Donald Wayne Riegle Jr., the former U.S. Senator from Michigan who served in Congress for 28 years and famously switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party in the middle of his career, died Friday at his home in San Diego. He was 88 years old. His wife of 48 years, Lori Hansen Riegle, was by his side when he passed. The cause of death was cardiac arrest.
Riegle was one of those political figures who doesn’t fit neatly into any box. He started out as a young Republican congressman, backed by Richard Nixon himself, and ended up as a progressive Democrat endorsing Bernie Sanders. In between, he helped save Chrysler, rewrote the rules for American banking, fought NAFTA before it was fashionable, and got tangled up in one of the biggest congressional scandals of the early 1990s. His story reads like a crash course in what American politics looked like before it became whatever it is now.
A Flint Kid Who Got to Washington by 28
Riegle was born in Flint, Michigan, on February 4, 1938. His father, Donald Wayne Riegle Sr., owned a printing business and eventually became Flint’s mayor. Growing up in a factory town shaped a lot of what Riegle would fight for later in his political life, even if his path to Congress took a few academic detours first.
He attended Flint Junior College (now Mott Community College), then Western Michigan University, before earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1960. A year later, he picked up a graduate degree from Michigan State University. He also did graduate work at Harvard Business School. Before he ever ran for office, he worked as a financial analyst for IBM in New York from 1961 to 1964 and taught at Michigan State, Boston University, and Harvard.
In 1966, at just 28 years old, Riegle won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican, representing his hometown of Flint. It was a fast start for a guy who, at that point, was still closer in age to the college students he’d been teaching than to most of his colleagues in Washington.
The Party Switch That Defined His Career
Riegle won reelection to the House three times as a Republican. But by the early 1970s, his relationship with the party was falling apart. The breaking point was Vietnam. Riegle was vocally opposed to Nixon’s handling of the war, which put him at odds with the president who had encouraged him to run in the first place.
It wasn’t just Vietnam, though. Riegle also took issue with what was called the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” the deliberate effort to court white voters in the South by playing on racial resentments. In 1973, he switched his party affiliation to Democrat. It was a move that carried real political risk. Switching parties in the middle of a career isn’t something you do lightly, especially when you’re a sitting congressman.
Three years after the switch, in 1976, Riegle ran for the U.S. Senate and won. He was actually appointed slightly early, on December 30, 1976, to fill the vacancy left by the death of Senator Philip Hart. He would go on to win reelection in 1982 and again in 1988, serving 18 years total in the Senate.
Saving Chrysler and Rewriting Banking Law
If there’s one thing Riegle’s name is most associated with, it might be the Chrysler bailout. In the late 1970s, Chrysler Corporation was on the verge of bankruptcy. Riegle was the lead Senate sponsor of the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act, which essentially put the federal government behind Chrysler’s debt and kept the company alive.
Getting that bill through the Senate was no easy task. Riegle had to fight off a filibuster on the Senate floor to win passage. For Michigan, which lived and died by the auto industry, this wasn’t abstract policy. It was about keeping hundreds of thousands of people employed. The bailout worked. Chrysler paid back its government-backed loans ahead of schedule, and the company survived for decades after.
As chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (a position he held from 1989 to 1995), Riegle left a big mark. He led passage of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act, a major overhaul aimed at cleaning up the savings and loan industry after the crisis of the late 1980s. He also championed community development banks and pushed through legislation that eliminated restrictions on interstate banking. That interstate banking bill bore his name.
Fighting NAFTA and Standing Up for Workers
Riegle was one of the loudest voices in the Senate opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA was a bipartisan project pushed by both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and opposing it as a Democrat meant going against your own party’s president. Riegle didn’t care. He represented Flint and the broader Michigan working class, and he believed NAFTA would gut manufacturing jobs in the state.
His family’s statement after his death specifically mentioned his opposition to NAFTA as something he was proud of, noting that the trade agreement “resulted in the loss of many jobs in Michigan.” History, to a large degree, proved him right. The decades following NAFTA’s passage were brutal for manufacturing towns across the Midwest, and Flint was hit especially hard.
The Keating Five Scandal
No honest account of Riegle’s career can skip the Keating Five. In 1990, Riegle and four other senators (including John McCain) faced Senate Ethics Committee hearings over their ties to Charles Keating, a savings and loan executive whose institution, Lincoln Savings and Loan, collapsed spectacularly. The allegation was that the five senators had pressured federal regulators to go easy on Keating after receiving campaign donations from him.
The Ethics Committee ultimately found that Riegle didn’t break any federal laws or Senate rules. But the committee also said his conduct “gave the appearance of being improper.” That phrase, “the appearance of being improper,” hung over him. It was a political blow that never fully healed. The controversy was a major reason he decided not to seek reelection in 1994. He left the Senate on January 3, 1995, after nearly three decades in Congress.
Gulf War Veterans and the Riegle Report
One of Riegle’s lesser known but arguably most important contributions came from his work on behalf of Gulf War veterans. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, thousands of American veterans started getting sick with a range of mysterious symptoms that became known as Gulf War syndrome. Riegle used his position as Banking Committee chairman to investigate whether the U.S. had exported chemical and biological agents to Iraq under so-called “dual-use” authority.
The investigation produced the “Riegle Report,” which found that disease-producing and poisonous biological research materials had indeed been exported to Iraq through the U.S. Department of Commerce. It was an uncomfortable finding for the government, but it mattered enormously to veterans who felt abandoned. Riegle was instrumental in securing treatment for those suffering from Gulf War syndrome.
Equal Credit and the Fight for Women’s Rights
Before switching parties, Riegle co-sponsored the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a bill that made it illegal to deny someone credit based on sex or marital status. President Gerald Ford signed it into law. It’s hard to overstate how significant this was. Before that law, a woman could be turned down for a credit card simply because she was single, or because she was married and her husband didn’t co-sign. It was one of those quiet, structural changes that reshaped how millions of Americans interacted with the financial system.
Life After the Senate
After leaving Congress, Riegle didn’t disappear. He joined Weber Shandwick Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., serving as executive committee chair. In 2001, he moved to APCO Worldwide as chairman of government relations. He also went back to teaching, becoming an adjunct professor at the Michigan State University School of Business.
He stayed involved in politics, too. He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 primary and general election. Then, in a move that probably surprised nobody who’d been paying attention to his trajectory, he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in both 2016 and 2020. For a man who started his career as a Nixon-backed Republican, ending up as a Sanders supporter tells you something about where Riegle’s priorities always were: with working people, even when that put him at odds with whoever was running his party.
What People Are Saying
Former U.S. Representative Dan Kildee, who also represented the Flint area, said Riegle “loved his hometown of Flint. He was a courageous leader and was willing to do the hard things real leaders do.” Inez Brown, a former Riegle staffer who worked for him from 1972 to 1993 and later became Flint’s city clerk, put it simply: “He was committed to the state, to the nation and all people.”
The late Senator Edward Kennedy once described Riegle as “one of the strongest defenders of Social Security and Medicare that those two vital programs have ever had.”
Riegle’s family said in their statement: “The cornerstone of our family, Don was a kind, loving, courageous leader who taught us to stand up for justice, economic opportunity, and fairness for everyone.”
He is survived by his wife Lori Hansen Riegle, their children, and grandchildren. He spent his later years between homes in Michigan and California. Memorial services are pending.
