The US senator John Warner, who has died aged 94, was for a time best known for his brief marriage to the Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor. Craggy of face and crusty of manner, he was central casting’s very image of a conservative Republican senator – dedicated champion of a big navy in the Nixon administration and later a leading advocate of strategic missile defence as chair of the powerful Senate armed services committee.
Warner became the swing vote in the great debate over American withdrawal from Iraq when the Republican party lost control of Congress in 2006. His influence was crucial because he had always seemed an utterly reliable supporter of the military and so, after the 2006 midterm elections, the ability of the Democrats to force President George W Bush to withdraw from Iraq was seen to turn on the decision of this one man.
The Democrats could raise enough votes to apply cloture (a procedure for ending a session and taking a vote) to the debate on withdrawal. But they could not override a presidential veto, which requires the support of two-thirds of the Senate, unless Warner gave a dozen doubting Republicans political cover to break with the president and vote with the Democrats to end the war.
Both temperamentally and ideologically, Warner was a conservative of a traditional kind. Yet he was also an astute judge of political realities and an unusually open-minded senator. He had been a loyal supporter of the Bush government’s war in Iraq when it was launched. But when in 2007 he found himself no longer chair of the armed services committee, but only the senior member of the Republican opposition there, he joined forces with a Republican moderate, Richard Lugar, and other unhappy Republicans in the search for an honourable way out of what he had come to regard as a painfully impossible situation.
There were many who thought this was mere political fancy dancing and that in the end Bush could count on him to support the war. But Warner, like Lugar and John McCain, showed that he was his own man. He insisted on making up his own mind, even if that sometimes made his political course on the war hard to follow.
Even before his break with the Bush administration over Iraq, Warner had shown that some of his views did not sit well with many conservatives. He supported a woman’s right to a legal abortion, though he voted for certain limitations. He voted for the “Brady bill”, requiring a waiting period for gun purchase and for a ban on assault weapons. He opposed Colonel Oliver North, the Marine officer in Ronald Reagan’s White House who tried to ride the row over the Iran-Contra scandal into the Senate. In 2004 he voted, unlike most of his party, for a bill to extend legislation against hate crime to victimisation of LGBTQ+ people.
Warner grew up in Washington DC, the son of Martha (nee Budd) and John Warner, a doctor. His family’s roots were in the Old Dominion of Virginia. A great-uncle lost an arm fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of the Wilderness. Young Warner went to St Alban’s, a fashionable day school, and Woodrow Wilson high school. When he was 17, he volunteered for second world war service in both the army and the navy, but the navy got him first. After the war he studied at Washington and Lee, a university in Virginia. When he graduated, the Korean war was beginning, and he volunteered for the Marines.
He studied law at the University of Virginia and after only two years in private practice in the District of Columbia, he became an assistant US attorney. In 1957 he married Catherine Mellon, of the Pittsburgh banking, oil and aluminium family. He joined the Nixon administration as undersecretary (1969-72) and then secretary (1972-74) of the navy, where he campaigned vigorously within the government for a 600-ship navy.
In 1973 Warner’s first marriage ended in divorce. Three years later, he married Taylor, then a huge star, who was fresh from her second divorce from Richard Burton. She maintained in a memoir that she “lost her sense of worth” when, in 1978, Warner was elected to the Senate. “I felt I’d become redundant – I had nothing to do,” she wrote in Elizabeth Takes Off.
“I ate and drank with abandon. The large amounts of food I ate were a substitute for everything I felt was lacking in my life. But what was really starving was my self-esteem.” The marriage ended in 1982. There was idle talk that his wife had been Warner’s chief electoral asset, but he was easily re-elected in 1984, 1990 and 2002, though he had a close race in 1998 against the unrelated Democrat Mark Warner, who went on to be governor of Virginia.
In 1999 Warner succeeded the venerable Strom Thurmond as chairman of the Senate’s armed services committee. He had already used his position on the committee for years to direct a steady flow of federal money into Virginia’s naval shipyards. He was also a staunch supporter of the missile defence programme, successor of Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars. This guaranteed generous campaign funding from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Grumman Northrop.
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, Warner was initially an enthusiastic supporter. He sponsored the Iraq war resolution, saying: “We cannot let the United Nations think in any way that they can veto the authority of this president or the ability of this nation to defend itself.”
Two years later, when two respected Republican foreign policy experts in the Senate, Lugar and Chuck Hagel, criticised the war, Warner was still on side. “I look at what our president has done and what he is trying to do and I’m solidly in the Bush corner,” he said. In 2003, however, the revelations of torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison were too much for him. He called it “as serious a problem of breakdown of discipline as I’ve seen”. Gradually, he seemed to become convinced that the war in Iraq could not be honourably won. In 2007 he called on Bush to begin bringing US troops home from Iraq by Christmas.
Warner did not seek re-election in 2008. He went back to the law firm Hogan Lovells, where he had worked in the 1960s. The following year, he received an honorary knighthood from the UK. In the 2016 US presidential election, Warner supported the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, rather than Donald Trump, and in 2020 backed Joe Biden.
Warner married Jeanne Vander Myde, an estate agent, in 2003. She survives him, as do three children, Virginia, John and Mary, from his first marriage, and two grandchildren.
• John William Warner, politician, born 18 February 1927; died 25 May 2021
• Godfrey Hodgson died in January
