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John Warner

John William Warner III (18 February 1927-25 May 2021) was the United States Secretary of the Navy from 4 May 1972 to 8 April 1974 (succeeding John Chafee and preceding J. William Middendorf) and a Republican US Senator from Virginia from 2 January 1979 to 3 January 2009 (succeeding William L. Scott and preceding Mark Warner).

Biography[]

John William Warner III was born in Washington DC on 18 February 1927, and he served in the US Navy during World War II and in the US Marine Corps during the Korean War. He became a lawyer in 1960, and he served as an aide on Vice President Richard Nixon's campaign team in the 1960 presidential election. Warner went on to serve as Under Secretary of the Navy from 1969 to 1972 and as Secretary of the Navy from 1972 to 1974, and, after President Gerald Ford's re-election defeat in 1976, Warner decided to run for office himself. With the help of his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, he ran for US Senate in 1978. While the centrist Warner lost the Republican primary to the more conservative Richard D. Obenshain, he replaced Obenshain as the nominee after the latter died before the general election, and he was elected Senator with 50.2% of the vote. Warner came to be known as a moderate who supported gun control measures, abortion rights, stem cell research, the expansion of hate crime laws to protect LGBT people, a 2007 cap-and-trade bill to ration carbon emissions in the United States, and the 2008 bank bailout. He retired in 2008 and worked for the Hogan Lovells law firm, and he died in 2021 at the age of 94.

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