Bone Disease Fells Former Sen. Tsongas

BOSTON — Former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, who parlayed a one-term Senate career into a 1992 Democratic presidential primary victory in New Hampshire against Bill Clinton, died here Saturday. He was 55.

Tsongas, who had entered the hospital Jan. 3, succumbed to complications of myelodysplasia, a rare bone marrow disease that doctors said resulted from the radiation and chemotherapy that had been used to successfully treat Tsongas’ lymphoma more than a decade ago.

“The irony is that what we’re dealing with here is the result of long-term survival,” Tsongas said when the ailment that would finally claim his life was discovered.

It was lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands, that prompted Tsongas to leave the Senate in 1984. By 1992, he was asserting such complete recovery that he declared himself a candidate for the presidency. The staunchly pro-business Democrat centered his bid not on his congressional record but on his role in the revitalization of the manufacturing town of Lowell, his hometown, where he began his political career as a city councilor in 1969.

Even after his triumph in New Hampshire, Tsongas’ 1992 primary victories in Maryland, Washington and Utah were not enough to compete with Clinton. Tsongas was dogged also by questions about whether the cancer that drove him from office was really cured. And he suffered from cynicism among pundits who raised the specter of Michael S. Dukakis’ defeat in 1988, contending that “another Greek liberal from Massachusetts” stood little chance of success.

Tsongas had a stock rejoinder: “If you are supporting me, you have great courage and no political instincts whatsoever.”

The son of an immigrant dry cleaner, Paul Efthemios Tsongas relished the description of “pragmatic liberal” that sometimes put him at odds with his own Democratic Party. Representing his family’s home district, the 5th of Massachusetts, Tsongas entered Congress in 1974 after returning home from Peace Corps service.

“Nothing before or after that time has shaped my view of the world so deeply,” Tsongas said of his two years in an Ethiopian village.

A fervent opponent of increased defense spending, Tsongas was an equally avid advocate of alternative energy sources, such as solar power. He soon won the U.S. Senate seat of Edward W. Brooke.

Tsongas consistently earned the highest possible ratings from the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action. But his ideology was unconfined by party lines, occasionally finding him allied with the likes of Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) or then-Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.).

Soon after his presidential effort collapsed in 1992, Tsongas joined forces with Rudman to organize the Concord Coalition, a grass-roots nonpartisan political group. Rudman, calling his work with Tsongas and the coalition “one of the great joys of my life,” praised his longtime colleague as a man “who was considered quite liberal in the Senate, but because of his decency, he could talk to the most conservative members and they would listen. The thing about Paul Tsongas that is the essence of this man is his absolute decency--and his integrity.”

President Clinton described Tsongas, the son of a Greek immigrant father and an American mother, as “a great American. . . . He cared deeply about his beloved state of Massachusetts and about our country and its future,” Clinton said in a written statement Saturday. “In a life devoted to public service, he set an unparalleled example of integrity, candor and commitment.”

Tsongas’ party loyalty turned him into an oracle who foresaw electoral disaster for Democrats. He bemoaned the growing strength of Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, borrowing from the former California governor’s old U.S. Borax-sponsored “Death Valley Days” television series to predict that Reagan’s conservative forces would lead the country into a “20-mule-team march into the past.”

In 1981, Tsongas was one of two senators to vote against the confirmation of Alexander M. Haig Jr. as secretary of State. The same year, he joined forces with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to oppose U.S. military aid to El Salvador. On Capitol Hill, he and his followers were called “Tsonganistas.”

In fighting cancer, Tsongas showed the same tenacity he displayed in politics. He continued to swim competitively in national Masters and YMCA meets.

Tsongas is survived by his wife, Nicola, and their three daughters, Ashley, Katina and Molly. His twin sister, Thaleia Schlesinger, who donated bone marrow to her brother shortly before his death, also survives him, as does another sister, Victoria Peters.