Roth, William Victor, Jr.

(b. 22 July 1921 in Great Falls, Montana; d. 13 December 2003 in Washington, D.C.), United States Senator from Delaware (1 January 1971 to 3 January 2001) known for his efforts to cut government spending and for his sponsorship of the Roth-Kemp tax cuts of 1978–1981 and the Roth IRA (1997).

Roth was the second of two children of William V. Roth and Clara Nelson Roth. His father first managed a grocery store in Great Falls then a brewery in Helena, Montana. His mother operated a cigar stand prior to marrying and then became a homemaker after her marriage. After graduating from Helena High School, Roth attended the University of Montana in Missoula, then transferred to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he graduated with a BA in business administration in 1943. He spent his junior year at Harvard Business School studying foreign trade, accounting, and administrative policy. Upon graduation Roth enlisted in the U.S. Army, attended officer candidate school, and served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific. In 1945 he was promoted to captain and won the Bronze Star. During the U.S. occupation of Japan, Roth worked to recreate Japan’s broadcasting system. In 1946 he resigned his commission and returned to Harvard University, where he completed an MBA in 1947 and earned a JD in 1949.

Following law school Roth joined the Hercules Powder Company of Wilmington, Delaware, where he dealt with the company’s defense contracts. In 1955 he was promoted to senior legal counsel. Roth’s involvement in the Republican Party began during his years at Hercules. He enjoyed the opportunity that politics afforded to meet people of all types and occupations. In 1960 he was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Delaware. Roth lost narrowly in a year when the Democratic ticket was headed by John F. Kennedy. In 1961 Roth was elected chair of the Republican state committee of Delaware.

On 9 October 1965 Roth married Jane Richards, a lawyer at the Wilmington firm of Richards, Layton, and Finger, of which her grandfather had been a founder. President Ronald Reagan appointed Jane Richards Roth a judge of the U.S. District Court for Delaware in 1985. In 1991 she was promoted to circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The Roths belonged to the Episcopal faith; they had two children. In addition to their home near Wilmington, the Roths maintained a vacation home overlooking the Rocky Mountains in the senator’s native Montana.

In 1966 William Roth won against a five-term Democrat incumbent to become Delaware’s sole representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. He campaigned accompanied by a huge but friendly Saint Bernard dog named Ludwig; this and other Saint Bernards would become fixtures in later Roth campaigns. During his two terms in the House of Representatives, Roth served on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Republican Policy Committee. He led exchange visits to Japan designed to improve American-Japanese trade relations and served on the visiting committee of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and the advisory committee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University.

As a newcomer to Washington, D.C., Roth discovered that there was no listing of the federal government’s one thousand-plus assistance programs. To rectify that omission he created the Roth Catalog, which was first published in the Congressional Record in 1968. He called his accomplishment “a very small, but basic step” toward improving government services. He then introduced the Program Information Act of 1970, which requires the General Accounting Office to update annually the publication now known as the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance.

In 1970 Delaware’s four-term U.S. senator John J. Williams, known as “the conscience of the Senate” for his fiscal probity and investigations of government corruption, retired. Roth ran for the open seat and was elected for the first of five consecutive terms in the Senate. Roth’s kindly, unassuming, honest, respectful, and conscientious approach to lawmaking made him an effective and respected leader in the Senate, especially in the areas of his major interest, which were government efficiency and tax reform. Because people trusted him and knew that his motives were not self-serving, Roth was able to bridge inter- and intra-party divisions in the Senate. Senator Joseph Biden, Roth’s Democratic colleague from Delaware, said of him, “There is not anyone in politics—either party—that I trust more than Bill Roth.”

Roth seldom missed a vote on the Senate floor, and his staff members were noted for their reliable help in handling constituent concerns. He chaired two major Senate committees: Governmental Affairs (1981–1986, 1995) and Finance (1995–2001). These assignments reflected his emphasis on banking, tax policy, government efficiency, and foreign relations. The Roth-Kemp tax cuts of 1978–1981 were the centerpiece of President Reagan’s “supply-side” economic-stimulus package. Roth worked to ensure that tax cuts were fairly applied to help wage-earning and middle-class Americans. The goal of the stimulus was not only to spur capital investment but also to increase the average American’s purchasing power. He also believed that cuts in the government’s income must be accompanied by similar cuts in government spending. His careful questioning of government spending practices uncovered millions of dollars of waste, most famously the Defense Department’s purchase of a $9,600 wrench and a $640 toilet seat.

In 1997–1998 Roth oversaw an investigation of the Internal Revenue Service that revealed many abuses. The investigation convinced Roth that the IRS “has too much power and not enough sunshine.” His efforts led to the passage of the IRS Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, which included safeguards to taxpayers’ rights and created an independent board to oversee the IRS. The following year Roth coauthored with William H. Nixon The Power to Destroy, a book based on his investigations of IRS practices. “No federal agency,” Roth wrote, “touches the lives of more Americans than the Internal Revenue Service. None strikes as much fear into the hearts of honest taxpayers.”

Roth championed strong economic and security ties among the United States, Europe, and Japan. He worked to destroy unfair trade practices and barriers to trade among nations, and he championed the expansion of NATO in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact. He served as president of the North Atlantic Assembly, NATO’s parliament, and was a founder of the Asia Pacific Parliamentary Forum. He favored the extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, worked to extend the normalization of trade with China, and supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Roth was a strong proponent of the protection of the environment. In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster of 1989, he sponsored legislation to prohibit oil exploration in the Alaskan wilderness. His investigation of pollution in Delaware led to his wider national efforts to prevent ocean dumping, to restrict landfill operations, to protect wetlands and other fragile ecological areas, and to control chemical waste disposal. In 1991 senators Roth and Al Gore of Tennessee cosponsored the Senate resolution that designated Earth Day. His efforts on behalf of the environment won him the Wilderness Society’s Ansel Adams Conservation Award in 1989.

Although Roth prophesied that he would be best remembered as “the taxpayers’ best friend,” his most memorable legacy has been the Roth IRA, or individual retirement account, which became law in 1997. The Roth IRA was designed to encourage individual savings by permitting people to place a portion of their taxed income into an IRA that would earn interest and would not be subject to tax when the investor withdrew the money during retirement.

The senator also supported the Education IRA (now called the Coverdell Education Savings Account). He further expressed his belief in the power of education by his sponsorship of the annual Roth Youth Leadership Conference, which brought outstanding students from Delaware’s high schools together for seminars about issues facing the government.

In 1998 Roth voted with his party to remove Bill Clinton from the office of U.S. president over the latter’s affair with a White House intern. In a written statement Roth said that he believed the president had committed perjury and had obstructed justice, actions that, in Roth’s view, severely undermined the nation’s foundation on the rule of law. In 2000, at the age of seventy-nine, Roth ran for a sixth term in the U.S. Senate. His opponent was Thomas Carper, who had just completed two terms as governor of Delaware. Although Roth remained popular and well-loved in Delaware, voters were concerned about his age and elected Carper.

Roth died suddenly of heart failure while visiting his daughter in Washington, D.C. He was honored by about five hundred friends, family, and political colleagues at a memorial service at the University of Delaware in Newark. His ashes were scattered at his home near Wilmington.

A U.S. senator from Delaware for thirty-four years with interests in the environment, foreign trade, education, and tax law, Roth will be remembered for his work to cut government spending, sponsorship of the Roth-Kemp tax cuts, and passage of the Roth IRA.

There is no biography of Roth. His papers, spanning more than 500 linear feet, are deposited at the Historical Society of Delaware in Wilmington. Information about Roth can be found in Gobind Daryanani, William V. Roth, Jr., and Murray Alter, The Roth IRA Book: An Investor’s Guide (1998); and Anne Kelly, William V. Roth, Jr., Republican Senator from Delaware, part of a series called “Citizens Look at Congress” (1972). Obituaries are in the Washington Post and New York Times (both 15 Dec. 2003). The Wilmington News Journal published an obituary of Roth (14 Dec. 2003) and lengthy tributes to him (15 and 18 Dec. 2003).

Carol E. Hoffecker