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Roger Jepsen, Senator From Iowa and Reagan Ally, Dies at 91

A voice for farmers, he lost a re-election bid after it was disclosed that he had joined a health spa that was shut down on prostitution charges.

Senator Roger Jepsen, second from left, with Ronald Reagan on a presidential campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1980. Reagan had been presented with a signed game ball from an Iowa-Iowa State football game. Senator Jepsen was a strong supporter of Reagan’s conservative agenda.Credit...Charles Harrity/Associated Press

Roger W. Jepsen, an Iowa Republican and Reagan administration ally who served one term in the Senate before losing a 1984 re-election bid after it was revealed that he had joined a private health spa that was later shut down on prostitution charges, died on Friday in Bettendorf, Iowa. He was 91.

His death, at the Clarissa C. Cook Hospice House, was confirmed on Sunday by his son Craig, who did not specify a cause. He said Mr. Jepsen had been living in Florida but moved back to Iowa in October with his wife, Dee Ann Jepsen, so that his family could help look after him.

An Iowa state senator and lieutenant governor before his election to the Senate in 1978, Mr. Jepsen became a dedicated supporter of President Ronald Reagan’s conservative agenda of tax cuts and a defense buildup in the early 1980s. Having grown up on a farm, a son and grandson of Danish-American farmers, he was a voice in Washington for the nation’s agricultural interests.

Mr. Jepsen was the Reagan presidential campaign’s chief farm adviser in 1980 and helped persuade the incoming president to lift a partial embargo on American grain sales to the Soviet Union that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The embargo had minimal effects on the Soviet Union, which bought grain elsewhere, but American farmers had felt the brunt of the sanctions.

The embargo had caused American grain prices to plummet, leading to an agricultural credit crisis, and some farmers had burned crops in protest. The embargo was believed to have hurt Mr. Carter in his bid for re-election in 1980 as anger in Midwestern farm states turned into votes for the victorious Reagan.

On another foreign-policy issue, Mr. Jepsen, a strong supporter of Israel, found himself in a dilemma in 1981 when he initially joined Senate opposition to the Reagan administration’s plan to sell Awacs surveillance planes to Israel’s hostile neighbor Saudi Arabia, a step that required Congressional approval. Mr. Jepsen said the sale would jeopardize Israel’s security.

But on the eve of the Senate vote, Mr. Jepsen, saying that he had received “highly classified information” on Awacs that had changed his mind, switched to Reagan’s side. He joined a voting bloc that approved the sale of five Airborne Warning and Control System planes to the Saudis for $8.5 billion. It was then the largest foreign arms sale in American history.

When Senate Democrats demanded a closed session to study the classified information, Mr. Jepsen admitted that there was none, and a White House official later told The New York Times that the real reason for his reversal was that Mr. Jepsen had given in to presidential pressure.

In an interview for this obituary in 2017,Mr. Jepsen acknowledged that he had met with Reagan at the White House before the Senate vote but denied any presidential arm-twisting.

“He did not pressure me,” Mr. Jepsen said. “He shook my hand. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘If you can give me a boost on this vote, I’ll really appreciate it.’”

Mr. Jepsen’s reversal raised his standing with the president, who in 1982 named the senator’s wife, Dee Jepsen, to be a special White House assistant and liaison to women’s organizations. Two years later, Reagan campaigned in Iowa for Mr. Jepsen’s re-election, and after Mr. Jepsen was voted out of office, the president appointed him to a $73,600-a-year federal post.

On domestic issues Mr. Jepsen introduced Senate bills to support conservation, consumer protections, child nutrition, assistance for crime victims and voting protections for the elderly and the handicapped.

A born-again Christian who made “family values” a keystone of his later political career, Mr. Jepsen was a chief sponsor of the Family Protection Act of 1981, a package of proposals to strengthen families through education, tax incentives and restrictions on federal funds for abortion and contraceptive services. Hailed by evangelicals but criticized by liberals as an attack on the rights of women and gay people, the measure died in committee.

To Americans fed up with proliferating codes and numbers in their lives, Mr. Jepsen struck a chord in 1980 by ridiculing a Postal Service plan to require the use of nine-digit ZIP Codes on mail instead of five. He called the plan “another Washington monument to stupidity.”

The service said it would spend $900 million for machines to sort mail by nine-digit codes but promised eventual annual savings of $600 million. Reflecting widespread public resistance to more numbers, the service introduced nine-digit codes in 1983, but the last four digits are still optional.

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Senator Jepsen in 1983. He lost a bid for re-election the following year in a campaign that degenerated into a mudslinging war of questions over Mr. Jepsen’s morality and military service record.Credit...Andrea Mohin/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press

Iowa’s 1984 Senate race, pitting Mr. Jepsen against Representative Tom Harkin, a five-term Democrat, began as a classic conservative-liberal contest over Iowa’s sluggish economy, abortion and other issues. But it degenerated into a mudslinging war of accusations and questions over Mr. Jepsen’s morality and military service record.

As the Harkin campaign trumpeted, Mr. Jepsen once claimed he had been a paratrooper in World War II, but when challenged had acknowledged that he had not entered the Army until 1946, a year after the war ended.

In a more damaging revelation, two Iowa radio stations reported that Mr. Jepsen in 1977, a year before he ran for the Senate, had joined Leisure Spa, a Des Moines brothel that offered “nude modeling, nude encounters and nude rap sessions to our members.” The establishment was closed three months later in a prostitution raid, and its owner pleaded guilty to “keeping a house of ill-fame.”

Mr. Jepsen initially called the reports a “deliberate attempt at character assassination.” He did not dispute his membership — there were copies of his signed application — but said he had thought that the spa was a health club, had visited it only once and had left “immediately.” He later admitted visiting the brothel out of “curiosity and weakness” and said he had been “humbled before an entire nation” before making his “commitment to Christ” in late 1977.

But the scandal did not fade from the 1984 race. Campaign buttons declared, “Roger Jepsen — Porn Again.” The Des Moines Register ran a cartoon depicting the senator at the spa, asking, “Could someone tell me where the exercise machines are?” The newspaper’s chief political reporter, David Yepsen, said, “People are laughing at him, and that can be fatal, at least in this state.”

It was. Despite an overwhelming re-election showing by President Reagan, who carried other Republicans to victories on his coattails, Mr. Jepsen’s political career was ended with a decisive loss to Mr. Harkin.

Roger William Jepsen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on Dec. 23, 1928, the eldest of three children of Ernest and Esther (Sorensen) Jepsen. Roger and his siblings, Myron and Carol, grew up on the family farm and attended local public schools. Roger graduated from high school in 1945 and attended Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa) for a year.

After Army service in 1946-47, he attended Arizona State University in Tempe, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1950 and a master’s in guidance counseling in 1953.

Mr. Jepsen married Dorothy Lambertson in 1948 and had four children with her. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1958, he married Dee Ann Delaney, who had a daughter, Linda, by a previous marriage. Linda died in 1996.

In addition to his wife and son Craig, from his first marriage, he is survived by another son from his first marriage, Jeffrey; two daughters from his first marriage, Ann Carruthers and Debbie Geisler; a son from his second marriage, Coy; his sister, Carol Nymann; nine grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren.

Mr. Jepsen was an insurance underwriter and sales manager in Iowa in the 1950s and ’60s. He began his political career as a Scott County Supervisor from 1962 to 1965, and was an Iowa state senator from 1966 to 1968 and a two-term lieutenant governor from 1969 to 1973, serving with Gov. Robert D. Ray.

Advocating a constitutional ban on abortions, Mr. Jepsen in 1978 narrowly beat Senator Dick Clark, the incumbent Democrat, who had been targeted for defeat by National Right to Life forces.

After Mr. Jepsen left the Senate in 1985, Reagan named him chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, a regulatory body. He retired in 1994.

Mr. Jepsen told The Times in the 2017 interview that in his Senate years, he and his wife had regularly joined members of Congress in prayer breakfasts, Bible-study groups and Christian fellowship gatherings.

“They helped to develop positive feelings about public service,” he said.

Byran Pietsch contributed reporting.

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books. More about Robert D. McFadden

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Roger Jepsen, 91, Senator From Iowa and Staunch Reagan Ally, Is Dead. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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