Robert D. Ray, Centrist GOP Governor of Iowa, Dies at 89

Robert D. Ray, a centrist Republican who served five terms as governor of Iowa and welcomed thousands of Southeast Asian refugees to his state in the 1970s — a politically risky decision he considered a moral imperative — died Sunday at a care facility in Des Moines. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by Scott Raecker, the executive director of the Robert D. and Billie Ray Center at Drake University in Des Moines.

Ray won his first term as governor in 1968. He embraced a fiscally responsible but progressive agenda, which included support for looser abortion laws and the Equal Rights Amendment and opposition to the death penalty.

Professor Dennis Goldford, chairman of the political science department at Drake University, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that it would be difficult for a politician like Ray to flourish in today’s more conservative Republican Party in Iowa.

“By 1988 it was certainly no longer a Bob Ray Republican Party,” Goldford said. “He was a moderate Republican, of which there are fewer and fewer and fewer, and he was governor at a time in Iowa when that was not a problem.”

Ray was known for his civility — a Washington Post profile in 1976 called him “a quiet, plain-spoken man who seldom raises his voice in anger” — but he did not shy from confrontation. In 1972 he ordered the Iowa National Guard to cease the operation of all planes and vehicles to pressure the federal government to pay damages to two Iowa families whose homes had been destroyed when military planes crashed into them in 1968. The government quickly relented, paying the families more than $125,000.

Beginning in 1975, Ray volunteered to accept several thousand refugees from Southeast Asia, people from different backgrounds who were displaced by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Many were concerned that the refugees would take jobs from Americans and fail to assimilate, and the move was unpopular in some circles. But Ray argued that a compassionate, humanitarian response was required.

“I decided we couldn’t sit here in the middle of Iowa, in the land of plenty, and let them die,” he told The Iowa City Press-Citizen in 2003. “They had to risk everything, their homes and members of their family.”

As governor, Ray helped create Iowa’s first transportation department, eliminated the state’s sales tax on groceries and prescription drugs, created a tuition grant program for private colleges and instituted a refundable five-cent deposit for bottles and cans to encourage recycling. He also addressed civil rights issues; in 1972 he ordered a museum to return Native American remains that had been on display there for years.

During his tenure, Iowa’s gubernatorial terms doubled, from two to four years.

In 1982 Ray announced that he would retire at the end of his term. He told The New York Times that he was able to stray from party orthodoxy because his constituents trusted his judgment.

“You gain the confidence of the people, or you don’t come back,” Ray said. “And once you have that confidence, you can do so many more things.”

Robert Dolph Ray was born in Des Moines on Sept. 26, 1928, to Clark Ray, an accountant, and Mildred (Dolph) Ray. He grew up in Des Moines and played basketball, football and tennis at Theodore Roosevelt High School, graduating in 1946.

He served in the Army for the next two years and was stationed in Japan after World War II. Returning to Des Moines in 1948, he enrolled at Drake University.

In 1951 Ray married his high school girlfriend, Billie Lee Hornberger. He received his bachelor’s degree in business the next year and then a law degree, also from Drake, in 1954. He became a trial lawyer and a partner in a law firm, and twice ran unsuccessfully for local office in the 1950s.

Ray joined the Iowa Republican central committee in 1960, and in 1963 he became the state party’s chairman. In 1968 he prevailed in the gubernatorial race, even though he was bedridden for weeks after shattering an ankle in a plane crash.

Ray was close to national Republican figures like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and Gerald R. Ford, who considered him as a vice-presidential candidate during his 1976 presidential campaign. But he never ran for national office.

Ray is survived by his wife; three daughters, Randi Watson, Lu Ann Newland and Victoria Carlson; and eight grandchildren.

After retiring, Ray worked as the chief executive of an insurance company and a health services corporation and served as the interim mayor of Des Moines and interim president of Drake University. In 2005 he received the Iowa Award, the state’s highest citizen honor.

Before he left office Ray offered some advice for his successor.

“There’s only one way to run this office, and that is to listen to the people,” he said, and then choose a position and “stay with it and take the flak. And if they don’t like you, why, let them get another governor.”