Paul Tsongas

Paul Tsongas Efthemios ( born February 14, 1941 in Lowell, Massachusetts, † January 18, 1997 ) was an American politician who represented the state of Massachusetts in both chambers of the Congress of the United States.

Life

Childhood and youth

Paul Tsongas grew up as the son of Efthemios and Katina Tsongas along with his twin sister Thaleia in Lowell zoom. His parents had immigrated from Greece to the United States, and first talked with auxiliary works financially afloat. Later, his father opened a dry-cleaner, which also Paul and Thaleia had to cooperate. When the siblings were six years old, her mother died of leukemia.

Career

After attending compulsory schools to Tsongas wrote at Dartmouth College in Hanover a (New Hampshire), in which he gained his degree in 1962. As a member of the launched by U.S. President John F. Kennedy Peace Corps, he then spent two years, 1962-1964, in Ethiopia. After completing his law degree at Yale University in 1967 - 1968 he was admitted - pulled it Tsongas first to Washington, DC where he worked for two years as an intern at the Republican Congressman F. Bradford Morse office.. Most recently, he studied from 1973 to 1974 political science at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, a department of the prestigious Harvard University.

Political career

Tsongas, who had a convincing Republicans as a father and had also worked during his internship in Congress for members of the Grand Old Party, yet chose to deny his political career as a member of the Democratic Party. In 1969 he was elected to the city council of his hometown of Lowell and in the same year as Deputy Attorney General of Massachusetts. In the period from 1973 to 1974 he was also Commissioner of Middlesex County.

In 1973, he ran successfully for a seat in the House of Representatives of the United States and was able to record a historic result, since he was the first Democrat in 90 years, who was seconded from the fifth congressional district to Washington. Tsongas was four years deputy until he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1978, his intention. In the election, he was the actual favorite, incumbent Edward Brooke, displace with 55 percentage points votes from office. Tsongas was just a term of Senator; for re-election in 1984, he renounced.

The reason why Tsongas withdrew from politics, was the diagnosis, with which he was confronted in September 1983. He was diagnosed with bone cancer. In 1986, therefore, he had to undergo a painful bone marrow transplant. Tsongas founded after his recovery Foley, Hoag & Eliot, a law firm in Boston. Around six years, he withdrew from the public back into private life.

The Presidency of George Bush was one of the reasons why Tsongas decided to run in the context of the U.S. presidential election in 1992 for the highest office in the state. In the Democratic primary, he could the voices of six states - Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Vermont, Rhode Iceland and Arizona - have teamed up. After he had, however, lost the two important primaries in Illinois and Michigan - the vote went to the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton - to Tsongas withdrew from the election campaign. Nevertheless, many of the delegates to cast their votes from the Federal Democratic Convention, which met in 1992 in New York City to give Tsongas decided. In this way, he received 289 delegate votes, according to Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown the third highest number.

Late life and death

In 1992 he founded, along with Warren Rudman, the U.S. senator from New Hampshire, the bipartisan Concord Coalition, which has set itself the goal of using deficit spending the national debt of the United States curb.

Mid-1990s was again diagnosed with cancer Tsongas. In May 1996, a bone marrow transplant was performed at him again, with donor cells from his sister. However, the efforts have shown no effect. Beginning in January 1997 Tsongas was hospitalized with severe pneumonia in the Brigham and Women 's Hospital. After two weeks Tsongas died at the age of 55 from liver failure. He left behind his wife and three daughters.

Others

His widow Niki Tsongas (* 1946) also later went into politics, and since October 2007, Democratic congressman from Massachusetts.