Floyd Haskell

Floyd Haskell was born in Morristown, New Jersey, to Edward Kirk and Gladys (née Clarkson) Haskell.[1] His father was an investment banker.[2] He attended Harvard College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1937.[3] During college, he played on the football, rugby, and soccer teams, later developing as a tennis player, and was president of the Rocky Mountain Club.[4][5][6] He received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1941.[3] That same year he married Eileen Nicoll, to whom he remained married until their divorce in 1976; they had three daughters, Ione, Evelyn, and Pamela.[7]

During World War II, Haskell served in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945, seeing action in Asia, viewing the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, and reaching the rank of major.[3] He was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for his intelligence work.[7] Following his military service, he was admitted to the bar in 1946 and moved to Denver, Colorado, where he worked as a tax lawyer.[2]

In 1964, Haskell was elected as a Republican to the Colorado House of Representatives from Arapahoe County, serving until 1969.[3] As a state legislator, he became assistant majority leader in 1967 and also served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the House Education and Finance Committees.[7] In 1970, he left the Republican Party and became a Democrat in protest of President Richard Nixon's invasion of Cambodia.[2]

In 1972, Haskell decided to challenge three-term Republican incumbent Gordon L. Allott for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He defeated state Senator Anthony Vollack (later chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court) in the Democratic primary.[8] In the general election, he narrowly won[9][10] a four-way race between Allott[11] and candidates from the Raza Unida Party[12] and the American Independent Party,[13] receiving only 49% of the vote.[10][14] He defeated his closest competitor, Senator Allott, by less than 10,000 votes while President Nixon carried Colorado by over 267,000 votes.[10]

Haskell was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 1973.[3] He served as a member of the Senate Finance and Energy and Natural Resources Committees, where he earned a reputation as a tax reformer and advocate for the environment.[2] He supported the historic Alaska Lands legislation and regulation of auto emissions, the Panama Canal treaties, and alternative sources of energy.[15] In 1978, lacking campaign funds and media acumen, he was defeated for re-election by Representative and future Colorado Christian University president William L. Armstrong, the first in Colorado to raise over a million dollars, losing by a landslide margin of 59%-40%.[16]

After his Senate career, Haskell established his residence in Washington, D.C., where he practiced law before joining Common Cause and a bipartisan group of retired lawmakers calling for campaign finance reform and an end to congressional gridlock.[15] In 1979, he married Nina Totenberg, the legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio; they remained married until his death in 1998.[7]

Haskell suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1994 after falling on ice near his home in Washington.[15] He died of pneumonia four years later, at age 82, while returning from a vacation in Maine with his wife.[2]

• Appearances on C-SPAN