Via OregonLive: Mark O. Hatfield, Oregon's first statesman

Mark O. Hatfield, the former governor and senator who transformed Oregon's economy and landscape while becoming one of the nation's most prominent opponents of the war in Vietnam, died Sunday. He was 89.

Hatfield, who had been in ill health for several years, died at a care center in Portland. His family did not have an immediate cause of death. He had lived in Oregon since his retirement from the Senate in 1996 but had recently spent several months in a hospital at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

Through nearly five decades in public office, Hatfield was both Oregon's most durable politician and -- after his rise to the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 1981 -- its most important.

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