by Mark Silva
Retired Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom today. It is the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Hyde, who is 82 and served for 32 years in Congress, is recuperating from heart bypass surgery at a rehabilitation center and expected home soon. In the mean time, his son Bob has arrived at the White House for the presidential ceremony in the East Room at 10 am EDT.
“I wish he was here,” son Bob Hyde said this morning, speaking of the meaning of this award for his father, one of the stalwarts of the Republican Party, experienced in the Judiciary and International Relations Committees but perhaps best known for his advocacy of restrictions on abortion. “It’s gratification,” his son says of the award. “I think it affirms the importance and the value of his stance on many things, like right to life.”
Henry Hyde, who retired when his final term ended in 2006, has undergone a quadruple heart bypass. “He is 82 with a million miles on his chassis,” says son Bob, the second of four Hyde children. He and his wife Mindy have come to the White House ceremony with Tom Mooney, who was chief of staff for the senior Hyde on the Judiciary and International Relations Committees and who runs a restaurant in Alexandria, Va., now.
Thirty-two years in Congress is a long time, the congressman’s son say, recalling his father’s start there – Rep. Hyde had served on the Iran Contra committee. “It was a much different place than it is now.”
Bob Hyde, 55, is a private banker in Dallas — working in wealth management for Wells Fargo. His older brother has passed away, his younger brother and sister still in Chicago. This is not the son’s first stop at the White House – though “you never quite get used to that.”
His mother, Jeanne Marie, who passed away in 1992, had worked on President Reagan’s staff reading personal correspondence, and he visited her there twice. There were six other ladies on the staff, he recalls. “They said that was an economic indicator on whether your administration was successful or not… Reagan averaged about 2,100 letters a day.”
Returning today, for an East Room ceremony at which President Bush will bestow the medal to several honorees – including Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist Gary Becker – Bob Hyde considers the award a validation of his father’s long service.
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“It means a lot to him,” he says of his father. “Serving in this capacity has been an avocation as well as a vocation. Frankly, he is a bit of workaholic. This is one way of saying it was worth the effort, and the price he paid, the time and energy.”
