Chicago Area Local News

ST. CHARLES, Ill. (CBS) ― Friend and foe alike today mourned former west suburban congressman Henry Hyde.

As CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery reports, at Hyde's funeral mass Friday, they used a word rarely used about any politician these days: beloved.

The pall bearers who carried Henry Hyde's casket included his longtime west suburban political deputy and a federal judge whose career he helped launch. All praised a man they said rose above petty politics.

"He's not a person who attacked people," said U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen. "He's a person who believed and pushed the ideas he believed in."

"You're seeing a rare moment -- Democrats and Republicans sharing even the spotlight," said Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. "He taught me that politics wasn't personal. It wasn't petty."

"Henry's laughter, his stories, even the smell of his cigars will be missed," Jackson added.

The silver-haired Republican, one of the best-known congressional names ever produced by Illinois, died Nov. 29 at age 83 -- four months after undergoing open-heart surgery and weeks after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a ceremony he was too ill to attend.

More than 1,000 friends, family and admirers attended the service. Hyde's coffin, covered with a white cloth, lay at the center of the cavernous, modern St. John Neumann Catholic Church.

Francis Cardinal George called Hyde a man of great principles and good instincts, notably in opposing abortion, but also, the Cardinal said, in standing up for immigrants and workers. Hyde was also a key supporter of AIDS prevention programs in Africa.

"He was out there saying, 'These are the principles that America stands for and that the world should stand for,'" said Rep. Melvin Watt.

"Everyone loved Henry because he respected everyone's opinion," said U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).

"No one could have asked for a better friend than Henry Hyde," said Rep. David Drier, R-Calif.

Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C., said he might have been considered a surprising speaker at the funeral since he had been "a persistent and ardent opponent of just about everything that Henry Hyde did."

"Henry and I played on different teams," Watt said. "And yet Henry understood that that was exactly what our founding fathers set up as a mechanism for bringing us together to resolve our differences," said Watt, who paid tribute to Hyde's "eloquence and magnificence as an orator on the House floor."

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a presidential hopeful, prefaced his reading of a lesson from Deuteronomy by saying Hyde was "the North Star of the U.S. Congress."

"I'm gonna miss his jokes," said DuPage County Rep. Judy Biggert. "He had the joke of the day. When we were sitting on the floor, when I was feeling really bad, I'd go to him for the joke of the day. And, you know what, he never told me the same one again."

Biggert added that in recent years she has, quote, "been embarrassed to be a member of Congress," because of Washington's bitter and often petty partisanship. Henry Hyde, she and others said, was one who made them proud.

Many former leaders of the state's GOP and Hyde contemporaries gathered around to shake hands after the Mass, including former Illinois Senate president James "Pate" Philip and former U.S House Minority Leader and Robert Michel.

Before the funeral, Hyde's son said the late congressman set an example for all well-meaning people.

"He enjoyed helping others," said son Robert Hyde. "He believed in the Constitution and what it stood for; the morality, protecting the weak and the defenseless, and he lived by that example."

Before his election to the House, Hyde gained statewide attention as a veteran member of the Illinois House of Representatives. Before entering politics, he practiced law in Chicago.

CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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