David Pryor, an 89-year-old former senator and governor of Arkansas, passed away

Little Rock, Arkansas – Former governor of Arkansas and U.S. Senator David Pryor, a Democrat and one of the most well-liked political figures in the state, has away. Pryor continued to serve the public interest in Arkansas long after he left office. He was eighty-nine.

While a congressman, Pryor went undercover to look into nursing facilities. According to his son Mark Pryor, Pryor passed away on Saturday in Little Rock from natural causes while surrounded by family. In 2020, Pryor—who had previously survived a heart attack and stroke—was admitted to the hospital after testing positive for COVID-19.

“I think he was a great model for public service. He was a great role model for politicians, but just for everyone in how we should treat each other and how we can make Arkansas better,” Mark Pryor, a former two-term Democratic U.S. senator, said.

Along with the late U.S. Senator Dale Bumpers and former President Bill Clinton, David Pryor was regarded as one of the party’s titans in Arkansas. In addition, he served in the Arkansas Legislature and the United States House. In recent years, he has continued to be involved in public life, having been appointed to the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees in 2009. In January 2023, he was present at the inauguration of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Republican governor.

“David would be like a fish out of water if he were out of public service,” Bumpers, who served 18 years with Pryor in the Senate, said in 2006. “It’s his whole life.”

Pryor, who founded and is the publisher of the weekly newspaper Ouachita Citizen, entered politics in 1960 when he was elected to the Arkansas House. He remained in that position until 1966 when he was elected to Congress following his victory in a special election for the US House.

Pryor established a reputation as one of the “Young Turks” who were eager to change the state’s political structure while he was in the state House. Years later, Pryor noted that the changes he had hoped for had not materialized as rapidly as he had imagined when he was younger.

“I guess I was a young reformer at the moment,” Pryor said in 2006. “I was going to change the world. I wanted it to change overnight, but it didn’t.”

When he entered the Democratic primary to oppose U.S. Sen. John McClellan’s attempt for a sixth term, he suffered his first and only political defeat. Despite forcing a runoff with McClellan, Pryor was defeated by over 18,000 votes. Decades later, Pryor still felt the pain from that setback.

“Following the McClellan race, I abandoned politics, or politics abandoned me,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography, “A Pryor Commitment.” “I didn’t care who was governor or president. I avoided reading the paper for months on end. I just wanted to be left alone and, like General MacArthur, silently fade away.”

After taking Bumpers’ seat in the governorship in 1974, Pryor served as governor for four years before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1988 and securing the enactment of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. The act, which increased citizens’ rights when interacting with the IRS, was dubbed the “cornerstone” of his congressional career.

“I didn’t sponsor this bill to help Donald Trump or Lee Iacocca,” Pryor, who chaired the Finance Subcommittee on Internal Revenue Oversight, said at the time. “This is a bill that protects the average taxpayer.”

In addition, he concentrated on assisting the elderly and conducted undercover investigations into nursing facilities while he was a member of the US House from 1966 to 1973. He added that up to 15 beds were frequently observed in a single room.

“Even now, I recall clearly the loneliness, neglect, despair, anxiety and boredom — in particular the boredom — of those cold and sterile homes,” he wrote. “Essentially human warehouses for old people.”

In addition, he concentrated on assisting the elderly and conducted undercover investigations into nursing facilities while he was a member of the US House from 1966 to 1973. He added that up to 15 beds were frequently observed in a single room.

However, he continued to be involved in politics and the public spotlight. He was the first dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, which is situated in downtown Little Rock close to the former president’s library, for two years. In 2008, he also held a temporary position as the state Democratic Party’s chairman following the chairman’s tragic shooting in his office.

Pryor, a member of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, was a vocal opponent of the 2016 $160 million plan to enlarge Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium and a critic of the collegiate football teams’ “nuclear arms race.” Pryor had three children with Barbara, his wife.