Highlights of George Voinovich’s life
Born: July 15, 1936
Education: Bachelor's degree, Ohio University, 1958; law degree, Ohio State University, 1961
Political career: Assistant Ohio attorney general, 1963-64; Ohio House of Representatives, 1967-71; Cuyahoga County Auditor, 1971-76; Cuyahoga County Commissioner, 1977-78; Ohio lieutenant governor, 1979; Cleveland mayor, 1980-89; Ohio governor, 1991-98; Ohio U.S. senator, 1999-2011
Mr. Ohio has died.
George Victor Voinovich, one of Ohio’s most storied public servants, passed away overnight. He was 79.
Voinovich, the most prolific vote-getter in Ohio history, spent 43 years of nearly uninterrupted service in public office, including as Cleveland mayor, governor and U.S. senator. He was survived by his constant companion, Janet, his wife of 53 years.
Right up until his death, Voinovich kept up a vigorous schedule. He spoke to a gathering in Cleveland on Friday and planned to be in Washington, D.C., Tuesday where his former staff members had scheduled an 80th-birthday party for him.
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“It’s a really difficult thing for me because I have been anticipating this for some years now and I always knew this day would come and I always hoped it wouldn’t,” said Curt Steiner, one of his longtime advisers. “I am so grateful that he died peacefully in his sleep and felt pretty good up to the end.”
Just last week, he exchanged e-mails with Mike Dawson, who served as Voinovich’s communications director as a senator and press secretary as governor. Dawson said he saw Voinovich a month ago in Columbus at a gathering of Ohio University graduates, adding he would “never forget that hug we had.”
“For all of us who worked for him, it was the most rewarding parts of our career,” Dawson said. “He truly was a better man than he was a politician and he was a great politician.”
A Republican who flourished in one of Ohio’s most-Democratic cities, Voinovich was philosophically consistent throughout his career, a political pragmatist who sometimes seemed just as much a Democrat as a Republican. He advocated tax or fee increases or opposed tax cuts more than two dozen times in the 40 years between his 1971 appointment as Cuyahoga County auditor and when he retired from the Senate at the end of 2010 — and never once did voters turn him out of office for doing so.
The first Republican Catholic ever elected Ohio governor, Voinovich lived his religion, often heralding guidance from “the Holy Spirit” in speeches and interviews, constantly saying his mission on earth was to serve his fellow man. As governor from 1991-99, he poured millions into programs and education for children and he fought initiatives he viewed as “anti-family, including in 1997 when he defeated Las Vegas gambling moguls who outspent Voinovich-led forces 10-to-1 in their failed effort to establish casinos in Ohio.
“My legacy?” Voinovich answered, rhetorically, in a November 2013 interview with The (Columbus) Dispatch. “I want it to be that I’ve touched peoples’ lives and I’ve made things better.”
In every office, Voinovich was a pay-as-you-go fiscal hawk, fixated on government efficiency, endlessly evoking the mantra that he would “work harder and smarter and do more with less,” and causing Ohioans to wince every time he promised “to get into the bowels” of government. Voinovich’s approach to government mimicked his own lifestyle, a man of simple pleasures who shined his own shoes and was so frugal that he once plucked a penny from a urinal.
Since 1972, the Voinoviches had lived in their modest two-story house in Cleveland a half-block from Lake Erie. They filled it not with photographs of him with presidents and prime ministers — although many were taken — but with family mementos and photographs of their four children, including Molly, who was hit by a van and killed at age 9 in 1979, just a few weeks before Voinovich was elected Cleveland mayor.
Voinovich was the antithesis of a stereotypical slick and blow-dried politician, often speaking his mind and publicly displaying his emotions. With TV cameras rolling in 1992 he sobbed in the governor’s office at the Statehouse as demonstrators outside his window decried his decision to cut funding for the poor. “I really do love my fellow man,” Voinovich said through tears.
And an audiotape of an angry Gov. Voinovich was widely played by the media in 1995 when his state plane was grounded at a Columbus airport by a presidential visit. Grabbing the cockpit mike, Voinovich told an air traffic controller: “If they (the Secret Service) shoot us down, they can. I’m going to tell them to go screw themselves, OK.”
Ted Hollingsworth, who served as Voinovich’s chief of staff in the Senate, said “if he got angry … he would apologize and move on.” Hollingsworth said Voinovich once told him he even wrote a letter of “forgiveness to the driver” of the vehicle which killed Molly.
Steeped in the Serbian and Slovenian heritage of his parents, Voinovich was raised in Cleveland’s working class Collinwood neighborhood, the oldest of six children. At age two, he suffered from osteomyelitis, a bone infection, and spent six months in a hospital and nearly died. The affliction would cause him to walk with a slight limp for the rest of his life.
Voinovich spent his early childhood wanting to be a doctor, but by his teen years he gradually became interested in politics, inspired by Frank J. Lausche, a Slovenian icon in the Collinwood neighborhood who blazed a trail Voinovich would follow as mayor, governor and senator. He kept a picture of Lausche in his office and even though Lausche was a Democrat, Voinovich referred to himself as “a Lausche Republican.”
“He had the same ethnic background as I had and I thought if he could do it, I could do it,” Voinovich said in 2013.
At Ohio University, Voinovich’s political interests flowered and he was elected student body president. His legacy lives on through the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs and the Voinovich Archives at OU.
Although in retirement Voinovich lamented that the GOP had moved too far right, he found in college that the Republican Party was a better fit for him, even though his father, an architect, warned him he’d never find work in the patronage-run environs of overwhelmingly Democratic Cleveland. “My dad said, ‘Well, kid, with your name and your religion, you’ll never make it as a Republican.’ ”
Five years after earning a law degree from Ohio State University, Voinovich won the first of three terms in the Ohio House. He left to accept an appointment as Cuyahoga County auditor, serving until 1977 when he was elected a Cuyahoga County commissioner. But in 1978, Gov. James A. Rhodes needed a Republican running mate who could get votes in the state’s biggest Democratic county, so he selected Voinovich.
Voinovich served as lieutenant governor only a year, returning to Cleveland in 1979 to defeat incumbent Democratic Mayor Dennis J. Kucinich in an election defined by Cleveland’s ignominious status as the first major American city to default on financial obligations since the Great Depression. He stabilized city finances by persuading Cleveland voters to approve a 33 percent income-tax increase and he worked successfully with an overwhelmingly Democratic city council by forging a governing partnership with the powerful council president, George L. Forbes.
Voinovich’s 10 years as mayor arguably were the most successful of his long political career. Along with putting the city on a sound fiscal footing, he presided over a $2 billion building boom downtown, transforming the skyline with new stadiums for the Indians and Browns, a basketball arena for the Cavaliers, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Great Lakes Science Center. He accomplished this by initiating what would become his governing doctrine as mayor and governor — forging partnerships between government and private business interests.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Voinovich “had a special place in his heart for his beloved Cleveland. It is not an exaggeration to say he personally saved the city from default and revived the spirit of Cleveland through sheer force of will, an unyielding work ethic and an infectious optimism.”
“I don’t think there’s a politician in the country who has had more done for him by the private sector than I have,” Voinovich told The Dispatch in 2010.
In 1990, Voinovich entered the Republican primary for governor, aided by GOP party chiefs who persuaded then-Hamilton County Commissioner Robert A. Taft II to drop his own gubernatorial bid and run for secretary of state instead. Voinovich ran nearly a flawless campaign to defeat Democrat Anthony J. Celebrezze Jr., then Ohio’s attorney general. In 1994, Voinovich won re-election in a historic landslide against Democratic state Sen. Rob Burch by garnering 72 percent of the vote.
Although wrought from economic chaos, including a huge impending state budget deficit, Voinovich’s eight years as governor ended in prosperity and generally were adjudged as an era of progress. At the end of his first two years, he had cut $711 million from the state budget and raised taxes, largely on the rich, by more than $400 million to usher forth fiscal soundness in state government. Hardly a caretaker, Voinovich implemented welfare and workers’ compensation reform, spent massively on children’s programs and for new schools, and allocated $600 million extra to poor school districts after the Ohio Supreme Court declared the school-funding system unconstitutional in 1997.
The biggest challenge of Voinovich’s political career occurred on Easter Sunday in 1993 when a riot erupted at the maximum-security prison in Lucasville. Inmates controlled the prison for 11 days, the longest state prison riot in U.S. history, resulting in the deaths of a guard and 10 inmates. Although under enormous pressure to go to the prison himself and, ultimately, to storm it with troops, Voinovich listened to the counsel of experts and followed the path of negotiation, avoiding more bloodshed.
Voinovich was elected to the Senate in 1998, the job he had sought 10 years earlier, but he quickly found it frustrating. A pragmatist with a record of working across party lines, Voinovich chafed under the intense partisan divisions that paralyzed Congress. Indeed, the first major vote he cast in 1999 was to impeach President Bill Clinton.
During his two six-year terms in the Senate, Voinovich fashioned himself as a deficit hawk — an image reinforced in his first term during the Clinton presidency when he opposed GOP efforts to cut taxes without cutting spending.
At 74, Voinovich considered a third six-year Senate term, but decided not to run, in part because Janet, who was three years older, was becoming ever more frail. Besides, he had grown even more frustrated that the politics of Washington had become so polarized and poisonous, making it difficult to forge agreements on what he considered the nation’s biggest problems — the budget deficit and national debt.
Voinovich recently talked to The Dispatch about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“I wish we had a better candidate,” Voinovich said. “I can’t understand why the establishment of this party didn’t go for John (Kasich), get behind him … shame on them for being for so stupid.”
And in an interview at the end of his career, Voinovich conceded that he enjoyed being mayor and governor much more than a senator.
“I’m a leader,” he said, not “an orchestra member.”
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