Former La. Rep. Boggs, 97, dies

WASHINGTON – Former Rep. Lindy Boggs, a plantation-born Louisianan who used her soft-spoken grace to fight for civil rights during nearly 18 years in Congress after succeeding her late husband in the House, died Saturday. She was 97.

Boggs, who later served three years as ambassador to the Vatican during the Clinton administration, died of natural causes at her home in Chevy Chase, Md., according to her daughter, ABC News journalist Cokie Roberts.

Boggs’ years in Congress started with a special election in 1973 to finish the term of her husband, Thomas Hale Boggs Sr., whose plane disappeared over Alaska six months earlier. Between them, they served a half-century in the House.

“It didn’t occur to us that anybody else would do it,” Roberts said in explaining why her mother was the natural pick for the congressional seat. Her parents, who had met in college, were “political partners for decades,” she said, with Lindy Boggs running her husband’s political campaigns and becoming a player on the Washington political scene.

Her son, Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., is a leading Washington lawyer and lobbyist.

The elder Boggs was first elected to Congress in 1940, two years after the couple married. Both were also active in local reform groups.

Lindy Boggs was more than the typical congressional wife. She ran several of her husband’s political campaigns and helped him in his Washington and New Orleans offices.

“Early on, Hale established with politicians at home that I was his direct representative and that they could say anything to me that they could say to him. Whatever decisions I made, they would be his final decisions,” she said in 1976.

Breaking with most Southern whites, Lindy Boggs saw civil rights as an inseparable part of the political reform movement of the 1940s and ’50s.

“You couldn’t want to reverse the injustices of the political system and not include the blacks and the poor. It was just obvious,” she said in 1990.

Boggs changed the way politics operated, former Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., once said.

“I’ve seen it time after time,” Johnston said. “On difficult issues, powerful men and women are going toe to toe, sometimes civilly, sometimes acrimoniously. Lindy Boggs will come into the room. The debate will change. By the time she leaves the room, she usually has what she came to get.”