"Craig Thomas, 74, G.O.P Senator From Wyoming, Dies"
"Senator Craig Thomas, a Wyoming Republican who combined a deep love of Western rural life with a 23-year public career in his home state and Washington, died Monday evening in Bethesda, Md. He was 74 and had homes in Casper, Wyo., and Arlington, Va.
The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, his family said. He died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, where earlier in the day his cancer had been found resistant to a second round of chemotherapy, his family said.
The illness, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, was diagnosed late last year, shortly after he was returned to the Senate for a third term in an election in which he received 70 percent of the vote.
Under Wyoming's election laws, the state Republican Party will nominate three people to be his successor. The final choice will be made by Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat. As a result, the seat will remain in Republican control and the balance of power in the Senate will remain unchanged.
Mr. Thomas was a square-jawed former marine who could wear a cowboy hat, as he did in his campaign ads and on his Web site, and never look like a poseur.
He came of age in Wyoming in the 1950s, when ranching and farming were still hardscrabble pursuits, not yet the stuff of a millionaire's ranchette fantasy. Friends and former colleagues said his values had been shaped by the tough-minded men and women who were only a generation or two removed from the homesteaders and pioneers.
Mr. Thomas espoused Western self-reliance and followed a conservative line in the Senate: supporting business and farmers, opposing abortion and taxes. On issues of environment and land use, he voted the pattern of the old rural West, which said that the land was to be used and that environmentalists were usually wrong.
From 1999 to 2004, for example, he supported the interests of the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group, zero percent of the time, according to Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting records. But the United States Chamber of Commerce praised him for his support of small business, as did the gun lobby. In 2006, the National Rifle Association gave him a lifetime grade of A.
Craig Lyle Thomas was born on a ranch near Cody, Wyo., a town of about 8,000 people near Yellowstone National Park. He came to prominence with a cohort of Wyoming politicians who made national names for themselves beginning in the 1980s, including former Senator Alan K. Simpson and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Mr. Thomas had known Mr. Simpson since their childhood together in Cody, and they formed a lasting bond. In Washington, their Senate careers overlapped when Mr. Thomas first took office in 1995 and Mr. Simpson, who left office in 1997, was approaching retirement.
The connection with Mr. Cheney was equally crucial to Mr. Thomas, who was a member of the State House of Representatives in 1989 when Mr. Cheney, then Wyoming's only member of the United States House of Representatives, was appointed secretary of defense by President George Bush.
In a special election, Mr. Thomas won the Republican nomination to succeed Mr. Cheney in the House, nearly guaranteeing victory in a deeply conservative state. Five years later, in 1994, opportunity knocked again when Senator Malcolm Wallop announced his retirement. Mr. Thomas ran and was elected to his first term in the Senate. He was easily re-elected in 2000, as well as last year.
Both Mr. Cheney and President Bush issued statements of condolences, as did Mr. Freudenthal.
Mr. Thomas's interests always went back to the land. After getting his undergraduate degree in agriculture from the University of Wyoming in 1955, followed by four years in the Marines, in which he rose to captain, Mr. Thomas spent most of the next five decades as an advocate for the interests of farmers and ranchers.
He was executive vice president of the Wyoming Farm Bureau for nine years from the mid-1960s to the mid-'70s and was general manager of the Wyoming Rural Electric Association for 14 years after that. In the Senate, he was a member of the Finance Committee and co-chairman of the Rural Health Caucus, which worked to improve health care opportunities in sparsely populated parts of the country with few doctors.
Mr. Thomas is survived by his wife, Susan; four children, Peter, Greg, Lexie and Patrick; and nine grandchildren."