydings, was a four-term U.S. senator who was defeated in 1950 shortly after he was denounced as an “egg-sucking liberal” by his colleague Joseph R. McCarthy. McCarthy’s contentions that the State Department had been infiltrated by Soviet agents and that it then lost China to the communists were substantially refuted during the stormy congressional hearings of which Tydings was chairman.

Joseph Tydings was born on May 4, 1928, as Joseph Davies Cheesborough in Ashville, North Carolina, to Tom and Eleanor (Davies) Cheesborough. The couple divorced in 1935, and his mother married Millard Tydings, who adopted Joseph and his sister.

Reared on an estate near Chesapeake Bay, he attended the private McDonogh School in Baltimore County. He enlisted in the Army and served as a corporal in a horse platoon in occupied Germany after World War II. In 1951, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government and politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also earned a law degree.

His marriage to Virginia Reynolds Campbell ended in divorce. So did his marriages to Terry Lynn Huntingdon, Rosemary Kayser and Kate Clark.

He is survived by four children from his first marriage, Mary Tydings Smith, Millard Tydings, Emlen Tydings Gaudino and Eleanor Tydings Gollob; a daughter, Alexandra Tydings Luzzato, from his second marriage; and nine grandchildren.

Tydings was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1954. After prosecuting corrupt politicians as the U.S. attorney for Maryland, he challenged the state’s Democratic machine in running for the 1964 Senate nomination and won. At 36 he went on to defeat J. Glenn Beall, a two-term Republican incumbent, that November.

In the Senate, Tydings disavowed the Vietnam War and galvanized opposition to Nixon’s nominations of Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell to the U.S. Supreme Court. Both were Southern conservatives opposed by labor and civil rights groups, and both were rejected in the Senate, opposed in each case by more than a dozen Republicans.

Earlier, Tydings had fought for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s proposed firearms control bill after the King and Kennedy assassinations. But the legislation that eventually passed was gutted after concerted lobbying by gun enthusiasts.

Even though he was a duck hunter who owned seven shotguns, Tydings was attacked by the NRA, and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew denounced him as one of the “radical liberals” who deserved to be ousted. He was defeated for a second term in 1970 by J. Glenn Beall Jr., the son of the incumbent he had unseated six years before.

Tydings felt he had been undone in part by the Life magazine article, published in late August as the political season heated up. It contended that he had “repeatedly lent his personal and senatorial prestige to the urgent promotion of his own greatest financial interest” on behalf of a friend’s company that was seeking government loan guarantees for construction investments in Latin America.

Tydings believed the White House had been a major source for the article in an effort to smear him. A State Department investigation, in a report released after the election, found no wrongdoing.

In 1976, Tydings lost a comeback bid in the Democratic primary to Rep. Paul S. Sarbanes, who then trounced Beall in the general election.

Tydings served for 15 years on the University of Maryland Board of Regents, practiced law until he turned 90 and remained outspoken to the end. In a memoir, “My Life in Progressive Politics: Against the Grain,” written with John W. Frece and published this year, Tydings complained about the Trump Organization’s appropriating his family coat of arms, which was granted by the British to Tydings’ grandfather Joseph Davies in 1939. It was displayed at Mar-a-Lago after Davies married Post.

Trump began using the family seal after he bought the Florida estate, and his company has since trademarked it and used it in marketing his golf courses and other properties worldwide.

But Tydings had advised his relatives not to bother suing Trump — “because you’ll be in court for years and years and years,” he told The Times in 2017.

Tydings was particularly vexed about a one-word edit in the heraldic hijacking: The Trump Organization replaced “integritas,” Latin for integrity, with “Trump.”

“My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave if he knew Trump was using his crest,” Tydings wrote. “I am sorry to say that banishing the concept of ‘integrity’ is a sad metaphor for the Trump presidency.”