Robert Foster Bennett was born in 1933 in Salt Lake City, the grandson of Heber J. Grant, seventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and son of longtime Senator Wallace F. Bennett. He was student body president at the University of Utah, an army chaplain in the Utah Army National Guard, a congressional press secretary and a J.C. Penney government affairs staffer. In 1971 he left the Nixon administration’s Department of Transportation to buy the Robert Mullen Company, a Washington public relations firm whose principal client was Howard Hughes’s Summa Corporation and which the CIA used as cover for agents overseas. He also chaired dummy committees that funneled corporate money to Nixon’s 1972 campaign, and the firm’s CIA ties came out in 1974 during Watergate, though he was never indicted.

In 1984 he became CEO of the Franklin International Institute, maker of Franklin day planners, which as Franklin Quest was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1992. He won an open Senate seat that year, narrowly beating Joseph A. Cannon in the primary with 51 percent, and served 18 years. His conservative record included support for a flat tax and Arctic drilling, but he backed embryonic stem cell research, the 2006 immigration reform bill and the Healthy Americans Act with Democrat Ron Wyden. After his vote for TARP, delegates at the 2010 Utah Republican Convention eliminated him in the second round behind Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee. In May 2016, dying of pancreatic cancer in Arlington, Virginia, he asked his family to help him apologize to Muslims for the rhetoric of that year’s Republican primaries.

• He was one of only three Republican senators to vote against a constitutional ban on flag burning.
• He held a lifetime score of 6 percent from the League of Conservation Voters.
• Mitt Romney endorsed him in 2010, but Utah’s convention system put the decision with a few thousand delegates.
• He declined to mount a write-in campaign after losing the nomination.
• Later he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, taught at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and advised the law firm Arent Fox.