John Lester Hubbard Chafee (1922 to 1999) was born in Providence into a Rhode Island political family that included governors, senators and his uncle Zechariah Chafee, a Harvard Law free speech scholar. He left Yale after Pearl Harbor to enlist as a Marine private, turned 20 during the battle of Guadalcanal, fought at Okinawa, and after Harvard Law was recalled for Korea, where he commanded a rifle company in the Chosin Reservoir campaign. Author James Brady, who served under him, called him the only truly great man he had ever met. Chafee won the Rhode Island governorship in 1962 by 398 votes and in 1964 won reelection by two to one while Lyndon Johnson carried the state with about 81 percent.

He lost a 1968 bid for a fourth term after reversing his opposition to a state income tax and after his 14 year old daughter Tribby died in a horse show accident. As Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Navy from 1969, he passed over 33 senior officers to make Elmo Zumwalt chief of naval operations and blocked a court martial for Lloyd Bucher, commander of the captured USS Pueblo. Elected in 1976 as Rhode Island’s first Republican senator since 1930, he helped shape the Clean Water Act, the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments and Superfund. In 1999 he voted against the articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton and was one of four Republicans to vote for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, weeks before he died at 77.

• As governor he created the Green Acres land conservation program.
• His Coastal Barrier Resources Act removed federal subsidies for building on fragile barrier islands instead of banning development.
• He voted to override President Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.
• The John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, renamed for him, helps young people aging out of foster care.
• President Clinton’s eulogy said Chafee embodied the decent center, and his son Lincoln Chafee succeeded him in the Senate.