Ex-House Speaker Tom Foley dies at 84

WASHINGTON (AP) — Tall and courtly, Tom Foley served 30 years in a U.S. House where partisan confrontation was less rancorous than today and where Democrats dominated for decades. He crowned his long political career by becoming speaker, only to be toppled when Republicans seized control of Congress in 1994, turned out by angry voters with little taste for incumbents.

Foley, the first speaker to be booted from office by his constituents since the Civil War, died Friday at the age of 84 of complications from a stroke, according to his wife, Heather.
She said he had suffered a stroke last December and was hospitalized in May with pneumonia. He returned home after a week and had been on hospice care there ever since, she said.