John David Dingell Jr. (pronounced DING-gəl; July 8, 1926 – February 7, 2019) was an American politician from Michigan who worked as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1955 until 2015. He was part of the Democratic Party and held the record for serving the longest time in Congress in American history.

Dingell was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He studied at Georgetown University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry in 1949 and a law degree in 1952. He began his work in Congress by taking his father’s place as the representative for Michigan’s 15th congressional district on December 13, 1955. He was a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for many years and led the committee from 1981 to 1995 and again from 2007 to 2009. He was called the Dean of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2015. Dingell helped pass important laws, including the Medicare Act, the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Air Act of 1990, and the Affordable Care Act. He also helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dingell was one of the last two World War II veterans to serve in Congress; the other was Texas Representative Ralph Hall.

On February 24, 2014, Dingell said he would not run for a 31st term in Congress. His wife, Debbie Dingell, won the election to replace him in 2014. President Barack Obama gave Dingell the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Dingell left his position on January 3, 2015.

Early life, education, and early career

John Dingell was born on July 8, 1926, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was the son of Grace (born Bigler) and John Dingell Sr. (1894–1955). His father was the child of Polish immigrants, and his mother had Swiss and Scots-Irish ancestry. The Dingell family moved to Colorado to find a cure for John Dingell Sr.'s tuberculosis. The family name, originally Dzięglewicz, was changed to Dingell by John Dingell Sr.'s father.

The family later returned to Michigan. In 1932, John Dingell Sr. became the first elected representative for Michigan's newly created 15th District. In Washington, D.C., John Jr. attended Georgetown Preparatory School and later worked as a page for the U.S. House of Representatives at the House Page School from 1938 to 1943. He was present in the House when President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speech after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In 1944, at age 18, Dingell joined the United States Army. He reached the rank of second lieutenant and received orders to participate in the first wave of a planned invasion of Japan in November 1945. He later stated that President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war saved his life.

Dingell studied at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry in 1949 and a Juris Doctor in 1952. Before becoming a congressman, he worked as a private lawyer, a research assistant for U.S. District Court judge Theodore Levin, a congressional employee, a forest ranger, and an assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County until 1955.

U.S. House of Representatives

John Dingell was sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives on December 13, 1955.

He helped pass important laws, including the Medicare Act, the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Air Act of 1990, and the Affordable Care Act. He also supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During his time in Congress, he voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He also supported the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Dingell was considered a somewhat liberal member of the Democratic Party. He supported organized labor, social welfare programs, and traditional progressive policies. At the start of each Congress, he introduced a bill for a national health insurance system, the same bill his father had proposed. He also supported President Bill Clinton’s managed-care proposal early in Clinton’s presidency. In October 1998, President Clinton thanked Senator Jay Rockefeller and Congressman Dingell for their support of Medicare and their work on the Medicare Commission.

On some issues, Dingell reflected the values of his mostly Catholic and working-class district. He supported the Vietnam War until 1971. While he supported civil rights laws, he opposed using mandatory busing to expand school desegregation in Detroit suburbs. He took a middle ground on abortion. He worked to balance clean air laws with the need to protect manufacturing jobs. In the early 1980s, he criticized Japanese businesses, blaming them for problems faced by American carmakers. This contributed to anti-Japanese racism in Detroit and the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man.

Dingell was a hunter and strongly opposed gun control. He was a former board member of the National Rifle Association of America and received an A+ rating from the NRA for many years. He helped keep firearms from being subject to the 1972 Consumer Product Safety Act, which meant the government could not recall defective guns. His wife, Representative Debbie Dingell, introduced a bill in 2018 to remove this exemption.

Michael Barone wrote about Dingell in 2002.

Dingell was the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2015.

On December 15, 2005, Dingell read a poem on the House floor that criticized Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, and the “War on Christmas.” In 2006, he and John Conyers sued George W. Bush and others over the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs did not have legal standing.

After winning re-election in 2008, Dingell became the longest-serving member of the House in history on February 11, 2009. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm declared that day “John Dingell Day.”

Dingell was one of the last two World War II veterans in Congress; the other was Texas Representative Ralph Hall.

He left office on January 3, 2015. By that time, he had worked with 2,453 different U.S. Representatives. He served in Congress for over 59 years and was the longest-tenured member of Congress in U.S. history. His wife, Debbie Dingell, won the 2014 election to replace him.

Dingell was a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and chaired it from 1981 to 1995 and again from 2007 to 2009. He was known for demanding strict oversight of the executive branch. He called many government officials to testify under oath and exposed corruption, such as the use of $600 toilet seats at the Pentagon. His work led to resignations of some Environmental Protection Agency officials and legal actions against Food and Drug Administration officials.

After serving as the committee’s ranking member for 12 years, Dingell regained the chairmanship in 2007. He planned to investigate the George W. Bush administration’s handling of port security, Medicare, and Dick Cheney’s energy task force. He also wanted to address climate change caused by carbon emissions.

He lost the chairmanship in 2008 to Henry Waxman of California, who said Dingell was delaying environmental laws that could harm carmakers in his district. Dingell was given the title “Chairman Emeritus” and a portrait of him is in the House collection.

In the 1980s, Dingell led hearings about scientific fraud by Thereza Imanishi-Kari and David Baltimore. Imanishi-Kari was cleared of wrongdoing, and David Baltimore resigned from his position. The story was later written about in books and a documentary.

From 1991 to 1995, Dingell’s staff investigated claims that Robert Gallo had used samples from Luc Montagnier to falsely claim he discovered the AIDS virus. The report said Gallo committed fraud and that the NIH covered it up. However, the report was not published after the House changed leadership. Gallo’s work is still credited with proving the virus causes AIDS.

Dingell was a member of the Congressional Wildlife Refuge Caucus.

He opposed raising mandatory automobile fuel efficiency standards.

Electoral history

In 1955, Dingell's father, John Dingell Sr., passed away. Dingell, a member of the Democratic Party, won a special election to replace him. He then won a full term in 1956 and was re-elected 29 times, including in 1988 and 2006, where he faced no Republican opponents. Dingell received less than 62% of the vote only twice. In 1994, when Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954, Dingell received 59% of the vote. In 2010, when Republicans regained control of the House, Dingell received 57% of the vote. Together, Dingell and his father represented the southeastern Michigan area for 80 years. His district was numbered as the 15th District from 1955 to 1965, when redistricting combined it with the 16th District, which was based in Dearborn. In that year's primary, Dingell defeated the 16th District's current representative, John Lesinski Jr.

In 2002, redistricting combined Dingell's 16th District with the 13th District, which covered parts of Washtenaw County and western Wayne County. The 13th District was represented by fellow Democratic Representative Lynn Rivers, whom Dingell also defeated in the Democratic primary. The 15th District for the 109th Congress included areas in Wayne County southwest of Detroit, the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti areas in Washtenaw County, and all of Monroe County. For many years, Dingell represented much of western Detroit. However, as Detroit's population decreased and its suburbs grew, all of Detroit was placed into districts represented by other Democratic members, such as John Conyers. Dingell consistently won re-election by large margins.

On February 24, 2014, Dingell announced he would not seek re-election for his 31st term in Congress.

Personal life

John Dingell was Catholic. He had four children from his first marriage to Helen Henebry, who worked as a flight attendant. They married in 1952 and divorced in 1972. His son, Christopher D. Dingell, worked in the Michigan State Senate and later became a judge in the Michigan Third Circuit Court.

In 1981, Dingell married Deborah "Debbie" Insley, who was 27 years younger than him. In November 2014, Debbie Dingell won an election to replace her husband as the U.S. Representative for Michigan's 12th congressional district. She began her work in Congress in January 2015. She was the first woman who was not a widow to take her husband’s place in Congress immediately.

In 2014, Dingell had surgery to fix an irregular heartbeat. The next year, he had surgery to implant a pacemaker. He was hospitalized after falling in 2017. On September 17, 2018, Dingell had what seemed to be a heart attack and was treated at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Later in life, Dingell used Twitter regularly. He gained over 250,000 followers for his humorous and critical posts about Republicans, especially Donald Trump. People called him "the Dean of Twitter."

In 2018, Dingell was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to other parts of his body. He decided not to receive treatment and instead chose hospice care. Dingell died on February 7, 2019, at his home in Dearborn, Michigan. On the day he died, he wrote a column for The Washington Post that included his final message to the country.

Legacy

In 2006, John Dingell received the Walter P. Reuther Humanitarian Award from Wayne State University. In 2014, President Barack Obama gave Dingell the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2019, the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act was signed into law. This law, named after Dingell, kept the Land and Water Conservation Fund active forever and created new protected areas for land.

On December 18, 2019, after Dingell’s wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell, voted to support both articles of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, Trump spoke negatively about John Dingell at a rally. Trump mentioned a phone call he had with Debbie Dingell, in which she thanked him for supporting a military flyover at Dingell’s funeral. Trump said Debbie Dingell told him, “John would be so thrilled. He's looking down. He would be so thrilled. Thank you so much sir.” Trump then told rally attendees, “I said that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Maybe he's looking up, I don't know. I don't know, maybe. Maybe. But let's assume he's looking down,” suggesting he believed Dingell might be in Hell. This statement received strong criticism from many Democratic and some Republican politicians. Many praised Dingell’s legacy, and some Republican lawmakers apologized for Trump’s remarks. Politicians from both parties also expressed support for Dingell’s wife.