Paul Tsongas

Paul Tsongas

Paul Efthemios Tsongas (born February 14, 1941 in Lowell , Massachusetts , †  January 18, 1997 ibid) was an American politician of the Democratic Party . From 1975 to 1985 he represented the state of Massachusetts in both houses of Congress . In the Democratic primary for the 1992 presidential election , he ran against eventual winner Bill Clinton .

Family, education and work

Paul Tsongas grew up as the son of Efthemios and Katina Tsongas together with his twin sister Thaleia in Lowell. His parents had immigrated to the USA from Greece and initially kept themselves afloat through unskilled labor. Later, his father opened a clothes cleaning company in which Paul and Thaleia also had to work. When the siblings were six years old, their mother died of leukemia .

After visiting the compulsory schools to Tsongas wrote on Dartmouth College in Hanover ( New Hampshire on), which he finished 1,962th As a member of the of US President John F. Kennedy launched Peace Corps , he then spent two years from 1962 to 1964, in Ethiopia . After graduating in law at Yale University in 1967 and his admission the following year Tsongas moved to Washington, DC , where he spent two years as an intern in the office of Republican Congressman F. Bradford Morse worked. Most recently he studied political science from 1973 to 1974 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government , a department at Harvard University .

Tsongas spent the years between 1985 and 1991 withdrawn from politics after being diagnosed with bone cancer in September 1983 . In 1986 he had a bone marrow transplant . After his recovery , Tsongas started Foley, Hoag & Eliot , a law firm in Boston . In the mid-1990s, Tsongas was again diagnosed with cancer. In May 1996, another bone marrow transplant was performed, using donor cells from his sister. In early January 1997, Tsongas was hospitalized with severe pneumonia and died of liver failure after two weeks at the age of 55 .

He had three daughters with his wife Niki Tsongas . She was a Democratic Congresswoman for Massachusetts from 2007 to 2019 after his death.

Political career

Area code of the Democrats for the US presidential election 1992; green states voted for Paul Tsongas

Tsongas, who had a staunch Republican father, joined the Democratic Party . In 1969 he was elected to the Lowell City Council in his hometown, and in the same year he was elected Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts. From 1973 to 1974 he was also Commissioner of Middlesex County .

In the 1974 election after the Watergate Affair , Tsongas ran for the United States House of Representatives and became the first Democrat in ninety years to win the fifth congressional constituency of Massachusetts, which he represented from January 3, 1975. In the 1978 election, he ran for a seat in the United States Senate and defeated the favorite candidate Edward Brooke with 55 percentage points. Tsongas was a senator for only one term; he waived re-election in 1984 for health reasons.

The presidency of George Bush was one of the reasons why Tsongas decided to run for the US presidential election in 1992 . In the Democratic primary , he won a relative majority in seven states - Massachusetts, Maine , Maryland , Vermont , Rhode Island , Utah and Arizona . However after the two important primaries in Illinois and Michigan had lost - the votes went to the governor of Arkansas , Bill Clinton - withdrew from the electoral race Tsongas back. Nonetheless, many delegates chose to cast their votes to Tsongas from the Federal Democratic Party Conference, which met in New York City in 1992 . In this way he received 289 delegate votes, the third highest number after Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown

The Tsongas Arena in Lowell, Massachusetts bears the name of Paul Tsongas

In 1992, together with Warren Rudman , the US Senator from New Hampshire, he founded the bipartisan Concord Coalition , which has set itself the goal of using deficit spending to contain the national debt of the USA .

Web links

Commons : Paul Tsongas  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Paul Tsongas in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)