A moderate Republican, he championed education, civil rights and environmental causes as a three-term governor and as a U.S. senator.
Daniel J. Evans, a moderate Republican who dominated Washington State politics as a three-term governor and a United States senator and who was repeatedly considered for the vice presidency, died on Friday night. He was 98 and lived in Seattle.
He died of natural causes at his home, which was about five blocks away from where he grew up in Seattle, said his son Dan Evans Jr.
“Dad lived an exceptionally full life,” said a written statement issued by Mr. Evans’s sons, including Mark and Bruce Evans. “Whether serving in public office, working to improve higher education, mentoring aspiring public servants,” they said, “he just kept signing up for stuff right until the end. He touched a lot of lives.”
Descended from seafarers who founded a Puget Sound shipping business in the 19th century, Mr. Evans championed education, civil rights and environmental causes as Washington’s 16th governor from 1965 to 1977. He served in the Senate, with some frustration, from 1983 to 1989.
He was a mountain climber and skier, a master yachtsman, an eloquent speaker and, in his first term as governor, a fresh new face in national politics at a time when Republicans were reeling from Senator Barry M. Goldwater’s crushing defeat in the 1964 presidential election.
At the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in 1968, where Richard Nixon was nominated for president, Mr. Evans was chosen to deliver the keynote address. Instead of the usual oratorical exercise in party self-congratulation, the rising Republican star challenged America to face its problems: the Vietnam War, urban decay, civil rights and unemployment.
Frequently mentioned as a potential running mate for Mr. Nixon, Mr. Evans had taken himself out of consideration by backing Mr. Nixon’s progressive rival, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, incurring the wrath of conservatives, many of whom had backed Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.
Mr. Evans resisted the designation of moderate Republican, saying in a 2010 speech to the Rotary Club of Seattle: “I am tired of hyphenated Republicanism. ‘Moderate,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘mainstream’ are all adjectives which divide us.” But the term fit him, starting in 1965, his first year as governor, when he sought to purge members of the far-right John Birch Society and their allies from the state Republican Party.
“Let those who are false prophets, the phony philosophers, the professional bigots, the destroyers, leave our party,” he told the Republican state committee.
He challenged many of the central causes of conservatives. He favored abortion rights, opposed a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget and argued that while “profligate spending” could lead to disaster, tax increases were sometimes necessary. “Fiscal integrity,” he said, “is not encompassed in the famous words of George H.W. Bush, ‘Read my lips, no new taxes.’”
A complete obituary will follow.
Hank Sanders contributed reporting.
Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018.
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