Ex-congressman Harding, who took on LDS leader Benson, dies

BOISE – Ralph R. Harding, a former two-term Mormon congressman from Idaho who lost re-election in 1964 after publicly berating a church leader for supporting the John Birch Society, has died at age 77.

Harding died Oct. 19 at a hospital in the town of Blackfoot, Hill-Hawker-Sandberg Funeral Home said. The cause of death was not released.

Longtime friend and former Idaho U.S. Rep. Richard Stallings, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, said Harding will be remembered as much for his rapid rise in Idaho politics as for his abrupt defeat in 1964. Harding, a Democrat who served in the Idaho Legislature from 1955 to 1956, ran against 16-year incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Hamer Budge for Idaho’s 2nd Congressional District in 1960 and pulled off a 4,000-vote, or 51.1 percent, upset victory.

“He surprised a lot of people by winning in 1960,” said Stallings, who represented Idaho’s 2nd Congressional District from 1985 to 1993. “Then, in 1964, he was one of the few incumbent Democrats who did not get re-elected in the L.B.J. (President Lyndon B. Johnson) landslide.”

Harding, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, blasted LDS Church Apostle Ezra Taft Benson as “a spokesman for the radical right” during a September 1963 speech on the U.S. House floor.

Harding criticized Benson, who had served as Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture from 1953 to 1961, for a speaking appearance that same month on behalf of John Birch Society founder Robert H. Welch. Welch had just published a book alleging that Eisenhower, commanding general of victorious U.S. forces in Europe during World War II, was a Communist Party sympathizer.

“Ralph felt this man should have stood up for Eisenhower so he unleashed an attack from the floor of the Congress on Elder Benson that made national headlines,” said Stallings. “It did not set well with his Mormon constituency, because even if many people felt Harding was right, they didn’t feel they should have their dirty laundry aired on the House floor.”

Two months later, Harding lost to Republican George V. Hansen.

Harding was born Sept. 9, 1929, in Malad, Idaho. He graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, after serving in Korea from 1951 to 1953 in the U.S. Army, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant.

Harding is survived by his widow, Willa C. Harding.