“If I win next year, I would become the first governor in history who voters knew used a wheelchair,” Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor John Hager told me during a meeting in his office at the State Capitol in Richmond in the summer of 2000.
Hager (who died August 23, 2020 at age 83) had contracted polio when his son was vaccinated for the disease in 1973 with a live virus vaccine. In 1997, he won the Old Dominion’s second-highest office after a campaign that included TV spots of him competing in wheelchair races.
As gently as I could, I reminded Hager that Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Wallace used wheelchairs as Democratic governors of New York and Alabama, respectively.
“But few knew FDR used a wheelchair,” he remonstrated, noting that the press’s cooperation with Roosevelt meant that he was almost never photographed in a wheelchair while governor and president. “And Wallace was already governor when he was shot [in 1972] and started using a wheelchair.”
Hager then noted that, if successful in his coming campaign, he would be coming into the governorships with voters knowing he used a wheelchair. Leaning back in his wheelchair, he smiled and said, “And wouldn’t that be uplifting to a lot of folks who get down?”
His candidacy drew fresh support. People with handicaps were moved that someone like them had gone so far. Hager also campaigned among minorities, who responded warmly to a Republican who spoke movingly of losing his high-level executive position at American Tobacco Company after contracting polio (“They didn’t need an executive vice president in a wheelchair”) and overcoming the loss (he started with the same company at the bottom and rose again).
“And [as lieutenant governor] John was ubiquitous at Virginia Republican events,” Virginia’s GOP National Committeeman Morton Blackwell recalled to Newsmax. “His presence was almost Biblical. Whenever two or three Republicans were gathered together, John was with us.”
Supporters of nomination opponent and State Attorney General Mark Earley suggested Hager was less than a true-blue conservative because of his ties to Richmond’s “Main Street” business community. To that, the lieutenant governor proudly displayed the endorsements of such leading Virginia conservatives as Blackwell, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene, and Free Congress Foundation President Paul Weyrich.
Retired Lt. Colonel Oliver North also weighed in for Hager, his good friend and co-chairman of his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign in Virginia.
Hager’s team always felt certain he could win a primary in which voters directly selected their nominee. But Earley’s allies controlled the state Republican committee, which determined the mechanism for selecting statewide nominees. They voted to choose a state convention, which enhanced the clout of Earley’s constituency of evangelical conservatives.
The late Mike Thompson, a state committee member from Fairfax County, and Hager backer, recalled to me, “I wanted to get a large group of his supporters who used wheelchairs, crutches or canes to jam the meeting of the state committee when we voted how to choose nominees. They would chant ‘You’re Keeping Us Out!’ and make the case to the press of their difficulty getting to many of the meeting places local leaders choose to pick convention delegates. The press would have picked up on this and there was no way, I felt, that the state committee could not support holding a primary.”
For reasons of his own, Hager never pursued Thompson’s plan. He continued to lose ground to Earley in battles for convention delegates and when the convention met, he had clearly lost the nomination.
GOP leaders on both sides suggested Hager be renominated for lieutenant governor. They felt he would win again easily and help Earley win the governor’s race.
“[State Delegate and lieutenant governor candidate] Jay Katzen also had a following with the Christian right,” recalled former Rep. Tom Davis, R-VA, “It would have taken real leadership to get him out of the race and make room for John. Had Mark exercised that leadership, I think he would have won in November and John would have won. But conventions are funny animals and Jay had strong support among Earley’s base.”
In the fall, Democrat Mark Warner—now Virginia’s senior U.S. Senator—won the governorship over Earley by 52 to 47 percent. Katzen lost the lieutenant governorship to Tim Kaine, now Virginia’s junior U.S. Senator. Since 2013, Virginia has not had a Republican in statewide office.
And Hager? After 9/11, he accepted Democratic Gov. Warner’s offer to head the state’s new Office of Commonwealth Preparedness. In ’04, he went on to serve as assistant U.S. secretary of education overseeing the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. He also served briefly as state GOP chairman.
A graduate of Purdue University and Harvard Business School, Hager served as a U.S. Army officer before joining American Tobacco.
When son Henry Hager married Jenna Bush, daughter of George W. and Laura Bush, the elder Hager delighted wedding guests by whirling in his wheelchair on the dance floor with wife Maggie.
“I saw John at the convention to elect our congressional nominee in July,” Republican activist Tyler Scott of Blackstone, Virginia, who worked in Hager’s gubernatorial campaign, told us “He was there holding his own, even in the worst heat imaginable and at age 83. He was a lovely man, and loved by all.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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