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Senate Years of Service: 1951-1969 Party: Republican
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DIRKSEN, Everett McKinley, (father-in-law of Howard Baker),
a Representative and a Senator from Illinois; born in Pekin,
Tazewell County, Ill., January 4, 1896; attended public schools and the
University of Minnesota College of Law at Minneapolis; during the First World
War served overseas as a private and later as a second lieutenant of Field
Artillery 1918-1919; general manager of a dredging company 1922-1925;
commissioner of finance of Pekin, Ill., 1927-1931; studied law; admitted to the
bar in 1936 and commenced practice in Pekin, Ill.; elected as a Republican to
the Seventy-third and to the seven succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1933-January
3, 1949); chairman, Committee on District of Columbia (Eightieth Congress); was
not a candidate for renomination in 1948; elected as a Republican to the United
States Senate in 1950; reelected in 1956, 1962, and again in 1968, and served
from January 3, 1951, until his death in Washington, D.C., September 7, 1969;
Republican whip 1957-1959; minority leader 1959-1969; chairman, Joint Committee
on Inaugural Arrangements (Ninetieth Congress); lay in state in the Rotunda of
the U.S. Capitol, September 9-10, 1969; interment in Glendale Memorial Gardens,
Pekin, Ill.
BibliographyDictionary of American Biography;
American National Biography; Dirksen, Everett M.
The Education of a Senator. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1998; MacNeil, Neil.
Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man. New York: World Publishing
Company, 1970.
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